The Franciscan Tradition (review)

The present volume is the first in a new series launched by the Liturgical Press exploring five major spiritual traditions within the Catholic Church: the Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. The focus of this inaugural volume by two recognized scholars of the tradition is to introduce the reader to Franciscan spirituality—in its various male and female expressions—through a survey of seventeen saintly figures within the tradition. A number of them are canonized saints of the Church (Francis and Clare of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Colette of Corbie, Catherine of Bologna, Felix of Cantalice, the Martyrs of Nagasaki, Veronica Giuliani, Jean-Marie Vianney, Marianne Cope of Molokai, and Maximilian Kolbe); others are officially recognized as blessed (Junípero Serra and Mother Mary of the Passion); and a few are generally acknowledged as men and women of outstanding holiness (Angela da Foligno, Matt Talbot, and Solanus Casey). To account for the broad diversity of the Franciscan Family in history, the authors have chosen representative figures from all four branches of the Franciscan Family: the First Order of male Franciscans (including examples from all three of its branches: the Observants, Conventuals, and Capuchins); the Second Order of Poor Clares; the Third Order Secular of laymen and laywomen; and the Third Order Regular. The volume is thus carefully thought out with respect to the complexities of Franciscan history and representative of its medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern periods.

The overall structure of this slim but substantive volume follows a simple pattern: a biographical sketch of each saintly figure, followed by selections from the writings of (or about) the individual in order to give a flavor of the spiritual orientation of each Franciscan.

Readers or preachers looking for biographical sketches of the key spiritual figures of this religious tradition have had to rely, for many years, chiefly on the heavily pious and uncritical Franciscan Book of Saints by Marion A. Habig (Chicago, 1959; rev. 1979). The biographical overviews in the present volume, although considerably more compact in scope, are a major improvement on the older work, especially in its increased sensitivity to the relationship between hagiography and history. Most of the sketches contain pertinent details on the lives of each of these saintly figures. The most disappointing sketch—perhaps the most difficult to render due to the amount and diversity of the literature—is the one treating Francis of Assisi. Indeed, the socioeconomic and political context of early-thirteenth-century Assisi, so formative of the early minorite spiritual vision, is curiously absent in this treatment, although one finds a passing reference to it in the sketch on Clare. Similarly, there is little mention of the tensions that wracked the male movement in the Middle Ages, whereas Clare’s travails with the papacy are pointedly noted.

The selection of texts that illuminate the spiritual vision of each figure is judicious and evocative. Indeed, a number of the texts (e.g., the Pantheologia for Bonaventure, the Testament of Colette, and especially the letters of Sera) are relatively unfamiliar and instructive.

The one real disappointment of the volume is that there is no synthetic essay attempting to present or grapple with a cohesive vision of Franciscan spirituality. Perhaps this is due to the structure of the book. But this is to be regretted since the reader is left with a somewhat fragmentary and impressionistic rather than analytical presentation of this particular spiritual tradition, which is the aim of the series. The work could have used more rigorous attention to copyediting.