Franciscan Mariology—Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure: The Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv: Volume 3

By Peter Damian Fehlner OFM Conv. and Charles Anthony Mary Robinson FI

In this third volume of Collected Essays, Peter Damian Fehlner traces the Franciscan Marian-ecclesiological vision and mission back to its sources in Francis and Clare of Assisi. Fehlner shows how the quintessentially Franciscan theological themes and their elaboration down the centuries find their roots in the Poverello, the "Man totally Catholic and Apostolic," as well as in Clare, the "imprint of the Mother of God." In thoroughly Trinitarian fashion, Fehlner unveils Francis's understanding of Mary--type and exemplar, mother and member of the church--as the firstborn daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, and Spouse of the Holy Spirit. Mary is, therefore, primordially the Virgin-made-Church. Flowering out into the Franciscan theological tradition, this volume features two studies where Fehlner unpacks this Franciscan, Marian-ecclesiological tradition in systematic and mystical theology. Fehlner takes St. Francis Anthony Fasani, his Conventual predecessor, as his guide in the spiritual exegesis of Scripture and Catholic devotion, unveiling the ecclesiological and Marian implications of the Song of Songs. In systematics, Fehlner analyzes the love song of the Son for his church in his definitive study of Bonaventure's understanding of charity and the divine missions in the church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Aug 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781532663857

Peter Damian Fehlner OFM Conv.

Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv. (1931–2018), was a Franciscan priest and theologian. For nearly forty years he taught theology in Franciscan schools and seminaries in Italy and the United States. He is the author of several books and countless articles in theological and pastoral journals. His final work was published posthumously as The Theologian of Auschwitz: St. Maximilian Kolbe on the Immaculate Conception in the Life of the Church (2019).

Book preview

Introduction

Charles Anthony Mary Robinson, FI

Chesterton gives us three ways to write the life of St. Francis. The first is to tell the story of a saint without God according to dominant cultural or scholarly standards. The second is to treat religion as the real thing that it was to the real Francis of Assisi. The third, and the path Chesterton proposed to walk, neither secular nor theological, but starting from the appeal to appreciate the startling, and by that arrive at some understanding of what St. Francis saw. In a common anecdote, Thomas Aquinas called on his friend St. Bonaventure, but found him in ecstasy writing the Legenda Maior of St. Francis, backed out of the room, and whispered to his companion: Let us leave a saint to write about a saint. Of these three ways, Bonaventure firmly walked the second, and his biography of St. Francis is a spiritual-theological work that draws out the theological meaning of the vocation of St. Francis.

The only problem with this way is that it would really require a saint to write about the life of a saint. While Fehlner would protest just as strongly as Chesterton against accusations of sanctity, he also walked the path blazed by St. Bonaventure in seeking the theological meaning of the life of St. Francis. In this, he was aided by St. Clare, St. Bonaventure, Bl. John Duns Scotus, St. Francis Anthony Fasani, and St. Maximilian Kolbe. With the help of these bona fide saints, he is able to discern the Marian shape of the vocation of St. Francis. His discernment was independently confirmed by the doctoral thesis of Johannes Schneider O.F.M. This work, Virgo Ecclesia Facta, is a "systematic study of the Franciscan sources in regard to the presence of Mary in the life of St. Francis,"¹ and was praised by St. John Paul II as the best Mariological thesis of 1993. It has been translated from the original German into both Italian and—by Fehlner—English.

Theologically reading the life of a saint is commonly done today as a study of Christian religious experience. But Fehlner does something else. He places the theological import of the saints within Bonaventure’s tri-part structure of theology as symbolic, proper/academic, and mystical.² Symbolic theology is the grouping together (syn-bole) of code, creed, and cult that constitutes the grammar and praxis of common ecclesial life. Proper or academic theology is the use of human sciences, above all philosophical metaphysics, to analyze and conceptualize what we receive by faith from symbolic theology. Mystical theology is the experiential encounter with what is believed in the union of charity.

These map onto many other Bonaventurian triads, and particularly the powers of the human soul, the theological virtues, and the three ways of the spiritual life.³ What is known in memory is expressed by the intellect to the will which embraces it in love. What is desired in hope is assented to in faith and embraced in charity. By purgation, the soul sees God more clearly—is illuminated—and by conforming herself to the God so-known, becomes increasingly capable of union within Him. In these examples as well as in the three types of theology, there is a perichoretic movement from the beginning through the middle to the consummation. Each exists in the others yet is distinct from them while being radically identical to the soul, sanctifying grace, and the spiritual life, respectively.

Looking at mystical theology in particular, we see that it does not run parallel to academic theology, but is its completion. Academic theology has an informative role—to supply the object of love—and normative role—to supply reasonableness to the finite will in the use of things and of ideas⁴ which guide the believer from the common faith of the Church to an authentic encounter with God. At the same time, the union of love stabilizes the process of fides quaerens intellectum and draws together the clear and distinct ideas of proper theology into an inexpressible synthesis: The more intimately and completely understanding and love, theology and spirituality compenetrate one another, the more perfect each is.⁵ This constitutes the ontological basis for the priority of contemplative over academic theology⁶ in the development of the Church’s understanding of the analogia fidei.

Indeed, Fehlner observes that, There has never been any advance in academic theology (formation of treatises) not anticipated by the contemplative theology of some Saint. In the case of pneumatology, Mariology, and ecclesiology two saints are particularly influential: St. Francis and his spiritual son St. Maximilian Ma. Kolbe.⁷ This is because, as he remarks invoking a distinction from Newman, the saint embraces the truths of the faith with a real assent, not merely notional. While it may not have the polished concepts of the scholar, mystical theology, the taste for the divine, sees further and deeper than the merely notional, regardless of how logically adept or hermeneutically sophisticated the scholar may be.

