Jacoba of Settesoli was a young widow living in Rome. From the moment she first learned about Francis of Assisi, she longed to meet him. That opportunity arose when Francis and his companions traveled to Rome to seek the pope’s approval for their new order. After hearing the saint preach, Jacoba approached and asked how she might also follow in his path. Because she still had children to raise, Francis advised her not to give up her home. “A perfect life can be lived anywhere,” he said. “Poverty is everywhere. Charity is everywhere.”
As Francis was nearing death, he sent Jacoba a message, urging her to come quickly and to bring a shroud for his body and wax candles for his burial.
Following this counsel, Jacoba joined the Third Order of St. Francis, turned over administration of her property to her sons, and devoted herself to prayer and charitable works. She nevertheless remained close to Francis. He gave her a pet lamb, which used to follow her about. As Francis was nearing death, he sent Jacoba a message, urging her to come quickly and to bring a shroud for his body and wax candles for his burial.
She hastened to Assisi, doing as he had asked. She also brought with her a batch of his favorite almond cookies. At first there was consternation among the brothers about allowing a woman into the friary, but Francis interceded and welcomed her as “Brother Jacoba.” Thus, she was admitted and so she remained beside him until his death. Afterward he was buried in her shroud.
Jacoba remained in Assisi until her own death on February 8, 1273. She was buried near the tomb of St. Francis.
While I was praying a voice within me said, “Go, visit your father, blessed Francis, without delay, and hurry, because if you delay long you will not find him alive.”
Regina Christine Wilhelmine Bonzel was born in Germany to a deeply religious family. Early in life, she felt the call to religious life. She recalled:
On the day of my First Holy Communion, I was unspeakably happy. Before that I was vivacious child, ready to take part in every prank. But after I received the Lord in my heart and returned to my place, an indescribable feeling came over me. Without really knowing what I was saying, I repeated over and over again, “O Lord, I am your victim, accept me as your victim; do not reject me.”
Her parents refused to allow her to enter a religious order, but when she was twenty, she entered the Third Order of St. Francis. With a group of friends she embarked on a life of service to orphans. Eventually, they were recognized as a new congregation, the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration. She became superior, taking the name Maria Theresia. As new members joined them, the order established a series of schools, hospitals, and orphanages. She was determined that her sisters always embrace the spirit of poverty, humility, and charity.
“We are the children of St. Francis. We must follow his example.”
During the Franco-Prussian War, Mother Maria’s sisters cared for over eight hundred wounded soldiers. Yet, after the war, the government instituted a series of harsh anti-Catholic measures known as the Kulturkampf. Severe restrictions were placed on all religious congregations, and the sisters were forbidden to accept new members. Mother Maria responded by sending sisters to Indiana in the United States. She herself accompanied the first six missionaries in 1875, and returned twice more to oversee their expanding work.
Mother Maria died on February 6, 1905. She was beatified in 2013.
Marthe Robin was born in 1902 in a small village near Lyons. Her early childhood was happy and unremarkable. When she was sixteen, however, she showed the first symptoms of a grave disease that would eventually leave her bedridden. On March 25, 1925, she offered a solemn prayer consecrating her life and her sufferings to God to help spread love in the world. Within three years she was totally paralyzed. That same year she entered the Franciscan Third Order. Unable to eat or drink, she was reported sustained for the rest of her life by the Eucharist alone. In time, she also received the marks of Christ’s wound on her hands and feet.
In 1936, a young priest named Georges Finet came to serve as her spiritual director. To him, she confided her vision for a new apostolic movement, the Foyers of Charity. With his help, her vision was realized. The Foyers of Charity is an international network of Catholic men and women who live, work, and pray together as a family to spread Christ’s love in the world.
Marthe lived on for many years – blind and immobilized, yet active through her prayers in the life of the Church, dispensing spiritual counsel, and showing that even when a person is stripped of everything, she still has the power to love.
She died on February 6, 1981. In 2014, Pope Francis recognized her heroic virtues and she was declared venerable.
