THE WOLF OF GUBBIO

St Francis had the great respect towards nature he accepted every animal and birds as his brothers and sisters. Once in the town call Gubbio there was a large and ferocious wolf which was harming and killing to the people of that town. People told Francis of their sad plight. The saint took pity on them and resolved to meet the wolf and try, if he could, to convert him. Then St Francis soon reached to the place where the animal was known. At that instant, Francis traced the hallowed sign of the cross over it and called aloud : come here, brother Wolf , come I order you in the name of Christ , do no harm neither me nor anyone the Wolf immediately shut his head down and laid down at his feet .       

Solemnity: The most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

                Dear brothers and sisters; today we celebrate the solemnity of the most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

            In the first reading of today, taken from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds his people as they are about to enter the Promised Land, that, they must not forget God’s goodness to them in the past. He also exhorts them to remember that they are God’s own people, who need to nourish themselves on His Word.

            In the second reading of today, taken from the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, St. Paul narrates the divine institution of the Holy Eucharist by our Lord and invites his readers to generously commemorate this mystery until he comes again. 

            And the Gospel Passage of today is taken from St. Luke which narrates Jesus’ miracle of the multiplications of the loaves. This miracle points to the heavenly banquet where everything will be in plenty because of God’s generosity.

            Therefore dear brothers and sisters, as we have assembled here for today’s Holy Eucharistic celebration, let us ask pardon from our merciful father, for all our wrong doings and pray for his blessing, so that the Lord will grant us his wisdom and insight by which we will understand the value of Holy Eucharist.

                                   MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE

Francis was the first founder of an order whose adherents could, if they so wished, go among the saracents and other believers’. Thus right from the time of Francis himself there was an enormous missionary expansion, especially eastward in moslem countries for at least a century. Afterwards, though there was a slight decline for some time, it was known to pick up all they were sponsored by the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Naturally the capuchin who steered this aspect strongly gave great importance to the missionary vocation of the reform, even though the actual possibilities of sending missionaries st the time were rather few. The order in fact could organize some missionary enterprise only from end of the 16th century. All the same one cannot but put on record the wonderful missionary enterprise of the capuchins. For when church founded the ‘propaganda fide’ in 1622 for the ‘evangelization of the peoples’, it was the capuchins who were its first main forces. Just a decade thereafter in 1632 they were seen already crossing lands and ocean and arriving at the shores of our own mother-land India. Gradually the field of missionary activity was amply widened to spread everywhere. It saw great expansion, beginning from the Christian orient to all the continents of Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania. Truly the missionary endeavors of the capuchin have been immense and their missionary zeal anything but extinguishable.

                                          APOSTOLIC MINISTRY

The type of religious life that was begun by Francis was somewhat new in the sense it included preaching as an exigency of the commitment for the faithful reproduction of the life Christ and his disciples. Francis was however convinced that all preaching worth its name could only\y be the result of an intensely lived gospel from of life. Still history is the witness that he was not totally averse to a certain academic preparation. Accordingly the capuchins, while seeing it as an indispensable necessity, if not the only reason, did make room for the introduction of studies, after a certain initial hesitation. But they never failed to alternate preaching and study together with times of intense work, especially manual and deep quiet and peaceful retreat, just as Francis had strongly enjoined. For all that, the capuchin were wholly as unusual band of preachers, as we already made mention of. It was their contemplative experience, evangelical earnestness, visible austerity, fraternal concern, ready pastoral service, absence of oratorical ornamentation, untied to the ‘biblical formation’ that rendered them uniquely acceptable and convincingly effective preachers for the learned as well as the unlearned. 

All kinds of ministry and preaching were cultivated by the capuchins, in particular, the so called ‘popular mission’, preached always by a group of brothers while living and witnessing to the evangelical ideals of brotherhood. Still that which gave real power to their words, was at all times, as we said, their lived witness to the gospel way of life and the service that flowed there from. They preached more by their deeds than words, as demanded by Francis. To the early initiatives of fraternal assistance to victims of hungry and plague- stricken were gradually added many others, such as aid to sick in the hospitals and to the prisoners in jails, installations of store houses and other institutions destined to project the poor and the abandoned, service to the labor class against the usurence, etc. even today a capuchin is not to be different; he maintains a balance between contemplative life and apostolic ministry, as already directed by the capuchin constitutions of 1536; he is one who preached more by his deeds than his words. But there is one thing that a capuchin Franciscan cannot afford to forget; all Franciscan capuchin ministries are nothing other than an overflowing of the Christ-like love others. “It is the witness of an evangelical life that wins acceptance for his words”. 

                    PENANCE AND ASCETICISM

Francis’ life of penance derived partly from his being wedded to holy lady poverty and partly from his own evangelical experience of being always in need of conversion and spiritual renewal, accomplished in complete openness to ‘the working of the spirit of the lord’. Penance and asceticism were meaningful in view of the eschatological life of be witnessed to. Accordingly the capuchins cherished ‘the cheerful spirit of penance in an austere life’ as forming part and parcel of their own reformed life. They strove continually for their own conversion and that of others so that all may be ‘conformed to the crucified and risen Christ’. The concrete life of penance, valued by the capuchins did of course vary, but it always include a radical but liberating and joyful austerity in all things, especially board and lodge, utensils and furniture, dress and travel. For the same, their life had the obvious effect of leaving a deep impression on the people they were in contact with. The external aspect of a capuchin with his bare feet, rude habit, rough beard, tonsured head, hands inside his sleeves and mortified eyed, humble and retiring deportment was always a continual and enduring sermon, understood and accepted not only by the simple people but even the ecclesiastical and civic aristocracy. For the latter, it was as well a powerful message of clear prophetic denunciation of an anti-gospel value.