In light of Bonaventure’s triadic theology, the life and teaching of the saints as a theology lived unto consummation become a locus of theology. As the complement of theology, and neither its origin nor rational analysis, it is not in competition with Magisterial teaching and theological study, but forms a criterion of fidelity and distinguishes theological study from theological curiosity. Normally, there is a harmonious development from the illumination of proper theology to the union of mystical theology, but God can elevate one to a high union with Himself, such as with St. Paul, without the intermediate, formal intellectual illumination generally required for a sane sanctity. One thinks of the holy fools of the Christian East, or of their counterparts in the West in figures like Catherine of Siena, Joseph of Cupertino, Mary of Agreda, Philip Neri, and, above all, Francis of Assisi.

From the singular vocation of St. Francis, who is an eschatological saint pointing toward the holiness of the Church in its fullness, springs the Franciscan movement. Fehlner, based both on the life of St. Francis and the development of the seeds he planted, interprets the vocation of St. Francis as an essentially Marian vocation with the purpose of promoting (theory) and implementing (praxis) the twinned doctrines of the Absolute Primacy of Christ and the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The essays in this volume have the dual purpose of excavating this Marian treasure and of reminding the Order that embracing or neglecting this Marian essence is directly correlated to the dynamism or decadence of the Franciscan Order.

Fehlner views saints as the first and most important of the signs of the times. Through the graces given to them, the Church develops and advances through salvation history. This can be thought of as a reverse typology. In typology, people and events of the Old Testament cumulatively build up an image of what is to come in the New. In the life of the Church, we continue moving towards the heavenly Promised Land, but each advancement in the life of the Church is, in some way, a making present what was historically realized in Jesus, the Lord of History. St. Francis, as Bonaventure saw, has a unique place and perennial relevance not limited to the culture of the late Middle Ages, but of eschatological significance. This is due to his vocation of repairing the Church not according to any particular paradigm of social organization, but according to the singular sanctity already realized in Mary Immaculate.

* * *

After finishing his 1959 doctoral thesis The Role of Charity in the Ecclesiology of St. Bonaventure⁸ at the Seraphicum, Fehlner returned to St. Anthony-on-Hudson (the Conventual’s Major Seminary) in Rensselaer, NY. During his twenty-five years here,⁹ he assembled a rare collection of over 100,000 books in the seminary library.¹⁰ Indeed, Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M. Conv., affirmed that for his doctoral thesis, Divine and Created Order in Bonaventure’s Theology, the seminary library at Rensselaer had more of his needed resources than did the libraries he searched in Europe.¹¹ Fehlner’s output during this time was limited to sporadic essays about the renewal of religious life following Vatican II, most of his time was dedicated to the study of the Franciscan tradition.

After 1978, he began to write about the Marian framing of the Franciscan Vocation. Entering into the mid-1980s, his output shifts to focus more exclusively on St. Maximilian Kolbe, which tapers off into the 1990s. In 1993, he transferred to the Franciscans of the Immaculate and wrote on pastoral problems with the missionary review Christ to the World. Then in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, his focus turned to expounding his synthesis of Franciscan Mariology, critically applying it to contemporary theology, and spreading it through popular articles. But this all started in 1978.

In 1976, Fehlner walked away from what should have been a fatal car accident, convinced that he had been spared in crying out to Mary. He describes himself as living as an essentially secular intellectual at the time, and the contrast between what his life was and what he knew it now needed to be threw him into a crisis of faith. Seeking peace, in 1978 he went on a month-long retreat, during which he had an encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary. She asked him to consecrate himself to her according to the teachings of St. Maximilian Kolbe, to which he had previously been opposed.¹² However, he found in it the key to integrating study and sanctity. He expounds this in the study he wrote after this retreat: Mary and Theology: Scotus Revisited.¹³ Within it, he lays the foundations of his pneumatic Mariology wherein Mary, the Created Immaculate Conception is the created parallel of the Holy Spirit, the Uncreated Immaculate Conception, as the perfect fruit of the love of the Father and the Son Incarnate. She is the primary and visible term of the mission of the Holy Spirit and collaborates with him as an essentially ordered co-cause to unite us with Jesus, clarifying His teaching and ensuring its interiorization by the believer. By placing Mary’s activity within the mission of the Holy Spirit, Fehlner shows she is present and active in the Church as Mediatrix and Co-redemptrix without in any way detracting from the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one Mediator and Redeemer.

Convinced that the much-desired renewal of the Order and the Church was connected with the incorporation of the Immaculate Conception called for by St. Maximilian Kolbe, Fehlner threw himself into a study of Mary and St. Francis and from 1978 study after study erupted from his pen. Within four years Fehlner had written the essays making up the first half of this present volume as well as Mary and Theology: Scotus Revisited in 1978 (vol. 1), Community, Prayer and Apostolate in the Conventual Tradition in 1979 (vol. 5), and Total Consecration, Baptism and the Franciscan Ideal in 1982 (vol. 6).

The new enthusiasm of Fehlner for this topic was noticed, and in 1984 he was called to Rome to work with the Militia of the Immaculata (MI), the movement started by St. Maximilian in 1917. He served as the Assistant International Director and as editor of Miles Immaculatae (a review founded by St. Maximilian in 1938) from 1985–1989. In 1986, he participated in the Extraordinary Chapter of the Conventual Franciscans on the Kolbean heritage, where he advocated a wide-scale adoption of Kolbe’s vision with its faithful preservation.

In 1993, Fehlner transferred from the Conventual Franciscans to the newly-erected Franciscans of the Immaculate. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed rector and professor of dogma of their American seminary in New Bedford, Mass. While there, he published various articles in the missionary review Christ to the World, edited in that same friary.¹⁴ However, in response to the controversy over Mary as Coredemptrix in the late 1990s, he began to explain the Coredemption and Mediation of Mary from the Franciscan tradition.

