St. Elizabeth, the daughter of Hungarian royalty, was betrothed at the age of four to Ludwig, the nine-year-old prince of Thuringia in southern Germany. Despite the arrangement, in which they had no say, the two children established a close friend- ship that eventually blossomed into a loving marriage. Elizabeth bore three children. But Ludwig’s family disapproved of her piety and especially her “inordinate” charity toward the poor and sick. The young princess, it was said, dressed too simply; she was too profligate in her almsgiving. After Elizabeth established several hospitals she aroused scandal by nursing the sick, even lepers, with her own hands.
Nevertheless, her instinctive spirit of poverty was only magnified upon the arrival of the first Franciscan missionaries in Germany. Elizabeth was captivated by the story of Clare and Francis (from whom she received the gift of his cloak), and she eventually embraced the rule of a Franciscan tertiary. During a time of famine, while Ludwig was away, she opened the royal granaries, thus winning the people’s devotion. Such generosity, however, only increased the scorn of elite members of the court.
She who had embraced the spirit of poverty now found herself happy to accept shelter in a pig shed.
In 1227, Ludwig died on his way home from a crusade. In a paroxysm of grief, Elizabeth cried out, “The world is dead to me, and all that was joyous in the world.” Without her husband’s protection, she was at the mercy of her in-laws. They banished her from the court, forcing her to leave the palace on a wintry night, carrying nothing but her newborn child. She who had embraced the spirit of poverty now found herself happy to accept shelter in a pig shed.
Eventually, to avoid scandal, she was provided with a simple cottage, where she supported herself by spinning and fishing. She continued to visit the sick in their homes or in the hospices she had endowed. Over time, her reputation for holiness spread, and she earned the grudging respect of those who had persecuted her. In 1231, she fell ill and announced calmly that she would not recover. She died on November 17 at the age of twenty-four. She was canonized less than four years later.
Born Caterina Offreducia, Agnes was the younger sister of Saint Clare, and her first follower. When Caterina left home two weeks after Clare’s departure, their family attempted to bring her back by force. They tried to drag her out of the monastery, but her body suddenly became so heavy that several knights could not budge it. Her uncle Monaldo tried to strike her but was temporarily paralyzed. The knights then left Caterina and Clare in peace. Saint Francis himself gave Clare’s sister the name Agnes, because she was gentle like a young lamb.
Agnes matched her sister in devotion to prayer and in willingness to endure the strict penances that characterized the Poor Ladies’ lives at San Damiano. In 1221, a group of Benedictine nuns in Monticelli near Florence asked to become Poor Ladies. Saint Clare sent Agnes to become abbess of that monastery. Agnes soon wrote a rather sad letter about how much she missed Clare and the other nuns at San Damiano. After establishing other monasteries of Poor Ladies in northern Italy, Agnes was recalled to San Damiano in 1253, as Clare lay dying.
Helene Marie Philippine was born in France to a noble family. After a short stint with the Poor Clares she joined a contemplative community in Toulouse, the Society of Mary Reparatrix, where she took the name Mary of the Passion. In 1865, she was sent to Madurai in southern India, where her order was helping to establish a congregation of Indian sisters. There she proved so adept in leadership that she was named provincial superior. In 1876, however, long-simmering divisions in the community erupted to the point that Mary and nineteen other sisters withdrew and established a community under the aegis of the Paris Foreign Mission Society.
At this point, Mary conceived of a new congregation that would combine contemplation with active mission work. After becoming a Third Order Franciscan, she received permission from Rome to establish the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. Her community grew with impressive speed. In India, she directed her sisters to provide medical care for women, whose health was compromised by their unwillingness to be seen by male doctors.
Mary’s sisters spread across the world, often in perilous situations. Seven of them (later canonized) were killed in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Mary remained the superior general until her death on November 15, 1904, at which time there were over two thousand Franciscan Missionaries of Mary working in eighty-six countries. She was beatified in 2002.
John Duns, later known as the Subtle Doctor, was called Scotus on account of his birth in Scotland. He entered the Franciscans at the age of fifteen and was later ordained a priest. After studies in Oxford and Paris, he went on to hold teaching positions in Paris and Cologne, where he was acclaimed as one of the greatest of the Scholastic theologians. His mystically charged theology held particular charm for the Franciscans, rendering in philosophical terms the creation-centered spirituality of their holy founder.