St. Joan, daughter of King Louis XI of France, was apparently misshapen from birth, a fact that incited her father’s contempt. When she was eight weeks old, he arranged her betrothal to her two-year-old cousin Louis, Duke of Orleans. The marriage transpired when Joan was twelve. Though her husband accepted the arrangement for pragmatic reasons, he felt no affection for his bride. Joan was subjected to constant abuse and ridicule in the court. She accepted all this without shame or complaint. But when Louis, after becoming king, sought to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of Joan’s deformity, she resisted as best she could. In the end, however, Pope Alexander VI decided in Louis’s favor, judging that the marriage had not been entered freely. Joan accepted this decision as the will of God and retired to Bourges to devote herself to a life of prayer and charity. Louis bestowed on her the title Duchess of Berry.
With the support of her Franciscan confessor, Joan established a religious foundation devoted to “the ten virtues of Our Lady.” The first postulants were eleven girls from the local school – some of them not yet ten. Under a rule that eventually received papal approval, they became the Franciscan order of the Annonciades of Bourges. Publicly renouncing her title and her property, Joan embraced a life of voluntary poverty. She died within a year. Her canonization followed in 1950.
Beautiful, clever, and the daughter of a king (Louis VIII of France), Princess Isabel was destined for a life of pomp and luxury. But her heart was drawn elsewhere. When her frequent fasts and austerity cause her to fall ill, her mother consulted a holy woman, who told her that when Isabel recovered she should be considered as dead to the whole world. So it was. Isabel refused all proposal of marriage – even when urged on her by Pope Innocent IV, who said that her marriage would serve the good of Christendom. She insisted on serving God before all else.
Increasingly, Isabel felt attracted to the Franciscan movement that was sweeping Europe. At dinner each day she would welcome a number of poor people, whom she waited on personally. In the evenings she would leave the palace to visit the sick. When her brother Louis ascended the throne, he agreed to support her plan to establish a Franciscan convent in Longchamps. St. Bonaventure himself helped to devise its rule. It was called the Monastery of the Humility of the Virgin Mary.
Isabel did not formally join the enclosed community. Instead, she lived in quarters separate from the nuns and continued to wear secular clothing, while devoting herself to prayer and contemplation. SHe died in 1270.
Brother Juniper was one of the original companions of St. Francis and
” a man of such unshakeable humility, patience, and self-contempt, that the rising waves of temptation and tribulation could not move him.”
Brother Juniper evidently attained such a degree of holiness that he was quite indifferent to the opinion or regard of others. This was fortunate, since “he was considered stupid and foolish by those who did not know how perfect he was.”
Apart from the stories in his brief “Life,” little is known of his biography. In these stories, he appears to function as a kind of living parable. Francis and his followers were regarded by the world as “fools for Christ.” Just so, the exasperating foolishness of Juniper served among the friars as a standard by which to measure their own compromise with the wisdom of the world.
Over and over again, Juniper tested the patience of his brothers. And not infrequently, after one of his escapades, “the friars were very much shocked and scandalized, and they rebuked him forcefully, calling him a lunatic and a fool and a disgrace to the order of St. Francis, and declaring that he should be put in chains as a madman,” At the sight of the poor, for instance, he was filled with such compassion that he would hand them his garment or rip off a sleeve or a cowl to give them. Not content with giving away his own habit, he would freely dispense his books, altar vestments, or anything else he could lay his hands on. As a result, “when poor people came to Brother Juniper to beg, the friars used to take and hide the things they wanted to keep.”
One time, he set out to surprise the brothers by preparing a feast. After filling pots with water, he tossed in everything – “chickens with feathers and eggs in shells” – so that everything could cook together. When he set down before the friars “that hodgepodge of his, which not a single hog in the city of Rome would have eaten.” they scolded him severely. Juniper displayed such humble abasement that the guardian was moved. Such an edifying example of simplicity, he said, was worth the waste of food.
So on this, and many other occasions, Juniper’s foolishness ultimately bore such a lesson in charity, faith or humility, that Francis himself was moved to observe on one occasion, “My Brothers, if only I had a great forest of such junipers.”
He died in Rome in 1258.
Once when Brother Juniper was praying – and perhaps he was thinking of something extraordinary – a hand appeared to him in the air, and he heard a voice saying to him: “Oh Brother Juniper, without this hand you can do nothing.” He quickly arose and ran through the friary, gazing up at heaven, dancing and shouting in a loud voice: “Indeed that is true, Lord! Indeed that is true!” And he kept on shouting that for a long time.