Around 2000, he was transferred to Italy to serve as the rector of the newly unified seminary of the Franciscans of the Immaculate. While there, he organized what became nine international symposia studying the Coredemption from various disciplinary perspectives, the acts of which are published in the nine volumes of Mary at the Foot of the Cross (2000–2010).¹⁵ He also expounded upon what he termed Marian Metaphysics¹⁶ in the inaugural issues of the review Immaculata Mediatrix and published several critiques¹⁷ of contemporary theology which uncritically adopts the bases of Kant and Hegel. Finally, he published a book on the pneumatology of Kolbe in 2004 which examines the pertinent texts, gives a theological systemization of their concepts, and then applies them to the controversy at that time accusing or lauding Kolbe as a proto-feminist due to the strong link he establishes between Mary and the Spirit.¹⁸

While in Italy, he encountered Raymond Cardinal Burke, at that time the bishop of rural La Crosse, Wisconsin. His advice on the planned Marian sanctuary in that diocese proved decisive for its execution, and Bishop Burke asked him to come as the founding rector of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Fehlner continued to contribute scholarly articles synthesizing Franciscan Mariology in various volumes,¹⁹ as well as starting his final book on Maximilian Kolbe in 2008 (published posthumously a decade later)²⁰ and a notable article²¹ putting Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and John Henry Newman in dialogue, all of whom, according to Fehlner, share the same fundamental metaphysic. After serving for a year as novice master in Griswold, CT, Fehlner chose to return to the Conventual Franciscans in 2016, where he passed away in 2018.

* * *

The first five works in the present volume date from 1980–1982. They address the Marian vocation of St. Francis, emphasizing that the problematic of Mary and the Order is not resolved by fitting her into the plans of the Order, but by discerning how the Order fits into her plans for the advancement of the Church. With this paradigm shift, the signs of the times throughout Franciscan history become legible and the key characteristics of Franciscanism are tied to a central Marian thread, called by St. Maximilian the Cause of the Immaculate. Further, by picking up this thread today, we are able to reform the Order according to its deepest resonances and purposes.

The first of these works, Mary in the Franciscan Tradition: The Virgin Made Church, was delivered at a workshop at Maryville in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1980 on August 2nd, the Feast of Our Lady of the Angels (a.k.a. the Porziuncula). It was later published in Italian in 1981 in Miles Immaculate and in English in 1985 in Civitas Immaculatae,²² a defunct publication of the St. Maximilian Kolbe Marian Center located at the St. Hyacinth College Seminary (1927–late 1990s) in Granby, Massachusetts. The second of these works, Mary and Franciscanism, is a series of nine meditations that Fehlner’s Provincial asked him to compose in honor of the 800th anniversary of the birth of St. Francis, and which were sent out from October 1981 through June 1982. The third, Our Lady and Saint Francis, compresses the central ideas of previous text into a few pages for The Cord, a then-monthly, now-quarterly review of Franciscan Spirituality published through The Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University in St. Bonaventure, NY. The fourth, Saint Francis and Mary Immaculate, was published in 1982 through Miscellanea Francescana, the theological journal of the Seraphicum in Rome.

After his 1978 retreat, Fehlner dedicated himself to deepening the Marian reality of the vocation of St. Francis, and the writings that followed re-propose the same ideas (and sometimes the same texts) across four different media: a conference, a novena of mediations, a short summary, and an article in a scholarly review. This is not the case with the next essay.

The fifth and final essay of this period included in this volume, Vir Catholicus et Totus Apostolicus: St. Francis and the Church, is a conference Fehlner wrote in the spring of 1982 and delivered in June at the Inter-Provincial Conference in Mt. St. Francis, Indiana. While the previous four articles re-present the same points in different venues, this article’s content is unique to it because it follows upon his conference, Community, Prayer and Apostolate in the Conventual Tradition, given at the 1979 meeting and published in 1982.²³ While presenting some of the same ideas as the contemporaneous articles in other publications, it treats at length the ecclesiology of St. Francis which undergirds the Franciscan Order as a hierarchically-ruled communion in charity, that is, a microcosm of the whole Church for the reform of the whole Church.

The next article takes us eighteen years into the future. It was composed in 2004 while he was the Rector at the International Seminary of the Franciscans of the Immaculate, but is published here for the first time. From internal evidence, it is clear that he intended it for a Marian Symposium in celebration of the 150th anniversary Ineffabilis Deus, but it seems this symposium never took place. It recapitulates the themes from the early 1980s, setting the calling of St. Francis within the greater plan of the Mother of the Church. But it carries them forward as well.

In it, Fehlner addresses at length the meaning of crisis in personal and ecclesial life—the same today as in the time of St. Francis—and so the solution is the same: take seriously the Immaculate Conception. He returns to the Marian foundations of the vocation of St. Francis, especially focusing on the Salute to the Virgin and the Antiphon of the Passion, the two explicitly Marian writings of the Saint, and then does a close reading of the Salute as a guide to Marian Consecration as the way to incorporate the Marian mystery more solidly into the life of the Church and Christians.

