March 5, 2023 - "Saint Bonaventure of Bagnorea"

As we continue looking at the various Doctors of the Church, we are exploring the life and significance of Saint Bonaventure of Bagnorea (1217-1274).  There is a family connection with this saint.  When it came time for my Confirmation, my paternal grandfather John Coady Dillon, Sr., told me that his Confirmation name was Bonaventure.  He took it after St. Bonaventure, but he also took it to honor his aunt, Sister M. Bonaventure Dillon, who was a member of the Sisters of Mercy in Brooklyn, New York.
 
The story has it that St. Francis of Assisi was passing through the town of Bagnorea (which is located on the border between Latium and Umbria in Italy) either in 1223 or 1224.  A couple brought their son John who was about six or seven and prone to illness to have St. Francis touch young John.  The boy was cured after St. Francis touched him. When John grew up, he entered the Franciscan Order and in time became the most famous Franciscan of the thirteenth century after St. Francis himself.
 
John received his early instruction at the Franciscan house in Bagnorea.  From there he went to the University of Paris where he studied between 1236 and 1242.  In the following year he entered the Franciscans, taking the name Bonaventure. He remained in Paris where he studied theology under several Franciscan masters between 1243 and 1248.  Then Bonaventure ascended the academic ladder over the next nine years until he was recognized as a master by the Paris theology faculty.  During these nine years Bonaventure composed most of his technical works, including his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, several biblical commentaries, a series of important disputed questions on the Trinity and the Knowledge of Christ, and his brief introduction to theology, the Breviloquium.
 
In 1257, when Bonaventure was forty, he was elected Minister General of the Friars Minor with a mandate to defend the order against its many detractors.  Bonaventure also sought to bring harmony to the order which was experiencing conflict between two factions: the “spirituals” and the “conventuals.”  The “spirituals” resisted any modifications to the ideals of St. Francis of Assisi.  They were influenced by the thought of a twelfth-century apocalyptic figure named Joachim of Fiore.  The “spirituals” made use of Joachim’s teachings to enhance their understanding of the world-historical importance of the Franciscans in the last days.  The “conventuals” were willing to adjust the ideal of Franciscan poverty and believed that the apocalyptic expectations of the “spirituals” were dangerous delusions.  Bonaventure’s efforts were largely successful during his own lifetime.  After his death both interior and exterior problems of the order came to the surface and provided a good deal of drama in thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and beyond.
 
Bonaventure was very busy in administrative matters from 1257-1274 (the year of his death).  Nevertheless, he still found time to write and preach.  Most of his works were pastoral, spiritual, and mystical in content.  The best-known writings of this period are The Mind’s Journey into God (1259) and the Life of St. Francis (Legenda major), the official biography of the saint that Bonaventure wrote in 1261.
 
In the last years of his life Bonaventure was engaged in polemics, defending the Franciscans against their attackers in his Defense of the Poor (1269) and combatting the radical Aristotelians of the University of Paris in three series of sermon lectures—The Ten Commandments, The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and his final theological synthesis, The Collations on the Hexaemeron. Bonaventure was made a cardinal by Pope Gregory X in 1273, a year before his death at the Second Council of Lyons.
 
In the first of three catecheses on St. Bonaventure, Pope Benedict XVI refers to the eulogy composed by an anonymous papal notary which can serve as a conclusive portrait of this great saint and excellent theologian:  “A good, affable, devout and compassionate man, full of virtue, beloved of God and human beings alike….God in fact had bestowed upon him such great grace that all who saw him were pervaded by a love that their hearts could not conceal.”
 
Here is a final thought from St. Bonaventure who wants to remind us of the meaning of our life with the following words: “On earth … we may contemplate the divine immensity through reasoning and admiration; in the heavenly homeland, on the other hand, through the vision, when we are likened to God and through ecstasy … we shall enter into the joy of God.”
 
Until next week,
Fr. John