SAINT BONAVENTURE

St. Bonaventure - John of Fidanza - was born in Bañorea (Bagnoreggio), a small Italian town near Viterbo. A miraculous event illuminated his childhood as a foreshadowing of what was to become his life. When he was seriously ill, his troubled mother entrusted and consecrated him to St. Francis of Assisi, through whose intercession and merits he recovered his health. When he reached the threshold of youth, he joined the Order founded by his benefactor, attracted, as the Saint himself confesses, by the beautiful combination of evangelical simplicity and science that he saw shining in the Franciscan Order. In the classrooms of the University of Paris, at that time a luminary of knowledge, he listened to the lessons of the best masters of the time, while at the same time he attended with ardent commitment to his spiritual formation in the school of the Poverello of Assisi. His beautiful qualities of mind and heart, perfected by grace, attracted the sympathy and admiration of his teachers and fellow disciples. Alexander of Hales said that there seemed to be no Adam sin in Bonaventure. For a decade he taught in Paris to unanimous applause. And when he was barely thirty-six years old, the Order, gathered in Rome in Chapter, elected him its Minister General on February 2, 1257.

Throughout eighteen years he would travel tirelessly through France and Italy, reaching Germany in the north and Spain in the south; he would hold General and Provincial Chapters and would provide with farsightedness for the needs of the Order, by then spread throughout the known ancient world, in terms of legislation and studies, and above all in terms of the observance of the Rule, for which he pointed out the right middle ground, equidistant from intransigent rigorism and condemnable relaxation. His norms of government are in substance still valid today, after seven centuries. He can rightly be called in a certain sense the second founder of the Order of Francis of Assisi, of whom he wrote, at the request of the friars, a biography, a model in the genre for the critical serenity, filial love and literary art that embellish it.


He often preached driven by his zeal for the good of souls. Popes and kings, such as St. Louis, King of France, universities, ecclesiastical corporations and especially religious communities of both sexes were his audiences. The popes distinguished him with their esteem, consulting him in serious questions of the government of the Church. Gregory X (1271-76), who on the advice of the Saint had been elevated to the supreme pontificate, named him cardinal, consecrated him bishop himself and retained him at his side to prepare the second ecumenical council of Lyons, in which the Seraphic Doctor directed the debates and by his hand the union of the dissenting Greeks to the Church of Rome was realized. It was the glorious culmination of a life consecrated to the good of the Church and of his Order. A few days later, on July 15, 1274, he gave his blessed soul to God amidst the consternation and sadness of the council, which had been won over by the irresistible charm of his personality and the holiness of his life. The Pope ordered - a unique case in history - that all the priests of the world say a Mass for his soul.


If the action of St. Bonaventure as a man of government was enormous, seeing the eleven thick volumes in folio of his works, it must be agreed that it was not inferior to what he developed in the scientific aspect. During his years of teaching at the Parisian university, he wrote commentaries on the Bible and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. From the time of his government we have theological works, apologies in which he defends the evangelical perfection and the mendicant Orders from the attacks of his adversaries, many hundreds of sermons and mystical opuscules; some, like the Itinerary of the soul to God, are priceless jewels of the mysticism of all times. In his works we find the definitive synthesis of medieval Augustinianism and the idea of Christ, center of creation, and also the most complete synthesis of Christian mysticism. All of this is presented with scholastic clarity and precision, as well as in a harmonious and elegant style, like that of a master, not only in ideas, but also in the way of speaking. Above all the other qualities with which his writings are adorned, there stands out a peculiar divine force that Pope Sixtus IV discovers in his works that drags and enraptures souls. It is the spiritual unction that oozes from all his pages. And it could not be otherwise, since Bonaventurian science is not a cold exercise of intelligence, but wisdom, a taste of sacred science lived and practiced. It is, therefore, very understandable the immense influence of the magisterium of the holy doctor in posterity. Ideas and stimuli have drunk freely from his pages masters of spirituality and souls thirsty for perfection. Also in our country have been repeatedly published his authentic and even spurious works, but inspired by his spirit or composed with fragments of his works.

In the midst of such overflowing activity, the Minister General of the Seraphic Order ascended the path of sanctity to its highest peak. He is not only a theologian who can give an adequate account of mystical phenomena thanks to the profound knowledge he possesses of sacred science. He is also an experienced man who has experienced at least some of the phenomena he analyzes. Therefore, science and experience come together in his person. But let it not be thought that, before stepping on the heights of mystical union, the Seraphic Doctor did not have to maintain fierce struggles with himself and with his twisted inclinations. Nothing could be more instructive than the Letter containing twenty-five memorials of perfection, a brief ascetic code, of inestimable value because of its autobiographical content. Reading it, one can glimpse the efforts he made to detach his heart from all disordered affection for creatures and to attain an extreme exquisiteness of conscience, and one can glimpse his progress in the exercise of the virtues. Among his favorite virtues were humility and poverty, prayer, mortification and patience. A naive legend, not verified, shows him washing the convent's dishes at the precise moment when the Pope's envoys arrive with the cardinal's insignia. If the fact is not real, it symbolizes exactly the humility of the Saint in the midst of the greatest successes and honors. In the performance of his office shone his prudence, his humble plainness and fatherly love in caring for his subjects of whatever category they were. Bonaventurian piety is markedly Christocentric and Marian. He put all his efforts in imitating Christ, the way of the soul. The Most Sacred Passion was the preferred object of his meditations and seraphic loves. Every day he dedicated a special gift to the Blessed Virgin and in her honor he ordered his religious to preach to the people the pious custom of greeting her with the recitation of the Angelus. To have devotion to her was equivalent for the Saint to imitate her in her purity and humility.


Pope Sixtus IV canonized him in 1482. In 1588 he was proclaimed doctor of the Church by Sixtus V, giving him the title of Seraphic Doctor. The sapient Leo XIII declared him prince of mysticism. And Pius XII recently exhorted the cultivators of the ecclesiastical sciences with words of St. Bonaventure to unite study with practice and spiritual unction.


Great was the activity of the Saint of Bañorea as a priest, as a prelate and as a scholar. But neither science nor action dried up his spirit. Spurred on by a burning love of God and neighbor, he lived an intense interior life, a sap that soaked all his activity with supernatural effluvium. The secret spring of every supernaturally fruitful dynamism has always been a robust interior life. It is the perennial lesson that the Saint offers us with the teachings of his magisterium and the example of his life. It is the path that with a kind and persuasive gesture he points out to those souls who do not want to be dragged down by this world full of technology, progress, haste and supersonic speed, threatened, however, by a frightening inner emptiness (By Juan Meseguer, o.f.m.). (By Juan Meseguer, o.f.m).