While this article does return to many of the themes from the early 1980s, it is also quite different. The brash youthfulness of his thesis has, twenty-five years later, settled into an integrated and experienced serenity. It benefits from the Marian contributions of St. John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, and especially from the close study of St. Francis’ texts by Johannes Schneider’s Virgo Ecclesia Facta, which Fehlner had translated from German into English the previous year.²⁴

The last article of part 1 is on St. Clare from 2008. He seeks to explain and establish the title given to Clare: Dei Matris vestigium, in English: the Footprint of the Mother of God, against common and contemporary feminist readings of St. Clare. By the stigmata, St. Francis re-presented Christ to the medieval Church, and St. Clare is seen as the re-presenting of the Mother of God to the Church. In contemporary language, she is a manifestation through her person of the Marian Profile of the Church. But Saints Francis and Clare also share the halo of those at the foot of the Cross, where Francis plays John to Clare’s Mary in the reception of her as an integral part of the life of the Order such that she is not the Foundress of the Poor Clares, but of the whole Order. And this because she reflects the Mother of God, who is the real Foundress with the Holy Spirit and who by her prayers obtained for the Church and for Francis the grace of his calling. In this article, Fehlner treats of her life and sanctity and various facets of her vocation that associate Lady Clare with the Immaculate Mother of God.

The sole article in part 2 of this volume takes us back to 1986, just a few years after Fehlner’s first pieces on St. Francis. While in Rome in the mid-1980s and while still serving as editor of Miles Immaculatae, Fehlner took part in continuing discussions over the nature and charism of the Franciscan Order, specifically the Conventual branch.²⁵ Fehlner had already been deeply involved, both at the level of the General Chapter and Provincial Chapters, on this topic since the 1970s.²⁶ As an ecclesiologist, Fehlner was concerned with the spiritual growth and perfection of the Church in line with the call of the Second Vatican Council. At the same time as a true son of St. Francis, he was deeply troubled about trends within the Order that, to his mind, threatened to undermine the Franciscan Conventual charism and to cause harm to the Body of Christ precisely as a result of the Conventual family’s forgetfulness or worse apathy regarding their particular raison d’être. For Fehlner, following the lead of his Franciscan forebears, the Immaculate Mediatrix was the key to clarifying the path the Conventual family needed to follow for internal reform, reunion with the other branches of the Minorites, and for accomplishing the particular task entrusted to the spiritual sons and daughters of Francis and Clare in achieving that divinely willed perfection of and in charity throughout the Church and the world.

Fasani’s canonization in 1986 presented Fehlner with an outstanding and saintly model of the true fulfillment of the Conventual vocation. Fasani was at once a scholar and a saint. Fehlner’s article on Fasani, composed in celebration of his 1986 canonization, summarizes and evaluates Francis Anthony Fasani’s commentary on the Song of Songs and his seven novenas in preparation for major Marian feasts. This article was published in Civitas Immaculatae (March 1986) and as the introduction to an Italian collection of these texts that same year.²⁷ Fehlner evaluates the uniqueness of Fasani in being able to, like St. Bonaventure, blend the spiritual and the dogmatic in an age when these were more often opposed to each other, describing his work as a marianized Itinerarium in mentis Deum. Further, he sees Fasani as a distinct witness to the radical immaculatism of the Franciscan Order, and by his canonization, a verification of the Kolbean thesis that the Cause of the Immaculate runs through the heart of Franciscanism and that the key to Franciscan sanctity is grasping onto it.

The first two sections of this volume present texts that explicate the foundational Marian nature of the Franciscan movement through the reading of the signs of the times as especially manifested through the great saints God wills to raise up, who are not only models of Christian life, but have content-bearing messages. For the most part, the saints presented are St. Francis and St. Maximilian, but Fehlner also gives us a study on St. Clare and on the all-too-little-known St. Francis Anthony Fasani as further corroboration of his thesis. And his thesis is this: The Virgin Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces and Mother of the Church, interceded and won the grace of Assisi for the rebuilding of the Church through drawing attention to her personal identity as Full of Grace (Luke 1:28) and the active exemplar, already realized, of what the Church is to be at its eschatological fulfillment. Therefore, in order to make sense of St. Francis and his motley crew, we must see them as a particular instrument of Mary Immaculate for the rebuilding of the Church, and move forward discerning not what place to allocate to Mary in the life of the Order, but how to move into that place she has allocated for us.

The third section of the present volume offers, a slightly edited and updated version of Fehlner’s 1959 (published in 1965), dissertation on the Role of Charity in the Ecclesiology of St. Bonaventure. In his 2015 introduction, Fehlner explains what he came to see as the theme that unifies this early work on St. Bonaventure with the founding charisms of Francis and Clare: Virgo facta ecclesia. Hence, Fehlner added this all-important phrase for understanding both his own Order and the Church to his dissertation. This work on Bonaventure’s ecclesiology established Fehlner from the outset as an important and rising ecclesiologist, and it presents the main lines of his thought as he develops them throughout his subsequent writings.

In a profound way, Fehlner always remained an ecclesiologist. His writings on Francis and Clare attest to this fact and his development of Franciscan ecclesiology in terms of his subsequent exposition and systematization of St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and others. His insights into St. Maximilian Kolbe’s teaching on the Mary and the Holy Spirit represent some of the most important contributions to the Church’s understanding of herself in its pilgrimage through history, striving to realize through the conjoint operation of the Uncreated and Created Immaculate Conceptions the perfection in charity that the Father has willed from eternity.

1

. Johannes Schneider, Virgo Ecclesia Facta, xxiv.

2

. Cf. Bonaventure, Chr. mag.,

567

–

68

; Bonaventure, Itin.,

298

.

3

. Fehlner, Theologian of Auschwitz,

35

–

43

.

4

. Fehlner, Theologian of Auschwitz,

55

.

5

. Fehlner, Kolbe . . .Pneumatologist,

119

.

6

. Fehlner, Kolbe . . .Pneumatologist,

119

.

7

Fehlner, Kolbe . . .Pneumatologist,

7

.

8

. Included in the third section of this volume. —Ed.

9

.

1960

–

1985

, with a stay in Rome from

1963

–

1965

.

10

. Ondrako, Rebuild My Church,

53

.

11

. Ondrako, Rebuild my church,

82

.

