March 25, 2009

Books on Sts. Patrick and Francis confirm radical Christian lives

By Nancy Hartnagel, Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS)—Though they lived 750 actual years and cultural light-years apart, St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Francis of Assisi, Italy, shared a calling: They lived radical Christian lives because they believed God asked them to.

These two major Catholic saints are the subjects of new books.

“Ireland’s Saint: The Essential Biography of St. Patrick” is a new edition of John Bagnell Bury’s 1905 biography, “The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History.” Bury was a Protestant Irish historian and scholar of the Greek and Roman empires. His book was regarded as the final word on St. Patrick for the first half of the 20th century.

Editor Jon M. Sweeney has added throughout the text numerous sidebars that provide information, opinions and sometimes corrections from more recent historians. One note, for example, explains that the Dalriadans and Picts mentioned often by Bury are tribal peoples in the north of Ireland and central to northern Scotland, respectively.

One of the key changes Sweeney made was to the structure of Bury’s work, moving his summary chapter on the saint’s place in history from the back to the front of the book. Since the remaining chapters put flesh on the bones of Patrick’s mission, this was helpful, signaling in brief what readers could expect to find in more detail.

In Bury’s account, Patrick did three things in Ireland: “He organized the Christianity which already existed. He converted kingdoms which were still pagan, especially in the west. And he brought Ireland into connection with the church of the (Roman) Empire, making Ireland formally part of universal Christendom.”

Sweeney’s Patrick is very much Bury’s Patrick, a humble, prayerful man who believes he has been called by God to missionary work in the still largely pagan island where he was enslaved as a youth and who toils faithfully for 30 years, circa 432-461, despite severe hardships, repeated dangers and not much support or guidance from Rome.

Bury made this assessment of Patrick: “The man who wrote the ‘Confession’ and the ‘Letter Against Coroticus’ had strength of will, energy of action, resolution without overconfidence, and the capacity for resisting pressure from others. ... Perhaps most important, he possessed practical qualities that were essential for carrying through the task that he had been divinely inspired to fulfill.”

In “A Mended and Broken Heart: The Life and Love of Francis of Assisi,” author Wendy Murray, formerly a senior writer for Christianity Today, asserts that a traditionally overlooked aspect of the story of the founder of the Order of Friars Minor, or Franciscans, is that his relationship with St. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the female arm of the order, the Poor Clares, was rooted in love.

“This love, in turn, evolved into mutual renunciation as each pursued their individual life as penitent religious. This book asserts that their renounced physical love ultimately defined the inner landscape of their devotional lives,” Murray writes in the preface.

Though Murray does not, and really cannot, prove this premise, she has crafted a very engaging history of the time as well as compact bios of Francis and Clare. They lived from the late 1100s into the 1200s, a time of danger both in Italy, with constant warring between communes and kingdoms, and internationally, with the Crusades dominating two centuries of Mediterranean politics.

There are other vivid sketches, of friars who collaborated with and succeeded Francis, and of the popes, the emperors and a sultan with whom he interacted. To supplement her text, Murray fills more than 40 pages with maps, a glossary, source material and explanatory notes.

But Francis is the star. Murray recounts familiar details—his playboy youth, renunciation of family, foundation of a new mendicant order and embrace of physical suffering, including the stigmata.

But she also describes the Francis who was brought to trial for stealing from his own father and whose yearlong imprisonment as a POW turned his Round-Table fascination with knighthood into a commitment to nonviolence, even as he participated in the Fifth Crusade. Here is the Francis who preached naked in solidarity with Christ’s humiliation on the cross and who battled his own Franciscan brothers over his more severe rule to govern their communal life.

That Francis and Clare may have considered marrying each other is an interesting idea. However, their shared story that can be documented shows a lifelong interdependence. As Murray says, “To know Francis truly one must also know Clare.”

Readers will find in these biographies no warm and fuzzy images of Patrick and Francis, but portraits of such unwavering Christian saints that their contemporaries “canonized” them even before they died.

Nancy Hartnagel is wire editor at Catholic News Service.