A curious claim from Augustine Thompson’s new bio of St. Francis

The galley for Augustine Thompson, O.P.’s new biography of Francis of Assisi arrived the other day. I am reviewing the book (Francis of Assisi: A New Biography; Cornell University Press, April 2012) for America.

It is a curious book right from the start, as Thompson claims, from page one of the Introduction, to be the first person writing in English (he points to only one to have done this before him in Italian) who has sought to uncover the real, historical Francis behind the legends. He writes: “This life is the first sustained attempt in English to treat these medieval sources for Francis in a consistently, sometimes ruthlessly, critical manner.” An odd claim, certainly, if you consider that Paul Sabatier claimed to have been the first to do the same (although he was writing in French), more than a century ago.

Review of Ian Ker’s Chesterton bio

I wish that I could link you to my full review, published in the January 30, 2012 issue of America, but here it is and you have to be a print subscriber to read the whole thing…!

Nice comments from Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR

Paraclete Press just shared with me a great letter that they received from Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, congratulating them on the new edition of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, which I recently compiled and translated, and they published this past fall. “I am delighted with this beautiful contribution to the literature of St. Francis,” he wrote. Nice!

Torturing the World’s First Megachurch Pastor

The world’s first “megachurch” – defined as a church with weekly worship attendance of 2,000 or more, a charismatic founder and leader, a top down authority structure, a tendency to draw members away from other churches, and sustained power and influence in a community – did not originate in 1950s America. Instead, by this definition, the first megachurch sprouted in fifteenth century Florence. It was called San Marco and was led by a fiery preacher and friar named Girolamo Savonarola.

Savonarola was an Italian Catholic priest, a member of the Dominican Order, and he ruled Florence for four years, from 1494 until just before his death in 1498. He made Florence a republic, a theocracy governed by the laws of Savonarola, which he defined through his sermons at mass. He claimed that God revealed the truth to him, that he was God’s appointed prophet, and the people of Florence could not argue with God.

If you’ve seen the Showtime series, The Borgias, with actor Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI, you have some idea of what Savonarola was preaching about and against. He built his megachurch and influence decrying the corruption of the Church itself. This pope kept mistresses, openly fathered children despite his vow of chastity, oversaw a thoroughly corrupt papal curia, and gave God’s blessing to the Spanish government to enslave peoples abroad.

So, Savonarola had some good points to make. But he also made sodomy a crime punishable by death. And he called for the infamous “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which took place on February 7, 1497 when Savonarola and his followers burned all sorts of household objects that Savonarola declared to be paths to sin: mirrors, cosmetics, playing cards, sculptures that showed accurate human anatomy, and certain books, including poetry.

After a few years of this, Pope Alexander VI had had enough. Excommunicating Savonarola had not succeeded in shutting him up. And so, from Rome, the Pope wrote to leaders in Florence saying that something had to be done about Savonarola. He convinced them to have their leader arrested.

Now, all of these maneuverings reek with lust and power. No one was blameless. They were all – how shall I say it? Bad. But Alexander VI did ask a decent question of Savonarola, one that the people who followed his every word from the pulpit had not. Basically, it was this: You claim to be divinely inspired, a prophet of God, who is only communicating to your congregation what God has told you to say. Is that true?

They tortured him in Florence, steps away from where Savonarola used to rule the city. The method was called la corde, the rope. The person’s hands were tied behind his back with one end of the rope, which was then fed through a pulley high above his head into the ceiling, so that when they pulled down on the other end of the rope it would raise one’s arms backwards over the head. Usually, arms would break.

Savonarola was raised off his feet three times during his week of torture – at times when his interrogators believed that he was being less than revealing in answering their questions. On one other occasion, they raised his arms with the rope without him leaving his feet. Even this must have hurt. Indeed, one of his arms was broken, and then he answered their questions. 

            What did he confess during this time? Donald Weinstein, a professor emeritus of Italian history at the University of Arizona, and author of a new biography titled Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet, summarizes it this way:

“He had pretended to divine revelation, deceiving the many who believed in him; his motives were glory, reputation, and influence; his prophetic apostolate was thus based on a lie.”

 A few days later, he confessed also to lying about experiencing divine visions, including a famous one where he told the people of Florence that God had showed him how God’s sword was pointing down from heaven at their city, poised to destroy it, if they did not heed Savonarola’s teachings.

Now, I abhor torture. I am against it in every instance. But I wonder what would be revealed if every one of us who write, preach, or teach others about what God says, what God wants, and who God is (starting with me), were forced to really fess up and speak for ourselves, and not God.

A great way to discover Francis of Assisi

The Little Flowers of Saint Francis tells the story of St. Francis and his earliest companions—the men and women of the early Franciscan movement. They are teaching tales, intended to motivate the reader toward holiness. There is never a question as to the sanctity of the subject of these tales; they are not the subject of objective history. They fit historically into the period of writings about St. Francis that began with St. Bonaventure’s Major Legend, or Life of St. Francis (finished in 1263), telling the details of his life while explaining the many-faceted ways of his unusual sanctity. For example, it was in Bonaventure that we first heard a story, probably of dubious foundation in actual fact, that a simple Assisan man used to lay down his coat in the road for Francis Bernardone to walk on as he passed by, when he was still a young boy. Today’s modern reader cannot help but sense some mythmaking in tales such as these, whether they appear in Bonaventure’s Life of Francis, or in The Little Flowers. One of the great Franciscan scholars of a century ago, Father Cuthbert, explains this best of all: “Now the writer of the Fioretti has no thought of driving anybody; he sets the brethren before us as one who would say, ‘Look and see the beauty of their lives and withhold your admiration, if you can!’”

The characters in the stories of The Little Flowers are the closest of friends, working together as comrades, living together as family. The Italian words frate and fratello are close cousins. Both can mean “brother,” although frate is a religious brother (or friar) and fratello generally indicates a biological brother. The nature of these tales is that the two meanings of brother tend to conflate.

There are 53 chapters, most of them quite short. I find these stories the best of all introductions to the life and spirit of Francis of Assisi. If you’d like to get started with a good new translation and presentation of The Little Flowers, try this edition.