12

. He recounts this in Kolbean Spirituality and Charismatic or Humanistic, both found in volume

5

of this collection.

13

. This study is found in the first volume of these collected essays. Ondrako compares it to Bonaventure’s Itinerarium in mentis Deum as the fruit of his 1259

retreat on La Verna, the same place St. Francis received the stigmata but twenty-five years earlier in

1224

. Ondrako, Rebuild My Church,

54

.

14

. Found in volume

7

of this collection.

15

. His contributions to these are reproduced in the first, second, and fourth volumes of this collection.

16

. These make up most of the first volume.

17

. The eighth volume of these collected essays.

18

. Fehlner, Kolbe . . . Pneumatologist.

19

. Mostly collected in volume

4

.

20

. Fehlner, Theologian of Auschwitz.

21

. Peter Damian Fehlner, Scotus and Newman, CE

8

, chapter

9

.

22

. The order of the essays in this volume reflects the

1985

date of publication.

23

. This may be found in volume

5

of these collected essays.

24

. Schneider, Virgo Ecclesia Facta.

25

. Fehlner’s writings from the period on this topic are found in volumes

5

and

6

of the Collected Essays. Most important among these is Fehlner’s address to the

1986

Extraordinary General Chapter Hereditas Kolbiana, CE

6

, chapter

7

.

26

. These are found in volume five.

27

. San Francesco Antonio Fasani, Le

7

Novene Mariane, ed. by Francesco Costa. Padua: Edizione Messagerro Padova,

1987

.

part one

Virgo Facta Ecclesia

Francis’ and Clare’s Marian-Ecclesial Vocation

1

Mary and Franciscanism

²⁸

Mary and Our Franciscan Origins

In his Testament, St. Francis himself unambiguously identifies the primary source of his vocation: No man showed me what to do, but the Most High revealed to me that I was to live according to the form of the Holy Gospel.²⁹ As we know so well, that form of life chosen for and shown to Francis by the crucified Savior had a dual purpose: to conform Francis perfectly to the crucified Lord, and to make Francis his instrument in sustaining and rebuilding His Church. Many other human and natural factors undoubtedly influenced the genesis and specification of Francis’ vocation and, thus, in any scrutiny of our origins for purposes of renewal, deserve our attention. None, however, if we are to be true to our Holy Father, can compare with and, therefore, have that final, normative influence on our understanding and resolve to renew our lives and our communities which the mind and intentions of Christ possess in this regard. Historical and cultural considerations are strictly subordinate to the mind of Christ on the nature of the Franciscan way as confirmed by the Lord Pope as valid today as in the thirteenth century. In a word, Francis and his Order are the exclusive possession of Christ, neither in origin, nor form, nor end, the product of merely natural historical forces—and so they must remain.

There is, however, one other factor at the source of the Franciscan phenomenon that stands on a par with the influence of our Lord. Francis writes: Holy Virgin Mary, there is none like you born in the world among women (Vespers Antiphon, Office of the Passion). While a creature, she is simply in a class by herself, incomparable with other creatures, i.e., unique and incomparable as a person, and in her influence as mediatrix of all graces only with her Son, who has bestowed on her a fullness of grace and love. To the question: Why did the crucified Lord choose Francis for and explain to him that specific, eschatological task of rekindling the love of the faithful for Himself and of heralding His coming, Francis gave but one answer throughout his life: because our Lady, the Mother of God and Queen of the Angels, asked her Son to do this.

St. Bonaventure writes: Francis, the shepherd of a little flock, led his band of twelve brothers to St. Mary of the Portiuncula—and the grace of heaven went before them—so that where the Order of the Minors by the merits of the Mother of God had its beginning, it might develop with her help (Leg. maj. 4.5). And with more detail, Celano records the same:

Although he knew that the kingdom of heaven had been established in every place on earth, and he believed that divine grace can be given to the elect of God everywhere, yet he knew by experience that the ‘place’ of the Church of St. Mary of the Portiuncula was filled with more abundant grace and frequented by the visitation of heavenly spirits. Therefore, he often used to say to the brothers: My sons, see that you never leave this place . . . for this place is truly holy and the home of Christ and his Virgin Mother. Here when we were few, the Most High increased us. Here he enlightened the souls of his poor by the light of his wisdom. Here he inflamed our wills by the fire of his love . . . Therefore, my sons, hold this place worthy of all reverence and honor as truly a dwelling place of God which is uniquely cherished by Him and His Mother (

1

Cel.

106

).

And in his second life (2 Cel. 18), Celano charmingly underscores the essential:

God’s servant, Francis, who was small in body, humble in mind, and a ‘minor’ by profession, chose a ‘little portion’ of the world for himself and his brothers, while he was living in the world . . . Indeed it was not without the foreknowledge of a divine prophecy that from olden times that place was called the Little Portion which was destined to fall to those who fervently desired to have nothing of the world. For there had also been built there a Church of the Virgin Mother who by her matchless humility merited to be after her Son the head of all the saints.

And so, Bonaventure echoes (Leg. maj. 3.1):

And while he stayed in the Church of the Virgin Mother of God, with continuous longing, he prayed to her who had conceived the Word full of grace and truth that she should deign to become his advocate, and by the merits of the mother of mercy he conceived and gave birth to the spirit of gospel truth.

In responding then to Christ’s invitation, Francis received the Portiuncula as his inheritance and became with his brethren the little portion of Mary—as much her possession as her Son’s—for by her merits he gave birth to the spirit of gospel truth. There have been and still are persons shocked by the praise seemingly unlimited, showered by Francis on the Mother of God, for he rendered special praises and poured forth prayers and offered his devotion to the Mother of Jesus—how many and in what ways, it is not humanly possible to tell (2 Cel. 198). And after Christ, he placed his trust especially in her (Leg. maj. 9.3). The puzzle is simply resolved when we remember what Cardinal Newman tells us concerning the primary, practical principle of all salvation history: the perfect complementarity of the New Adam and the New Eve.

