Note: If joining “Saintly Influencers” for the first time today, please read the footnote, explaining its context, purpose, and aim.
The Age of Christendom spanned roughly six centuries of European history, basically A.D. 800 to 1400. The thirteenth century (the 1200s) was a particularly pivotal period within the age because of three influential mendicant orders that arose and transformed Christian Europe. Each order had a gifted leader whose work—along with the friars, religious sisters, and laity they formed as spiritual progeny—has influenced Christian culture in the west through both ecclesiastical reform and popular devotion. Quite simply, without the apostolic ministry of the mendicant orders, iconized by these three men, our experience of Catholic life would be quite different than it currently is.
Our first influencer was baptized Giovanni di Bernardone (A.D. 1181-1226). His mother was French, and his father was a successful silk merchant who had much business in France, which may be why he was commonly known as “Francesco.” As he grew into adulthood, he partook of the lavish lifestyle of his wealthy family. Yet, at a key moment in his life, he experienced a profound grace of conversion, which has been recounted frequently over the last eight centuries. From that moment of conversion, he repudiated his father’s wealth, much to the latter’s chagrin, and took up the life of mendicant poverty at the service of rebuilding the Lord’s house. Since then, he has been known to posterity as St. Francis of Assisi.
Francesco’s conversion, and the apostolic ministry incited by it, is the source of all the influence he has borne to the remainder of Christian history. There is, first and most notably, the establishment of the Order of Friars Minor, known commonly as the Franciscans. This religious order, with its several unique instantiations (Conventuals, Capuchins, Capuchin Friars of the Renewal, Third Order Regulars, Poor Clares, and Secular Franciscans, to name several), remains among the largest, most noticeable, and most noteworthy of orders. Among their ranks, Franciscans list Doctors of the Church, such as Anthony of Padua and Bonaventure; great mystics, such as Clare of Assisi; missionaries, such as Junipero Serra; and European royalty, such as Louis IX, King of France, and Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, both of whom professed vows in the Third Order.
St. Francis also left a popular spirituality, along with several particularly well-known prayers and devotions, as part of his heritage. Specifically, Francis exercised a devotion to created beauty as a mediator of God’s presence. It is from this devotion that we receive the Canticle of the Sun, in which the Troubadour from Assisi cried out, “Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.” Additionally, his Prayer for Peace has become a favorite of countless faithful, and it has been rendered as a worship hymn, at least in our own nation. And, of course, it seems that every Catholic parish in the western world hosts a Blessing of the Pets each year in early October near St. Francis’s feast day.
All this notwithstanding, there are two other, perhaps even greater reasons for Francesco’s influence, and they are both common, powerful devotions. A few years before his death, Francis developed a living replica of the Nativity scene, called a creche, which allowed him to preach powerfully about the birth of Our Lord. This was the beginning of the devotional practice of setting up Nativity scenes in towns and homes throughout Christendom. The other devotion that Francis popularized was Eucharistic Adoration. A firm believer that Jesus is truly present under the appearance of bread, Francis knew that sitting in the presence of the Eucharistic Lord could be a fruitful mode of prayer for individuals and for the Church as a whole.
The next influencer was Dominic de Guzmán (A.D. 1170-1221), a Spaniard and a contemporary of Francesco di Bernardone. (In fact, the two are known from historical sources to have met in Rome near the end of Dominic’s life.) Dominic was born into a pious, noble family. He was a student of theology and the arts, who always seemed to have an affinity for the poor and suffering. He was ordained to the priesthood at just 24 years old. Several years later, while traveling through France with his bishop, he developed a zeal for giving away the fruit of his prayerful contemplation through preaching. The mission of this “good and noble fighter,” as Jesus called him in a vision, led to the establishment of the Ordo Praedicatorum, the Order of Preachers, commonly known as the Dominicans.
The first mission of the order was the conversion of Albigensians in southern France, offering theological, doctrinal, and practical arguments against the dualism by which they lived. This emphasis on handing on the rich and beautiful truths of the Catholic Faith led to the quick expansion of the community, and at least a few of these mendicant friars took the mission into the universities. Some of the best-known Medieval scholastics were Dominicans: Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas at the top of the list. Catherine of Siena, a Dominican tertiary, also provided an example of laity influencing the life of the Church, as she exhorted Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome. Whether it was by preaching in towns and countryside, providing solid intellectual formation, or exhorting ecclesial and political leaders, Dominic and his spiritual sons and daughters have provided effective tools for the conversion and formation of all subsequent generations.
