When he became superior of the Franciscans, St. Bonaventure faced serious problems in his religious congregation. At the University of Paris, he fought hard against those who wanted to extinguish the mendicant order.
Newsroom (28/12/2023 08:30, Gaudium Press) St. Bonaventure, known as the “Seraphic Father”, had such a union of soul with St. Francis of Assisi, that he was considered the second Founder of the Order of Friars Minor. He wrote works in which he demonstrated his ardent love for God, reminding us of the first Choir of Angels. For these reasons, St. Bonaventure received the glorious title of “Seraphic Doctor”.
Prince of mystics
Among the many books he wrote, we will highlight a few in order to contemplate certain aspects of this virginal man’s soul.
In Italy, while visiting the convents of his Order to encourage the monks, St. Bonaventure climbed Mount Alverne in 1259, where St. Francis had received the stigmata of the Passion of Christ. There, filled with blessings, he stayed for a week and wrote “Itinerary of the Mind to God”, which “is one of the jewels of philosophical-theological and mystical literature, one of St. Bonaventure’s most typical and sublime books.”
This work, in which he teaches how to reach the Creator from creatures, is Mystical Theology because it moves, above all, the will and sensitivity to love God, while speculative theology especially moves the intellect towards this end.
Dr Plinio Corrêa da Oliveira said:
“Catholicism is essentially mystical. Mysticism consists in the intimate relations of the faithful with God, arising from the generosity with which He offers Himself and from the mercy with which He deigns to work in each soul, purifying and sanctifying it.”
In 1890, Pope Leo XIII declared: “After having reached the pinnacle of speculation, [St. Bonaventure] wrote about mystical theology with such perfection that the most able considered him the prince of mystics.“
Combating the errors of Joachim of Fiore
In his lectures at the University of Paris, St. Bonaventure gave very clear expositions on the highest themes of Catholic Doctrine. He also firmly fought the enemies of the Church.
One day, in front of all the masters and students, he fought a battle against an Averroist professor, “erecting a great monument to Catholic truth.” Averroes (1126-1198) was an Arab philosopher who claimed that the world was eternal, denied the immortality of the soul and defended pantheism. He was also a philosopher of the Church.
In 1273, St. Bonaventure gave 23 lectures at the University of Paris on the six days of Creation – compiled in the book Hexaemeron – in which he teaches “the most sublime truths of speculative and mystical theology”, in order to train students and warn them against the errors spread by Joachim of Fiore (1130-1202), abbot of a Cistercian monastery in Calabria in southern Italy.
According to Fiore, history is divided into three eras: that of the Father, that of the Son and that of the Holy Spirit. This will be the “epoch of the reconciliation of men and religions”. The hierarchical Church will give way to the Church of the Spirit, “detached from the old structures.”
In 1957, Fr. Joseph Ratzinger – the future Benedict XVI – presented a thesis entitled “St. Bonaventure’s Theology of History” in order to obtain a professorship at the Faculty of Theology in Munich, Germany.
Ratzinger states that St. Bonaventure rejected the plan to establish a “pneumatological and prophetic Church of the new poor”, as Joachim’s followers wanted.
And today, the ideological poison produced by Fiore has penetrated sectors of the Church, as Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira explained:
There are “currents of theologians and canonists who aim to transform the noble and bony rigidity of the ecclesiastical structure, as Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted it and twenty centuries of religious life have magnificently modelled it, into a cartilaginous, soft and amorphous tissue, of dioceses and parishes without defined territorial circumscriptions, of religious groups in which firm canonical authority is gradually being replaced by the rise of more or less Pentecostalist ‘prophets’, who themselves are similar to the shamans of structural-tribalism, with whose figures they will end up being confused. Just as the structuralist tribe-cell will necessarily be confused with the progressive-Pentecostalist parish or diocese”.
“It has often happened in the Church that, when the ideal of poverty is strongly advocated, some exaggerate it and turn, like Protestants, against the pomp of the Church.”
Thus, for example, shortly after the death of St. Francis of Assisi, some Franciscans gave rise to the heresy called the Fraticelli, which was communist, opposed to private property, to all honour and pomp, and to all the brilliance of civilization.[10]
Joachim’s errors caused very serious damage among the Franciscans. In 1257, St. Bonaventure had left his lectures at the University of Paris to take up the post of Superior of the Order of Friars Minor.
His predecessor, John of Parma, had been removed because he defended Fiore’s theses and wanted to transform the Order according to the abbot’s conceptions. He led a faction of Franciscans, who were called spiritual and defended the “Church of the poor”, announced by Fiore. They later gave rise to the heresy of the Fraticelli.
Celestine V, elected pope at the age of 85 in July 1294, authorized the Spirituals to disassociate themselves from the Order of Friars Minor and found another community, which came to be called the Fraticelli. Various issues arose and he resigned on 13 December of the same year.
On 24 December 1294, Boniface VIII took over the pontificate and cancelled all the concessions made by Celestine. The fraticelli revolted and declared that Boniface VIII was not a legitimate pope and that the supreme power of the Church would remain in their hands until the Church was reformed.
Some fraticelli claimed that certain impure acts did not contradict the Sixth Commandment, and they favoured the community of goods because, they said, private property was “the fruit of sin and human corruption.”
John XXII took over the papacy in 1316 and extinguished the association of the fraticelli because its members had fallen into heresy. As they represented a danger to temporal society, the civil authorities condemned four of them to the stake and one to life imprisonment.
By Paulo Francisco Martos
With Files From ‘Notions of Church History’
Compiled by Sandra Chisholm