Neither the establishment of the new order of grace and truth through the Incarnation and saving death of Christ nor its subsequent implementation occurs without the active cooperation of the Woman who, from the earliest pages of Scripture and the most primitive times of the Church has been unambiguously named and proclaimed the New Eve, the Mother of God and therefore of all the Saved. Her humble Fiat was the complement of the Creator’s almighty Fiat, this time issuing not simply in a work of God, but the most perfect work, the incarnation of the Son of God, as obedient to his Mother’s Fiat as to the will of His heavenly Father. And her pure love was and is the highest response possible to the love of her Son, without which His love would, as it were, have been left suspended in a vacuum.

When the world was growing cold so that love of Him who didst deign to die for love of our love might be understood, appreciated, and shared more widely and intensely in the Church, the New Eve, the Mediatrix of all graces and Queen of the Angels, interceded that Francis might be chosen to form a new Order in the Church, an Order whose essential structure was designed to foster precisely that love for Christ nowhere so perfectly realized as in the Woman named by the Angel Gabriel, Full of Grace.

And if we would discover our origins and the purpose of our calling, we must have unlimited trust and recourse to the Holy Virgin Mary, our Mother, as did St. Francis, seeking to discover not so much how we find room for her in our multiple concerns, but how our concerns and above all ourselves fit into her plans. For all that we continue to accomplish as Franciscans will come from Christ, not as a solitary decision on His part, but as a living response to the prayers of His Mother, i.e., to her Fiat for us.

Mary and the Understanding of Our Vocation

Celano writes (1 Cel. 24) of Francis while staying at the house of Bernard of Claravalle: And he (Bernard) used to see him praying all night, very rarely sleeping, praising God and His Mother the, glorious Virgin. Rightly, observes Bonaventure: After Christ, he placed all his trust in her (Leg. min. 9.3). For through her help, he had not only received the grace of his vocation, but the understanding thereof as well, and precisely at the Church of St. Mary of the Angels. Here he enlightened the souls of his poor by the light of his Wisdom (1 Cel. 106). For where the Order of Minors had by the merits of the Mother of God had its beginning, it might develop with her help (Leg. maj. 4.5).

Behind these observations stands a simple but especially significant fact. It was while repairing the material edifice of the Portiuncula that Francis came to realize the essential meaning and purpose of his vocation, viz., that it was only incidentally that he had been called to repair the material edifice of the Church—as he had only incidentally been called to care for the lepers; essentially Christ wished him through this new way to repair or edify or build up, as St. Paul says, that which the material edifice symbolizes, the mystical body of Christ, the immaculate bride of Christ, without spot or wrinkle (Eph 5:27). The influence of the Mediatrix of all graces extended not only to the granting of his vocation by her Son; it also touched its clarification. We should attend carefully to that work, for it indicates several parallels between the roles of Mary and the Holy Spirit in the work of salvation, and is crystallized in a very singular title given Mary by St. Francis: Spouse of the Holy Spirit. It is the mission of the Holy Spirit to be the soul of the Church, to animate it as the immaculate bride of Christ so that the Church might be the mother and teacher of the faithful, as Mary conceived the Lord by the power of the Spirit. In no way is this mission so radically fulfilled as in that of clarifying and sustaining, to wit being the advocate of what Christ has taught, revealed, and established. Thus, the roles of the Holy Spirit and of Mary in the life of Francis and of his Order coincide in clarifying and sustaining what Christ has revealed and done for Francis in calling him through perfect conformity to Himself to build up the Church as the immaculate bride of Christ.

In fact, all the essential elements of this new way constitute the means to this end: perfect conformity with the Crucified Lord and the repair of the Church—respectively the contemplative and apostolic dimensions of his ideal—Francis came to understand and interpret in relation to Mary.

For example, the distinctive interior feature of the Franciscan way: mercy, sympathy, joy—"Pax et Bonum," the greeting that so well expresses the interior joy and mercy of the gospel life proclaimed as Bonaventure observes (Itin., Prol.) in every word and deed and breath of our holy Father, was associated by him with the Portiuncula and with the grace obtained for him there by Mary. How much and how characteristically his love for Mary Queen of the Angels at this shrine informed his mind and heart is surely manifested in the indulgence or pardon Francis obtained for this shrine from Christ through the help of Mary.

And does not this provide us further insight into the marvelous ways of divine providence, into the manner in which the natural endowments and desires of Francis were perfected rather than destroyed by grace? Far from ceasing to be a knight and soldier, the leader of a militia, in virtue of his conversion, his inner bent received its true complement: a knight of Christ, struggling not against flesh and blood, but against the prince of darkness, the enemy of truth, the liar and murderer ex professo. His battle for souls, to save his brethren, is carried on under the guidance of the Queen of Angels and in the company of Michael and his legions. (Rev 12). In this context, his uncompromising faith and delicate appreciation for holy purity take on more profound significance. They are the basis of that joyful courage that has so enthralled generations. And as even a superficial reading of his salute to the Virgin Mary and to the virtues will show, Mary is his source of inspiration.

A few texts will easily illustrate how Mary is the inspiration for and guide to the interpretation Francis gave to the principal exterior features of his way of life, to wit heroic poverty and obedience. Though He (Christ) was rich above all things nevertheless he wished with his most blessed Mother to take poverty as his choice (Letter to all the Faithful). In all the poor he saw the Son of the poor Lady. He bore naked in his heart the one whom she bore naked in her hands (2 Cel. 83) I, little Brother Francis, wish to follow the life of poverty of our most high Lord Jesus Christ and of his most holy Mother and to persevere in it to the end (Last Will—Rule of St. Clare, 5). St. Francis would often recall with tears the poverty of Jesus Christ and His mother. Hence he declared that this virtue was the queen because it shone with such superior brilliance in the King of Kings and in the Queen, His Mother (Leg. maj. 7.1).

