John Duns, later known as the Subtle Doctor, was called Scotus on account of his birth in Scotland. He entered the Franciscans at the age of fifteen and was later ordained a priest. After studies in Oxford and Paris, he went on to hold teaching positions in Paris and Cologne, where he was acclaimed as one of the greatest of the Scholastic theologians. His mystically charged theology held particular charm for the Franciscans, rendering in philosophical terms the creation-centered spirituality of their holy founder.
Like other scholastic theologians, Duns Scotus tried to present a philosophical “proof” for the existence of God. In his case, he focused on the observation that all things require some prior cause for their existence. From this, he predicated the existence of a primary infinite cause which owes its existence to itself alone. Yet he drew a distinction between what could be “proved” by reason and what could be known only by faith. There was a difference between a rational knowledge of the existence of God and a saving knowledge of the love of God.
Duns Scotus defined God as infinite love. He taught that the incarnation was not required as payment for sin; it was willed through eternity as an expression of God’s love, and hence God’s desire for consummated union with creation. Our redemption by the cross was likewise an expression of God’s love and compassion rather than an appeasement of God’s anger or a form of compensation for God’s injured majesty. He believed that knowledge of God’s love should evoke a loving response on the part of humanity. He wrote, “I am of the opinion that God wished to redeem us in this fashion principally in order to draw us to his love.” Through our own loving self-gift, he argued, we join with Christ in becoming “co-lovers” of the Holy Trinity.
“I am of the opinion that God wished to redeem us in this fashion principally in order to draw us to his love.”
– Blessed John Duns Scotus
Unlike philosophers in the line of Plato, Scotus did not value the ideal at the expense of the real. Created things pointed to their Creator not only by their conformity to an ideal pattern but by their individuality and uniqueness—what he termed their “thisness” (haecceitas). Thus, the path to contemplation should proceed not only through the mind but through the senses. This insight of Scotus especially endeared him to the most highly distinctive of Catholic poets, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. He paid tribute to the Subtle Doctor in one of his poems:
Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece.
Duns Scotus died on November 8, 1308. He was beatified in 1993.
Friar Claurence Motoyou OFM was ordained a priest while Friar Cruzender Alex OFM was ordained to the Diaconate at Sacred Heart Cathedral here on 27 October 2018.
St. Peter, who was born in Alcantara, a small town in Spain, studied at the great university of Salamanca, and entered the Franciscans at the age of sixteen. From the start, Peter adopted a habit of extreme austerity. He trained himself to sleep no more than two hours at night; he wore no sandals on his feet; he would eat no flesh and drink no wine. Eventually he won permission to found a group of Franciscans along these lines. It was said that their cells – only seven feet long – resembled more graves than rooms. Nevertheless, he found many willing followers.
In the course of extensive preaching tours, he came to know St. Teresa of Avila and became her spiritual advisor. At that time, she was seeking courage to undertake her reform of the Carmelite Order and she later testified on behalf of his canonization that it was Peter, more than anyone, who had encourage her mission. “When I came to know him he was very old, and his body so shriveled and weak that it seemed to be composed as it were of the roots and dried bark of a tree rather than flesh,” she wrote. She also claimed, after his death in 1562, to receive visions of Peter, so that “Our Lord has been pleased to let me enjoy more of him than I did when he was alive.”
One time a brother was complaining to Peter about the wickedness of the world, and the saint replied. “The remedy is simple. You and I must first be what we ought to be; then we shall have cured what concerns ourselves. Let each one do the same, and all will be well. The trouble is that we all talk of reforming others without ever reforming ourselves.”
St. Peter died on October 18, 1562. He was canonized in 1669.
John Baptist Bullaker was born in Chichester, England. When he was eighteen, he resolved to become a missionary priest. All Catholic institutions in England at this point having been suppressed, he went to France and studied at the Jesuit College at St. Omer. The next year, he entered the Franciscans.
After his ordination in 1628, he prepared to return to England, a most dangerous mission territory. Any priest found on English soil was subject to arrest; the same was true for those who harbored him. In fact, Bullaker was arrested immediately upon his landing, though several months in jail he was released for lack of evidence. Thus, he was able to carry on a clandestine ministry for fourteen years, mostly among the gentry. Holing up in hidden cupboards, traveling in disguise, he was passed from house to house, saying Mass, hearing confessions, comforting the faithful, attending the sick and dying, while managing to evade the authorities and their watchful spies. Finally, on September 11, 1642, he was betrayed by a maid in a house where he was saying Mass, and arrested.
Asked by the sheriff his purpose in returning to England, he answered, “to bring back my country to the fold of Christ from which it was gone astray.” Tried and convicted for treason, he was sentenced to death. On October 12, he was hanged in Tyburn before a large crowd. While still alive, he was disemboweled, then quartered, his head was displayed on London Bridge.
Along with other English martyrs, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1989.
St. Colette was born to a poor family in Picardy, France. Upon the death of her parents, she was cared for by the local abbey where her father had worked. Naturally drawn to contemplative life, she became a Third Order Franciscan and afterward received permission to enter an enclosed cell attached to the church. There she spent four years in solitude and prayer, until one day, on the feast day of St. Francis, she received an extraordinary vision. She saw Francis and the Blessed Mother begging Christ to put her in charge of reforming the Franciscan Order. In an audience with Peter de Luna – recognized by the French, in this time of papal schism, as Pope Benedict XIII – he endorsed her mission and appointed her superior of any convent she might found or reform.
At once, this uneducated young maid of twenty-four set off on a tour of all the Poor Clare houses in France. She met with wide scorn and even violent opposition. In more than one case, she was accused of sorcery. Yet the tide began to turn. In all, she founded seventeen new convents and restored to many others the strict poverty of the primitive rule of St. Clare. Her reform also spread to a number of friaries, and many noble families sought her wisdom and counsel. She was sustained by a deep discipline of prayer, and every Friday she received a vision of Jesus on the cross. Like her master, St. Francis, she was drawn to animals, especially lambs and birds, which she easily tamed.