Like other scholastic theologians, Duns Scotus tried to present a philosophical “proof” for the existence of God. In his case, he focused on the observation that all things require some prior cause for their existence. From this, he predicated the existence of a primary infinite cause which owes its existence to itself alone. Yet he drew a distinction between what could be “proved” by reason and what could be known only by faith. There was a difference between a rational knowledge of the existence of God and a saving knowledge of the love of God.
Duns Scotus defined God as infinite love. He taught that the incarnation was not required as payment for sin; it was willed through eternity as an expression of God’s love, and hence God’s desire for consummated union with creation. Our redemption by the cross was likewise an expression of God’s love and compassion rather than an appeasement of God’s anger or a form of compensation for God’s injured majesty. He believed that knowledge of God’s love should evoke a loving response on the part of humanity. He wrote, “I am of the opinion that God wished to redeem us in this fashion principally in order to draw us to his love.” Through our own loving self-gift, he argued, we join with Christ in becoming “co-lovers” of the Holy Trinity.
“I am of the opinion that God wished to redeem us in this fashion principally in order to draw us to his love.”
– Blessed John Duns Scotus
Unlike philosophers in the line of Plato, Scotus did not value the ideal at the expense of the real. Created things pointed to their Creator not only by their conformity to an ideal pattern but by their individuality and uniqueness—what he termed their “thisness” (haecceitas). Thus, the path to contemplation should proceed not only through the mind but through the senses. This insight of Scotus especially endeared him to the most highly distinctive of Catholic poets, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. He paid tribute to the Subtle Doctor in one of his poems:
Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece.
Duns Scotus died on November 8, 1308. He was beatified in 1993.
Louis Massignon, a French scholar, played a key role in promoting the cause of Catholic-Muslim dialogue. The seeds of his vocation were planted in his youth and his avid interest in Arab culture. While conducting research in Mesopotamia he was arrested and charged as a spy. During his captivity, he received a profound mystical experience, which brought him to an overwhelming sense of God. This prompted an ardent return to his Catholic roots. But he was also deeply affected by the experience of Muslim piety and vowed to devote his life to increasing understanding between this two religious traditions, both heirs of the faith of Abraham. (He was also deeply influenced by his friendship with the desert hermit Blessed Charles de Foucauld.) In 1931 he became a Franciscan tertiary, taking the name “Ibrahim” (the Arabic form of Abraham).
A key point for reference for Massignon was God’s visit to Abraham as a stranger in the form of three angels. By providing hospitality for God in our hearts, he wrote, “we enter the path of mystical union.” He considered his encounter with Muslim spirituality (one of the three Abrahamic faiths) as a form of “sacred hospitality”. At an abandoned Franciscan church in Egypt where St. Francis had met Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, Massignon made a vow, offering his life for the Muslims, “not so they would be converted, but so that the will of God might be accomplished in them and through them.”
Later in life, Massignon became a Melkite Greek Catholic and was ordained a priest, permitting him to celebrate the Mass in Arabic according to the Byzantine Rite liturgy. A follower of Gandhian nonviolence, he supported efforts to promote peace in the Middle East and for a peaceful resolution of the war in Algeria. For the sake of sacred hospitality, he became an outspoken advocate for Muslim refugees in France.
St. Peter, who was born in Alcantara, a small town in Spain, studied at the great university of Salamanca, and entered the Franciscans at the age of sixteen. From the start, Peter adopted a habit of extreme austerity. He trained himself to sleep no more than two hours at night; he wore no sandals on his feet; he would eat no flesh and drink no wine. Eventually he won permission to found a group of Franciscans along these lines. It was said that their cells – only seven feet long – resembled more graves than rooms. Nevertheless, he found many willing followers.
In the course of extensive preaching tours, he came to know St. Teresa of Avila and became her spiritual advisor. At that time, she was seeking courage to undertake her reform of the Carmelite Order and she later testified on behalf of his canonization that it was Peter, more than anyone, who had encourage her mission. “When I came to know him he was very old, and his body so shriveled and weak that it seemed to be composed as it were of the roots and dried bark of a tree rather than flesh,” she wrote. She also claimed, after his death in 1562, to receive visions of Peter, so that “Our Lord has been pleased to let me enjoy more of him than I did when he was alive.”
One time a brother was complaining to Peter about the wickedness of the world, and the saint replied. “The remedy is simple. You and I must first be what we ought to be; then we shall have cured what concerns ourselves. Let each one do the same, and all will be well. The trouble is that we all talk of reforming others without ever reforming ourselves.”
St. Peter died on October 18, 1562. He was canonized in 1669.
