St. Bonaventure

Who they were

Bonaventure entered the Franciscans a generation after Francis and rose to become, at thirty six, minister general of an order tearing itself apart between rigorists and relaxers. His twenty year governance, holding the movement together with such wisdom that history calls him its second founder, is the quiet half of his greatness.

The loud half is the theology. A Paris master alongside his friend Thomas Aquinas, he wrote The Journey of the Mind into God on Francis's own mountain of La Verna: a map of the ascent to God through creation, the soul, and above the mind's ceiling, where knowledge hands off to love. His standing rule, that learning must end in devotion or it has ended nowhere, is why the Church calls him the Seraphic Doctor and pairs him forever with the Angelic one. The tradition that the cardinals' legates found him washing dishes when they brought his red hat, and were told to hang it on a tree till he finished, is the beloved tradition it sounds like. He died during the Council of Lyons in 1274, weeks after Aquinas died travelling to the same council.

Why people turn to St. Bonaventure

Students and scholars whose faith has gone dry in the library, for whom his prescription is the handoff to love. And everyone administering a fragile, quarrelling institution.

How to ask their intercession

After study, one decade with the books closed, which was his own sequence. Administrators can ask for the second founder grace: holding a thing together without breaking either side.