Perhaps the most recognizable influence Dominic had on posterity was his spread of the most identifiable and popular devotion in all of Christendom. In 1214, before the establishment of the Order of Preachers, Dominic was known to have received an apparition from the Blessed Mother during a period of prayer, in which she instructed him to use the Rosary as a devotion alongside the ministry of preaching. For centuries since, the Rosary has been one of the most common methods of putting the faithful in contact with the mysteries of Jesus’ life.
The last great influencer of this period emanates from the third mendicant order, the Carmelites. Simon Stock (A.D. 1165-1265) was a contemplative young English boy who committed to live as a hermit in the hollow trunk of an oak tree at twelve years old. Thus, he found that he had an affinity with the Carmelites, a community which had recently come to England after being driven out of the Holy Land by Saracen Muslims. He also spent several years in Rome, and then on the original Mount Carmel, when it was safe to return.
When he was more than eighty years old, Simon was elected General of the Carmelite order. During his leadership tenure, the Carmelites fully transitioned from a hermetical to a mendicant mode. This process was aided by the establishment of houses of formation at the great universities of Europe, which allowed for their mystical spirituality to spread throughout Europe. Such a movement within the order provided the formation of eminent spiritual teachers of Church history, such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Teresa Benedict of the Cross, all of whom combined mysticism with a deep intellectual life.
Like the saints highlighted above, St. Simon Stock’s influence extends to our own age through a popular devotion. It was a Carmelite practice during the Middle Ages for a friar to bestow his scapular (the piece of a friar’s habit that covers his shoulders) on a friend or benefactor. In 1251, St. Simon Stock was visited by the Blessed Mother and given a promise: “This shall be a privilege for you and all Carmelites, that anyone dying in this habit shall not suffer eternal fire.” The Carmelites wore brown habits, and so a fellowship of laypersons developed around the brown scapular. By about the sixteenth century, the scapulars had developed into the small scapulars we recognize today, and the devotion has continued among Catholics in the west.
So we see that these three men and their religious orders have borne an outsized impact on the last eight centuries, in theology and practical spirituality. History reveals that these men responded to God’s Providence in a way that revitalized nearly every aspect of Christian life in the Middle Ages, and their influence continues to this very day. In our own age, we are recipients of their influence by their presence in apostolates from media to education to healthcare to work with the poor. They continue to prove that the mode of operating used by Our Blessed Lord—communing first with the Heavenly Father and then ministering to His creatures—is fruitful in any age of history. We will do well to respond to their influence in kind.
[1]Learning about the lives of holy men and women is a common and helpful spiritual practice. But while we might take some time to consider saints in their historical contexts, it’s easy to look past the ways their lives and actions influence our own present culture. Saints are made within specific cultural, historical circumstances and, just as importantly, they have borne deep impact on this current age of history.
Thus, this series seeks to identify the saints from the history of our Church who have borne the greatest influence on our present culture, that is, the way we think about and experience the Christian life in our current era, and in our segment of geography (i.e., the West and, in particular, the United States). This series delineates Christian history into eight ages: the Apostolic Age (A.D. 35-100); the Early Patristic Age (A.D. 100-480); the Later Patristic Age (A.D. 480-800); the Age of Early Christendom (A.D. 800-1200); the Age of Later Christendom (A.D. 1200-1400); the Renaissance and Baroque Age (A.D. 1400-1660); the Modern Age (A.D. 1660-1900); and the Post-Modern Age (the twentieth century). Each essay within this series will examine a handful of saints who sought and found holiness within their historical epochs and who, in turn, have borne an outsized influence on the ways Catholic-Christians in the third millennium understand and live the Catholic Faith. These few in each essay are chosen from among many, many other saints whose influence could be included in this series as well.
The great hope is that learning these influences gives us inspiration and stamina as we seek to answer the call to holiness in the world and the culture of the twenty-first century.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
