Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoreggio was an Italian philosopher and theologian of the 13th century, belonging to the order of minor friars.
He is one of the greatest thinkers, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1588.
His work is characterized by the harmony between faith, reason, wisdom, mysticism and philosophy.
Saint Bonaventure exerted a profound influence on Christian culture through his writings and through his role as general minister of the Franciscan order and as cardinal of the Catholic Church.
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Biography
The biography of Saint Bonaventure reveals how he knew and followed Saint Francis from his youth, and how he dedicated his theological and pastoral work to spreading his message of peace and love.
Giovanni Fidanza was born in Civita di Bagnoregio, in the Viterbo area, between 1217 and 1221, son of Giovanni Fidanza, doctor, and Maria di Ritello. Little is known about his childhood, what is certainly known is that Giovanni was often ill as a child and in danger of death his parents turned to Saint Francis. One day as he passed through those parts, he came to bless and heal him. As he had finished his prayers, Saint Francis said to him in Latin: Good fortune in relation to the favorable outcome of his prayers for healing. The child recovered and, from that day, all the inhabitants of Bagnoregio called the child Bonaventura.
In 1235 when he was eighteen years old, he went to Paris to study and obtain the diploma of Master of Arts and felt the strong call of the Lord and entered the Order of Friars Minor and subsequently, in 1243, he entered the faculty of theology. His theological studies ended in 1253, when he became magister (i.e. "master") of theology and obtained the licentia docendi ("license to teach"). He thus became master regent in the Franciscan Study of Paris, incorporated into the University since Alexander of Hales became a Franciscan and brought the chair with him. The title, however, was conferred on him only in 1257, due to the hostility of the secular masters. His main teacher was Alexander of Hales, but he also had Giovanni de La Rochelle, Oddone Rigaldi and William of Melitona as teachers.
In 1250, the pope had authorized the chancellor of the University of Paris to grant teaching licenses to religious men of the mendicant orders, despite the fact that this conflicted with the right to hire new masters from the university corporation. In fact, in 1253, a strike broke out in which the members of the mendicant orders did not join. The university corporation required them to take an oath of obedience to the statutes, but they refused and were therefore excluded from teaching.
The exclusion also affected Bonaventura, who was master regent of the Franciscan teachers. The following year, the secular masters denounced to Pope Innocent IV the treatise of the Franciscan Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino, Introduction to the Eternal Gospel, in which the advent of the new age "of the Holy Spirit" and of a purely spiritual Church, founded on poverty like that prophesied by Joachim of Fiore in 1260. As a consequence of this the Pope - shortly before his death - canceled the privileges granted to the mendicant orders.
The new pontiff Pope Alexander IV condemned Gerard's book with a bull in 1255, however taking a position in favor of the mendicant orders and no longer placing limits on the number of chairs they could hold. The seculars refused these decisions, thus being excommunicated, also for the boycott they carried out against the courses held by the friars of the mendicant orders. All this despite the fact that the former had the support of the clergy and bishops, while the King of France Louis IX found himself supporting the positions of the beggars.
Bonaventure In 1257 he was recognized as magister and in the same year elected Minister General of the Franciscan Order, a position he held for seventeen years with commitment to the point of being defined as the second founder of the Order, starting from this date, taken up by the commitments of the new service, he put his studies aside and made various trips to Europe. His main objective was to preserve the unity of the Friars Minor, taking a position both against the spiritual current that accentuated the poverty of primitive Franciscanism, and against the worldly tendencies that arose within the Order. In the General Chapter of Narbonne in 1260 he contributed to defining the rules that were to guide the lives of its members: the Constitutions, called Narbonensi. In this Chapter, he was entrusted with the task of drafting a new biography of Saint Francis of Assisi which, entitled Legenda Maior, will become the official biography in the Order.
In 1250, the pope had authorized the chancellor of the University of Paris to grant teaching licenses to religious men of the mendicant orders, despite the fact that this conflicted with the right to hire new masters from the university corporation. In fact, in 1253, a strike broke out in which the members of the mendicant orders did not join. The university corporation required them to take an oath of obedience to the statutes, but they refused and were therefore excluded from teaching.
The exclusion also affected Bonaventura, who was master regent of the Franciscan teachers. The following year, the secular masters denounced to Pope Innocent IV the treatise of the Franciscan Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino, Introduction to the Eternal Gospel, in which the advent of the new age "of the Holy Spirit" and of a purely spiritual Church, founded on poverty like that prophesied by Joachim of Fiore in 1260. As a consequence of this the Pope - shortly before his death - canceled the privileges granted to the mendicant orders.
The new pontiff Pope Alexander IV condemned Gerard's book with a bull in 1255, however taking a position in favor of the mendicant orders and no longer placing limits on the number of chairs they could hold. The seculars refused these decisions, thus being excommunicated, also for the boycott they carried out against the courses held by the friars of the mendicant orders. All this despite the fact that the former had the support of the clergy and bishops, while the King of France Louis IX found himself supporting the positions of the beggars.
Bonaventure In 1257 was recognized as magister and in the same year elected General Minister of the Franciscan Order, a position he held for seventeen years with commitment to the point of being defined as the second founder of the Order, starting from this date, taken up by the commitments of the new service, he put his studies aside and made various trips to Europe. His main objective was to preserve the unity of the Friars Minor, taking a position both against the spiritual current that accentuated the poverty of primitive Franciscans, and against the worldly tendencies that arose within the Order. In the General Chapter of Narbonne in 1260 he contributed to defining the rules that were to guide the lives of its members: the Constitutions, called Narbonensi. In this Chapter, he was entrusted with the task of drafting a new biography of Saint Francis of Assisi which, entitled Legenda Maior, will become the official biography in the Order.
Bonaventure never abandoned his philosophical and theological studies, his studies were illuminated by a strong attraction for mysticism, to encounter faith to ascend to the Truth, which is God himself which cannot be reached without prayer and grace. He actually never abandoned Paris, between 1267 and 1269 he held a series of lectures there on the relationship between philosophy and theology and on the need to subordinate the first to the second; he left the city in 1270 but returned in 1273 to speak against the rampant Aristotelianism.
Pope Gregory he abandoned the leadership of the Order and prepared the work of the Council of Lyon in which he favored a rapprochement between the Latin and Greek Churches.
He died on 15 July 1274. The future Pope Innocent V celebrated the funeral of Cardinal Bonaventure, and was buried in the Franciscan church of Lyon. In 1434 the body was moved to a new church, dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi; the tomb was opened and his head was found in a perfect state of preservation: this fact facilitated his canonization, which took place by the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV on 14 April 1482; while on May 14, 1588 he was awarded the title of Doctor of the Church by Pope Sixtus V.
On 14 March 1490, following the reconnaissance of the saint's body in Lyon, a part of the saint's right arm was extracted and placed in a silver reliquary which the following year was taken to Bagnoregio, and in 1491 it was placed in the cathedral of Saint Nicholas. Today the "holy arm" is the largest of the remaining relics of Saint Bonaventure after the desecration of his tomb and the dispersion of his remains by the Huguenots in 1562. It is kept in Bagnoregio in the co-cathedral of Saint Nicholas. Over the years, some minor relics have been obtained from it.
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