Angelina, who was raised in a noble family, married the count of Civitella when she was fifteen. Two years later, her husband died, and Angelina inherited his title and castle. Straightaway, she put on the habit of a Franciscan tertiary and gathered her female attendants into a religious community. Together they began to travel throughout the region, calling sinners to conversion and extolling the virtues of virginity. So effective were her paeans to virginity that she was deemed a threat to civil order. Placed under arrest, she was denounced as a witch (because of her sway over young girls) and a heretic (because of her supposed rejection of marriage). Yet, when she was brought before King Ladislas of Naples, who was fully prepared to have her burned, she mounted an effective defense. “If I have taught or practiced error,” she said, “I am prepared to suffer the appropriate punishment.” With that she drew back her cloak to reveal burning embers, hidden within. The king was sufficiently impressed that he spared her the worst punishment. Still, he exiled her from the kingdom.
On pilgrimage to Assisi, Angelina received a vision that she should found an enclosed monastery of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis in Foligno. In 1397, with support from the local bishop, she accomplished this plan. Other communities gradually affiliated with her convent, and they were recognized as a new congregation in 1428. Angelina died on July 14, 1435. She was beatified in 1825.
Francis Solano was born in the Andalusian town of Montilla, where he joined the Franciscans in 1569. While ministering in southern Spain, he cared for the victims of plague, a most perilous undertaking. At one point, he himself nearly died of the disease. Though he wished to be assigned to Africa, in 1589 Francis was sent to Peru. Along the way, a fierce storm drove his ship onto a sandbar close to shore. While the rest of the crew abandoned shop, leaving behind a cargo of African slaves, Francis chose to remain behind. Three days later, when the weather cleared, the survivors were rescued.
For his achievements over the next twenty years, Francis became known as the “Wonderworker of the New World.” Venturing into the remote region of Tucaman, in present day Argentina and Paraguay, he went out to meet the Indians, announcing his arrival with the sound of his violin. He was gifted in learning the indigenous languages – so much so that he was reputed to have a “gift of tongues.” But though his gentleness won the Indians’ affection, his efforts to protect them from Spanish exploitation had only mixed results.
Later he was assigned to Lima. There, his preaching against corruption and injustice caused such an uproar that his superiors pleaded with him to moderate his speech. He died on July 14, 1610, having uttered his last words: “Glory be to God.” He was canonized in 1726.
St. Birgitta of Sweden was one of the great women of the fourteenth century: the wife of a nobleman and the mother of eight children; a nun and founder of monasteries as well as a religious order; a pilgrim who crossed continents and seas; a mystic who filled many volumes with accounts of her visions and colloquies with Christ; and a prophet who called kings to justice and popes to live up to their sacred duties.
She experienced her first vision as a child, when she saw an altar, and seated above it a woman who said, “Come, Birgitta,” and offered her a crown. Some years later she had another vision of Christ hanging on the cross. When she asked him who had treated him this way, he answered, “They who despise me and spurn my love for them.” From that point, she felt herself mystically united with Christ and determined to serve him in every way.
At fourteen, she married a prince named Ulf. It was a happy marriage that lasted twenty-eight years. Whenever she could, she would visit the hospitals, binding the wounds of the patients with her own hands. She often brought along her young children, desiring that they learn “at an early age to serve God and his poor and sick.” Eventually, fed up with the frivolity of court life, both she and Ulf embarked on a long pilgrimage that took them all the way to Compostela in Spain. On the return trip, Ulf died, and Birgitta sought consolation in becoming a member of the Third Order of St. Francis.
Before long, she received another vision, this time instructing her to found a monastery in Sweden. After she had accomplished this, she went on yet another pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she again received many visions of the events of Christ’s life, before finally settling in Rome for the last twenty years of her life. Wherever she traveled, she spoke out against slavery, injustice, and threats to peace. Confronting the corruption she encountered in the Eternal City, she cried out, “O Rome, Rome, be converted and turn to the Lord thy God.” She excoriated the pope for abandoning Rome for Avignon, and at one point even denounced him as “a murderer of souls, worse than Lucifer, more unjust than Pilate, more merciless than Judas.” Despite her frankness, he approved the rule of her new order, the Birgittines.
St. Birgitta died on July 12, 1373. A triumphal procession, led by her daughter, accompanied her body across Europe and back to her abbey in Vadstena, where she was laid to rest.
St. Elizabeth of Portugal was the daughter of the king of Aragon. At twelve, she married King Denis of Portugal, a profligate man, who tolerated his wife’s piety while making no secret of his own infidelities. Elizabeth bore him two children, a son and a daughter. Her son, Alfonso, would later come close to open rebellion against his neglectful father. For her role in effecting a reconciliation between father and son, Elizabeth became popularly known as “the Peacemaker.” But her peacemaking talents were exercised on an even greater level when she personally prevented a war between Portugal and Castile.
Elizabeth lived up to her public responsibilities as queen. But the greater part of her time was spent in prayer and a variety of charitable projects. She established hospitals, orphanages, and religious houses throughout the kingdom, as well as halfway homes for “fallen women.” “God made me queen so that I may serve others,” she noted.
When her husband died, she put on the habit of Franciscan tertiary and lived for her eleven remaining years in one of the monasteries she had helped to found. She emerged occasionally to intercede between rival monarchs – with most of whom she bore some relation. Even as she lived she was credited with miracles, and she was revered by the people of Portugal.
Elizabeth died in 1336 and was canonized three centuries later by Pope Urban VIII, who named her the Patroness of Peace.
Ramon Lull was born in Majorca in 1232, the son of a Catalan military chief. His early life was spent in the frivolity of court life. At the age of thirty, however, prompted by a recurrent vision of Jesus on the cross, he underwent a dramatic and total conversion. Afterward, he gave up all his property to his family and the poor and determined to devote his life to God’s cause. In particular, he felt called to bring the Gospel to the Muslims – a vocation, he was sure, that would cost him his life.
He prepared for this mission with zeal. For over a decade he pursued studies in Latin and Arabic and immersed himself – to a remarkable degree – in the literature of Muslim religion and philosophy. He believed that a missionary must be fully knowledgeable about the beliefs of those he wished to convert.
At this point, the primary locus of Christian-Muslim encounter had been the battlefields of the Crusades. To most Christians of Lull’s day, the Muslims were irredeemable heretics whose slaughter brought glory to God. The Crusades were not even ostensibly concerned with the conversion of Muslims; their object was simply to drive the ‘infidels’ from the Holy Land, a sacred cause that justified any means. (A bright exception was St. Francis of Assisi.)
At sixty, Lull himself became a Franciscan tertiary. His vision never advanced so far as to reject all recourse to force in the service of the Gospel. But in his respect for the intelligence and good faith of non-Christians and his belief in the need to encounter them on their own terms he introduced a remarkably progressive path for this time.
Lull travelled throughout Europe lobbying and seeking sponsors for his projects, which included a series of missionary colleges where the best preachers of the world could study the languages and cultures of the non-Christians world. Such plans came to naught. He also wrote several hundred major works, as well as mystical poetry and allegorical romances about the Christian life. A Christian troubadour in the Franciscan mold, he has been called “the Catalan Dante.”
Lull made three trips to North Africa. On the first and second occasions, he was quickly arrested and deported. However, on his third trip in Tunisia he was accosted by a mob on June 29, 1316, and stoned to death. He had foreseen this fate from the outset of his vocation. As he wrote, “Missionaries will convert the world by preaching, but also through the shedding of tears and blood and with great labor, and through a bitter death.”
