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.

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.

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.

I was only able to mention in passing the marvelous exhibit of paintings by Tagore currently at The Asia Society in Manhattan. He came to visual art late in life (in 1924 at the age of 63) and, to those who have read the poems and the short stories, the paintings bring everything together. Tagore’s spiritual vision, often dark, always full of mystery, is all there. Go and see this exhibit if you can. It leaves NYC in early January and re-emerges at The Art Insitute of Chicago on January 25, 2012.

The paintings are full of birds, and geometric shapes, and faces. They are intentionally one-dimensional. Some clearly originated in doodles, others appear to have been carefully executed according to plan.

Some of my favorites:

*Scene with Nine Figures (these titles are not Tagore’s; he never titled his visual art) — looks like Job and his friends, or a group of desert fathers, or a bunch of sadhus by the seaside.

*Man and Woman Against a Dark Background — is, in contrast to Scene with Nine Figures, exclusively human, without any reference to religious reference points. It seems to communicate a major theme in Tagore’s visual art: the dark side of human relationships, which can be frightening, alienating, even dangerous.

There are many paintings of women’s faces and many of them look like the Virgin Mary, or nearly any peasant Indian woman wearing a sari or veil.

And then there are many paintings of men’s faces, often wearing turbans, and bearded like Christ — or like Tagore himself. I found myself often wondering, staring at these dark creations, what and who the artist was contemplating with his brush.

My friend, Dave, feels alienated and alone this time of year. He is single, and just the word, “single,” he thinks, sounds incomplete. The company party is rough. All of the other managers are married, or at least coupled, and he feels at odds especially when they go out of their way to make him feel included. Dave also has to figure out what he’ll do or where he’ll go on Thanksgiving and Christmas days—something that many a married person hasn’t had to consider for years.

Can it be that the story of Advent and Christmas holds less meaning for the single, separated, and divorced? I don’t think so – not if we look at the facts. What would it mean if the Holy Family—the way that Christian tradition refers to Mary, Joseph, and Jesus—represented something quite different from today’s “ideal” family? Let’s take the biblical characters out of the crèche and imagine the real circumstances of their lives. What if they were actually examples of what we might call today a non-traditional, or even, broken, family? The truth is, today’s single-parent, multi-generational, dysfunctional, non-traditional families are as much a mirror of the family of Jesus as are homes with a Norman Rockwell or Frank Capra husband and wife with two-and-a-half kids.

Look at what we know from the account in the Gospel of Luke: Mary was pregnant and unwed; the father of her child was not the man to whom she was betrothed; and Joseph’s role is blurry at best. Joseph does not even appear to be the holy child’s father until together with Mary they are heading from Nazareth to Bethlehem, Joseph’s hometown, for the census. Even then the text is unclear on Joseph’s role: “He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son.” (Luke 2:5-7; NRSV) Her child. Her firstborn son. Mary sounds a lot like what we would call a single mom. And Joseph sounds like a man who has yet to adopt his wife’s child. Only when bringing Jesus up to the Temple does the text for the first time use a plural pronoun, “they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.” (Luke 2:22)

Mary, it seems, was much stronger and more independent than the crèche figures ever communicate. After the flight from Herod into Egypt, Joseph makes no appearances in Matthew’s gospel. There’s no mention of him at all in either Mark or John. And in Luke, the last mentions of Joseph come when Jesus was twelve years old and staying behind in Jerusalem to talk with the teachers, and then a brief mention when Jesus’ ancestry is chronicled after his baptism. It appears to be Mary, and only Mary, who tutored the boy Jesus, raised him, and then later, watched him die with the courage of a woman at her son’s execution.

So when you look at the crèche this year, try considering that the Holy Family was not ideal. None of our families are.

Beside Peter, supporting and corrupting him, was Charles II of Anjou, the ingratiating King of Naples, who kept this hermit pope on a tight leash.

And then beside both of them was Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, one of the eleven electors who picked Peter as pope. Born as Benedetto, the son of Gaetani, he was a true Roman, high-born into a prominent family. Trained as a lawyer, Gaetani became a member of the papal curia at the age of twenty-nine. For the next thirty years, he gained a reputation as a legate who could represent the Holy See in confronting heresy and spiritual rebellion in places like England and France. A skilled canon lawyer, he would become the trusted, conniving advisor who helped Pope Celestine V resign from office – only to himself take the Chair eleven days later.

Theirs is the story I tell in The Pope Who Quit: A True Medieval Tale of Mystery, Death, and Salvation, coming March 6, 2012 from Image Books.

[W]hen a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world…. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.