Born in Lombardy and orphaned at an early age, Angela Merici became a Franciscan tertiary and embraced a life of prayerful simplicity. After spending many years in almost continuous pilgrimage, visiting shrines of Italy, she had a vision one day in which she beheld a company of angels and maidens descending from a ladder in the heavens. A voice revealed that she would found a community whose members would be as numerous as the maidens thus revealed to her.
For some years Angela offered religious instruction to the children of her poor neighbors. Over the years, when not travelling, she had made this her regular occupation. Other women were gradually inspired to join her. Finally, after she had settled in Brescia, Angela had a group of twenty-eight women prepared to consecrate themselves with her to God’s service. They chose as their patron St. Ursula, a legendary fourth-century martyr widely venerated as a protector of women.
Although she devised a simple rule for her Ursuline community, Angela did not initially conceive of them as a religious order. While dedicating themselves to the education of poor girls, the members wore no habits and took no vows; they continued to live with their families rather than behind an enclosure. The idea of such an association of religious women was unheard of at the time. But the work of Angela and her companions was widely admired. Angela observed, “Each member of the Company should strive to despoil herself of everything and set all her good, her love, her delight, not in robes, nor in food, nor in relatives, but in God alone and in his benign and ineffable Providence.”
By the time of her death on January 27, 1541, Angela was revered as a living saint in Brescia. Crowds of people would follow her to church, attracted in part by her reputation for levitating several inches off the ground while gazing on the Eucharist. Four years after Angela’s death, Rome approved a constitution for her congregation, which would in time come to number many tens of thousands. She was canonized in 1807.
Known as “the St. Jerome of China”, Fr. Gabriele was born Dec. 26, 1907 in a village in the province of Catania, Sicily, and entered the Order as a youth of 16. While he was studying theology at St. Anthony’s College in Rome, an academic conference was held there on the work of Giovanni of Montecorvino, a Franciscan who journeyed to China in the late 13th century.
Inspired by Giovanni’s attempts to communicate Christianity to the Chinese people, Gabriel sailed to Hunan Province shortly after his ordination in 1930, and as soon as he gained knowledge of the language, began translating the Bible into Chinese. This was a task that would consume the next 40 years of his life: facing many obstacles, he persevered, establishing the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Beijing in 1945. Forced to move to Hong Kong in 1948, he and his friar collaborators completed the translation of the Bible into Chinese with full commentary in 1968. He died in Hong Kong on Jan. 26, 1976.
Although known primarily as a biblical scholar, Fr. Gabriele was well-read in other areas of theology, becoming an expert on the thought of John Duns Scotus and a friend of the Jesuit Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. He also carved out time to help the poor, victims of war, and the sick, especially a leper colony in Macau, where he often spent his holidays. Perhaps Blessed Gabriele might be venerated as the patron of workaholics. He was fond of saying: “The most enviable fate for a Franciscan who does not obtain the grace of martyrdom is to die while he is working. . . . Everyone thinks I’m sick! I can still work — so let’s go on!”
In 2001, Sr. Dorothy Hennessey, eighty-eight, made headlines when she was arrested with her younger sister Gwen Hennessey for trespassing at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. They were part of a large contingent of human rights protesters waging a campaign to close the school, whose alumni included the perpetrators of torture, massacres, and military coups in Latin America. Dorothy and Gwen were sentenced to six months in prison. When their judge offered to commute Dorothy’s sentence to “motherhouse arrest,” she replied, “I’d rather not be singled out. If you wouldn’t mind, I would just as soon have the same sentence as the others.”
Dorothy had entered the Franciscan order at nineteen and spent many years teaching. But over time, her sense of global responsibility was awakened through letters from her brother Ron Hennessey, a Maryknoll priest in Guatemala, who reported on the violence and atrocities occurring at the hands of the military. In the early 1980s she went to Nicaragua during the time of the Contra war to serve as a witness for peace. In 1986, in her seventies, she took part in a continental walk for peace across the entire United States.
In 2002, she and her sister Gwen received the Pacem in Terris award from the diocese of Davenport, and award previously won by Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr., Tom Harkin, senator from Iowa, entered into the Congressional Record these words from an article in the Des Moines Register:
“Sister Hennessey taught many things, including courage, compassion, and the importance of independent thought and creative action. She taught that aging gracefully can be consistent with living meaningfully and even dangerously. But most important, she taught that we don’t have to stand by in frustration when wrongs are perpetrated, even by our government; that the world is best served when we stand up for what is right. And that you do whatever you can, from wherever you are. In her case if was for the Lord’s work.”
In 1219, in the midst of the Fifth Crusade, St. Francis embarked on a risky mission. Crossing the battlefield in Syria he sought an audience with Sultan Malik al-Kamil of Egypt. Though he did not succeed in converting the sultan, he was received graciously and permitted to return without harm. A different fate awaited five Franciscans who set out the next year to preach to the Muslims. Brother Berard, who spoke Arabic, along with Brothers Peter, Odo, Accursio, and Adjutus, first tried to preach to the Moors in Seville. When they were banished, they sailed to Morocco.
Upon arriving on the North African shore, they immediately began to preach in the public square, where they were regarded as lunatics and promptly arrested. Brought before the sultan in Marrakesh, they refused an ultimatum to depart or to keep silent, whereupon the sultan drew his scimitar and beheaded them each in turn.
The remains of these friars – the first Franciscan martyrs – were returned to Italy in a solemn journey. Among those deeply affected along the route was an Augustinian canon in Portugal, later known as St. Anthony of Padua, who was inspired by their example to become a Franciscan.
St. Berard and his companions were canonized in 1481.
Odoric of Pordenone passed his early life unremarkably as a Franciscan friar, a vocation he had embraced at the age of fifteen. In 1317, however, some impulse inspired him to embark on a fantastic journey that took him to the ends of the known world and back again.
Starting in Venice he sailed east, traveling overland from Constantinople to Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. From there he sailed to Malabar and southern India where he spent time with the ancient Christian community there. Still, he pushed on, to Ceylon, Sumatra, and Java then north to Canton and the great ports of China. He spent several years in Beijing before turning homeward through Tibet and the capital of Lhasa, on to Persia, and eventually back to Italy.
The reasons for this travel are mysterious. As for his decision to spend his final years in seclusion, he is said to have complied with a vision from St. Francis, who ordered him to stay put. He did dictate an account of his journeys, which circulated widely. While providing little information about his activities or the motive for his grand tour, his travelogue offered an eyewitness account of the extraordinary things he had witnessed, including the curious customs, the prodigious sights, and the religious practices of the people he encountered.
Odoric died on January 14, 1331. He was beatified in 1755.
Filippo Latino, the son of a shoemaker in the town of Corleone, trained as a soldier and earned a reputation as the greatest swordman in Sicily. Equipped with a hot temper, he was evidently quick to draw his blade. This was the cause of his conversion.
One day, in a public altercation, he seriously wounded a policeman and fled to a nearby Capuchin friary to seek sanctuary. His refuge extended for a number of days, during which time he seriously examined his life. Eventually he resolved to enter the Capuchins as a lay brother and became known as Brother Bernard.
His zeal for prayer and for self-sacrifice were widely recognized, and he acquired a reputation for miracles – particularly his ability to heal animals. This generally followed his saying the Lord’s Prayer over the suffering creature, after which he would lead it three times around a cross in front of the friary. “How could I do otherwise?” he explained. The animals could not speak for themselves and had no doctors to attend to them.
Brother Bernard died on January 12, 1667. He was canonized in 2001.