Heroic poverty and obedience were the means or arms appointed for engaging in the struggle to rescue souls from enslavement to the archenemy of Christ and of his Mother and to rebuild the Church. Neither an ideology of poverty nor a natural experience of misery was for Francis the basic criteria for understanding and living poverty in spirit. Rather, as is so clear from Francis’ love of the feast of the Nativity, it is the Woman of Bethlehem, the Mother of God and her Son, who were the source of inspiration and interpretation. Their way of life in poverty and obedience brought them together to the great hour of Calvary and the Resurrection. So Francis’ sharing in their poverty and obedience so well dramatized at Greccio would bring him to Mt. Alvernia. All this, as Francis so well put it, was because the Mother of God interceded for him; therefore, he trusted her counsel completely.

Given his Christocentrism, it was only natural that all Francis’ piety should center on the corporal presence of Christ in the mystery of the Eucharist. And herein, too, he saw an exact parallel or complement between the action of Mary in his spiritual life and that of the priest, both of whom make the object of his love present to him. See how every day he humbles himself, as when he came down from his royal throne into the Virgin’s womb (Admonitions on the Blessed Sacrament).

We should be tragically mistaken if on the basis of this text we imagined Francis to have thought, even implicitly, Mary to be a kind of super-priestess, that her action and that of the ordained priest to be identical or interchangeable, or that the Marian maximalism of Francis to be confused with or substituted for his all-absorbing Christocentrism. It is the complementarity that is to be stressed, exactly as the mission of the Spirit complements that of Christ the mediator and priest. Each in its own order is sufficient, without the confusion of orders. So also with Mary who in the words of Francis is Spouse of the Holy Spirit, full of grace. Her active and complementary association with her Son, first in the work of redemption and then in the application of its fruits, far from detracting from the uniqueness of Christ, makes that uniqueness clear. So, too, her universal mediation far from supplanting the hierarchy and the visible institutional structures of the Church, is the natural and indispensable support of these, who, in turn, especially Peter and his successors, confirm her person and work. Is it any accident that the one for whom Mary obtained the grace to rebuild the Church, precisely in such wise as to set in relief the absolute kingship of her Son, should have had this grace confirmed by the Lord Pope, and that the followers of the Poverello who had such a reverence for the priesthood should have been those who in setting forth the mystery of the Immaculate Conception should have come to be numbered among the strongest exponent of the primacy and infallibility of Peter and his successors?

The Immaculate and the Marian Structure of Our Vocation

When the question is asked: What is the specific, distinguishing feature of the Franciscan way and of its Christocentrism? a great many answers are given—all containing a kernel of the truth, but none entirely adequate. Some will point to poverty and penance; others to charity or joy; still others to Francis’ Christocentrism, and hardly anyone at all to a specific apostolate. While everyone agrees that there is something very distinctive about the Franciscan way and that all these elements are in some way essential, by themselves as the hinge element, none provides a really satisfactory explanation. For example, Franciscans can hardly claim Christocentrism as exclusively theirs—to the exclusion of Dominicans, Jesuits, and Benedictines. So, too, with charity, penance, specific apostolates, and activities. Nor is it unreasonable, if the answer is a certain combination of all these elements, to seek a coherent description of the proportion involved as distinctive of the Franciscan ethos.

With the exception of St. Maximilian, very few students of this question have sought the primary distinguishing feature of our way in its Marian character. Perhaps this is because until the time of St. Maximilian, no one sought to examine this dimension in the sense of the question, What place do Francis and his Order have in the intentions of Mary? rather than in terms of the question, What place does Mary have in our lives?

For St. Maximilian, as we know so well, Franciscan thought, action, and contemplation are not only interpreted in relation to Mary Immaculate but lived in and with her qua Immaculate. Despite the inclination of many to consider this as a latter-day accretion and not part of the primitive charism of the Order, there is some very persuasive evidence that St. Maximilian has, in fact, (however he came to do this) discovered the feature of the life of Francis and of his Order capable of serving as the primary distinguishing characteristic of this new way.

Cardinal Newman has observed (Discourses to Mixed Congregations, 17) that whenever the Church has in any way been threatened at the roots of her very existence, i.e., in the purity and indefectibility of her faith in Christ Jesus as Son of God and risen Lord crucified for our sins, that Mary would quietly yet effectively call attention to one or another of her privileges, in such wise that the glory of her Son in the Church might be confessed undiminished and without equivocation, and that the Church might continue exactly as her Son had intended and established it. Surely, it is not unreasonable to view the vocation of Francis, called to a way of life calculated to sustain and make prosper the life of the Church at a time when the hearts of many under the impact of a nascent secularism were inclined to grow cold and become indifferent to the primacy of the King of kings, as a case in point.

The earliest sources dealing with the vocation of Francis amply witness to the extraordinary intimacy between Francis and Mary and clearly indicate that the distinctive features and purpose of the Franciscan way of life have their origin in the prayers and the titles of our Lady, in particular, her divine maternity and her role as mediatrix of all graces; this is by no means something original with him. There is, however, one title given to Mary by Francis—Spouse of the Holy Spirit—that as far as can be determined, was never used previously. Does this title express in a succinct, but all-embracing manner, the essential point clarified by Mary in her converse with Francis? On the assumption of St. Maximilian that this title is the equivalent of Immaculate Conception, and that it was Mary Immaculate who directed Francis’ attention to a clear, accurate, and practical recognition of the mystery of the New Eve full of grace, the Woman who is Queen of the Angels, a number of other factors in our vocation and history can be explained with a clarity and coherence that otherwise might elude us.

