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127 chapter nine THE SAINT FRANCIS OF FRAY ANGÉLICO CHÁVEZ p murray bodo, o.f.m. Thomas More College, Crestview Hills, Kentucky He began to write in earnest of Saint Francis of Assisi as a high-school student at Saint Francis Seminary in Cincinnati. The young Manuel E. Chávez—his given name prior to receiving ‘‘Angélico’’ as his religious name—wrote poems and, later, editorials for the Brown and White, the seminary magazine, that took as their theme the life and spirituality of Saint Francis. Romantic and filled with the enthusiasm of youth, these pieces contained lines such as, ‘‘For he sought no hand of mortal, nor the sword of gallant knight, / But the sweet Love-Grail of Jesus; long he wished that blessed sight.’’∞ In the years when Fray Angélico was a seminarian, boys who wanted to become Franciscan priests entered the seminary after the eighth grade. And if you were a boy from northern New Mexico, where the Franciscan friars of the Cincinnati Province of Saint John the Baptist ministered, then you had to leave your parents at the tender age of fourteen and travel from New Mexico to Cincinnati to begin studies for the Franciscan priesthood. A boy needed, to be sure, a lot of idealism and love for Saint Francis and Christ to make that extraordinary outer and inner journey; thus the idealism of the lines above, written when Fray Angélico was seventeen years old. Or, as editor of the Brown and White in his senior year, this description of Francis in an editorial: ‘‘And he loved his God so much, that he devoted his whole life to His Love and to the all-embracing love of his fellowmen in the villages and in the big cities.’’≤ It is extraordinary that even at so young an age Fray Angélico captures the very essence of Saint Francis of Assisi’s spirituality in the poem and the editorial . The Franciscan scholar Duane V. Lapsanski has defined what Fray Angélico calls Jesus’ ‘‘Love-Grail’’ as an ‘‘invitation to enter into a new level of 128 The Life of a Franciscan existence, one lived completely in God’s presence and characterized by a total self-giving to the Father. . . . The surrender must be accompanied by a wholehearted trust in the Lord as one’s helper and savior and must be expressed in deeds of loving service.’’≥ In 1932, two years after his novitiate (which followed immediately after the seminarian’s senior year of high school) and during his second year of college, Fray Angélico is already beginning to see the stigmatic Saint Francis as the quintessential emblem of the person who has sought and found the Love-Grail of Jesus. In the final stanza of ‘‘Stigmata of St. Francis,’’ a poem published in St. Anthony Messenger, Fray Angélico writes in the persona of Saint Francis praying at La Verna, the mountain on which he was imprinted with the wounds of Christ: ‘‘Dear Christ! At last I scan / La Verna’s cli√-veiled side. / Complete the picture You began / And have me crucified!’’∂ This poem and the allusion to the stigmata in the 1932 poem ‘‘The Son of St. Francis’’∑ were surely influenced by Fray Angélico’s spiritual formation as a Franciscan friar. What it meant to be a Franciscan would have been constantly in the forefront of his consciousness, for he was still in his temporary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, taken for three years at the end of the novitiate year. It was understood that though the vows brought inner freedom and intimacy with God, they also involved an inner conformity to the crucified Christ, the emblem of which was the sacred stigmata of Saint Francis. After professing his temporary vows the young friar then went immediately to the college seminary, Duns Scotus College, in Detroit, where, after his third year in college, he made his profession of solemn vows as a Franciscan friar. He spent his last year of college as a fully professed Franciscan. In that final year of 1933, again in St. Anthony Messenger, Fray Angélico published the poem ‘‘The City of St. Francis,’’ in which he compares Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Assisi and asserts of Mount Alverno (a variation of Mount La Verna), where Saint Francis received the stigmata: ‘‘Why, his dear Alverno / Was the kingly Monte Sol! / And the Seraph—Sun of Zia / Blazoned on a...

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