First, St. Francis was deeply attached to our Lady under her title of Queen of the Angels, and at a shrine dedicated to her under that name, and popularly known as the Little Portion, where, in fact, he came to realize the true significance of Christ’s call to follow Him in a unique and new way. Revelation 12 is the most obvious passage of Scripture one commonly associates with this title of our Lady. The woman of Apocalypse is, without doubt, the woman foretold in Gen 3:15 to crush the head of the serpent, and who is addressed by the Archangel Gabriel with the name full of grace. The significance of the point is brought further into relief when we recall St. Francis’ great devotion to St. Michael, the captain of the angelic legions against the dragon of Revelation, and the way in which his natural inclination to knightly action was transformed and channeled through his religious vocation into a spiritual combat and into the founding of an Order that rightly can be described as a spiritual militia.

In hindsight, one can hardly avoid the rather strong suggestion of the Immaculate Conception. That this is not merely hindsight, that the mystery of Mary’s Immaculate Conception is very much at the heart of her concern in obtaining Francis his vocation and then enlightening him as to its meaning becomes evident when we recall that of all the privileges of Mary this one is most characteristically and distinctively associated with Francis’ Order, in all its branches and for the greater part of its history.

Second, this title, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, illumines the distinctive character which the divine maternity plays at the heart of Franciscan spirituality. In chapter six of his definitive Rule, Francis writes: If a mother so loves and nourishes her child according to the flesh, how much more the friar love his brethren according to the Spirit? What is this something more in the love of the friars for each other? Is it not the love of the Virgin Mother for her child? And is it not in her fullness of grace, in her espousals with the Holy Spirit in a most perfect fashion that we perceive the ideal of true love, whose perfection is to give one’s life for another? Is it not the grace to love Christ and to die for love of his love that Mary, Mediatrix of all grace, obtained for Francis? And with this, clarified for him the meaning of spiritual poverty as the means to this height of gospel perfection? In this same chapter six, the practice of perfect poverty is intimately associated with the unique love that distinguishes Francis’ brotherhood. Humble poverty and fraternal charity are but two sides of a single love for Christ, whose plenitude is found in Mary the Immaculate, full of grace.

I am the Immaculate Conception. Shortly after the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Woman clothed with the Sun, the Queen of the Angels, appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes and gave her name as the Immaculate Conception and not simply as one immaculately conceived, surely an odd way to speak for a human person, unless that human person is utterly unique. A latter-day disciple of St. Francis, St. Maximilian, has observed that such an affirmation is only natural if we take Spouse of the Holy Spirit and Immaculate Conception to be synonyms. Just as the Holy Spirit from eternity is the fruit of the mutual love of Father and Son and the complement thereof, so Mary Immaculate as Spouse of the Holy Spirit is the perfect fruit of the love of the Father and Son Incarnate, and the complement thereof. It is by that love which is the Holy Spirit and whose fullness is in the Virgin Mother that the Incarnate Word is conceived and born and brought to the cross.

The antiphon, then, in which Francis employs the title, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, should be pondered carefully in the light of this insight:

Holy Virgin Mary, there is none like you born in the world among women: Daughter and handmaid of the Most High King and heavenly Father, Mother of our Most Holy Lord Jesus Christ, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, Pray for us with St. Michael and all the virtues of heaven and all the saints to your most beloved Son, our Lord and Master.

In this antiphon, Francis, who described himself as academically illiterate, manifests an astounding theological precision and indeed originality. The uniqueness and incomparability of Mary (with respect to all other creatures) is formulated in terms of her relations to the three divine persons. In this formulation, Christ holds the middle or central position. As Francis often said, Mary’s greatest claim to honor is the fact that she is the Mother of God the Son. Thereby she is not the wife of the Father; rather she is his most perfect daughter, because most perfectly his obedient handmaid, i.e., most perfectly by her obedient Fiat actively accomplishing his will. Her Fiat is the crowning complement to the original Fiat of creation, bringing to be the most perfect work of God, viz., the Incarnation and Redemption. How is it that she is at once handmaid and mother; that she pertains in so unique a fashion to the order of the divine persons? Because she is the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

In a simple, yet profound fashion, Francis has expressed the core of what later Scotist Mariologists will discuss under the heading of belonging to the order of the hypostatic union in virtue of being predestined to be the immaculate mother of the Word. Mary in no way belongs to the order of the first Adam; she is preserved from all taint of original sin. She is full of grace, the Spouse of the Holy Spirit. She is the most perfect fruit of the most perfect redemption, without which her Son would not enjoy the most perfect, absolute primacy as firstborn of creation, as firstborn of the dead. And as Spouse of the Holy Spirit from the first moment of her existence, her love for God is the perfect complement in creation that the love of the Holy Spirit in eternity is for that of the Father and the Son. In the Immaculate, we discover the fullest and most concrete exemplification of that love which for Francis is the very essence of his spirituality, and for which he prayed (with the encouragement of the Spouse of the Holy Spirit): grant that I might die for love of thy love who didst deign to die for love of my love.

The Immaculate and Conventual Franciscanism

When Our Lord gives us a saint or blessed, He does so for a purpose—to instruct us, sustain us, or lead us in the achievement of those purposes for which our Order was founded initially. This is certainly the case with St. Maximilian Kolbe. Pope Paul VI, in his homily on the occasion of the beatification of St. Maximilian, noted some of these in regard to the Church. And in these reflections on the relation of St. Francis and of our Order to the Mother of God, note has been taken incidentally of the insight which St. Maximilian gives us into the purpose of Francis’ vocation and of ours.

In a letter to seminarians of the Order in 1933, St. Maximilian identifies two main objectives whose realization governs the overall rhythms of the