                                     POVERTY AND HUMILITY

Francis was convinced that such brotherhood as he envisaged could not be practically lived without another importance gospel prerequisite, namely ‘minoritas’ (minority or being a lesser brother) which he concretized in his own person with the double virtues of ‘poverty and humility’. If the povererllo of Assisi, renowned for no other reason than a veritable re-creation of the ‘gospel form of life’, had the ‘most high poverty’ as the main hallmark of his brotherhood, he had indeed is reason. For in the spirituality of Francis, poverty did go along with her sister holy humility; but still neither of them was an end in itself. They both together were merely means to charity. So as far as the early capuchins were concerned, poverty together with humility was not only their primacy evangelical option in the following of Christ but also ‘the great liberator of the mind for the love of God and neighbor” i.e. to put into practice fraternal love and ‘provide of the best disposition for true prayer’. We would understand this better if we bear in mind that ‘the poor are not always visible’. For we all suffer ‘structure amnesia’. (Remember the rich man of the gospel and the poor man, Lazarus). It is only the poor who recognize the poor. When a section of the brothers and sisters are out of our perspective, we also do not truly ‘pray’. Prayer is possible only in total solidarity with all God’s people. 

             Poverty and humility therefore had a strong emphasis in content as well as witness among the capuchin, all the exaggerated extremes of a return to st. Francis notwithstanding. The capuchins did not own anything. They lived by work and when it was insufficient they faith gladly had “recourse to the table of the Lord” Putting thus their faith daily to the test with regard to God’s providence and the goodness of the people. True to the spirit of Francis, their dwellings were constructed with ‘vile materials’ and were known to be fit only for ‘pilgrims and strangers’. Their churches were as small and simple as not attract people to them, because as the constitutions said “we do a greater good by preaching in churches belonging to others…” to experience better the virtue of non-appropriation, the houses and lands where the brothers lived had different immediate owners who could well deny them the permission to continue to live if they so willed. The brothers would then naturally go joyfully to other places “with the blessing of God to do penance”, as Francis had written in the testament. More importantly, the brothers could leave them, whenever necessary, without undergoing in the least the usual pangs of attachment or pain.

  The voluntary poverty of the capuchin entailed a further natural consequence, in that it fostered an all-importance and unflinching solidarity with the poor. In the general chapter of 1535 itself, the capuchins had in this respect laid down two heroic resolutions: one, the obligation to help the poor in time of need and shortage; second, and the obligation of assistance to those afflicted in time of epidemics. Obviously these two realities were rather frequent at that time and those who ordinary suffered most were the people. In our own day these heroic prescriptions have all but disappeared from our constitutions. Still capuchin conscience, inured as it is for centuries to be always sensitive to these duties towards the poor cannot but cherish ‘a preferential option and love for the poor’.

1.     UNIVERSAL BROTHER-SISTERHOOD:

Form the beginning Francis was aware that he was founding an order that was wholly different from all the previous monastic orders. His call was specifically to replicate ‘a life lived according to the pattern of the gospel’ and his gospel life was expressly a witness to ‘fraternitas’ or brotherhood, which was its basic focus. To Francis fraternity meant being ‘members of one household’ and a brotherhood of evangelical witness that was accomplished first within the fraternity itself, and then extended to others and even to the entire creation. It was truly a ‘universal brother-sisterhood’. Keeping the model of Christ and the apostles before him, Francis greatly desired to form his brotherhood for mutual service by the simple acceptance and plain co-penetration of each and every member in the everyday life of the fraternity. Such a fraternity of brothers therefore could admit differences but never any of the inequalities, on account of either their origin or their intellectual capacity, either the office fulfilled in the internal structure of the order or even the ordination to sacred orders. The ordained brothers were in truth specifically understood as ‘the ministers and servants’ of all the brothers, in the strict gospel sense of the words.

              It is precisely this type of fraternity that the first capuchins tried to re-establish from within. Verily theirs was a brotherhood of voluntary poor men, free and happy, fraternal zing and loving, open and simple. The simplicity was all the more visible in as much as there was a total leveling of the brothers, according to the pattern of love and faith. Famous theologians, renowned preachers, persons of high nobility, all lived in brotherly equality within the fraternities, no seldom governed by a simple brother. In order to guarantee at all times this atmosphere of  fraternal intimacy and evangelical vibration, the constitutions laid it down that numerically the fraternities be neither too big and crowded nor too small and be individualistic, becoming thereby less vital. The first chronicles of the order do indeed give us a beautiful and picturesque account of this simple fraternal life of the capuchins, almost worthy of the times of st. Francis himself. It is therefore importance to bear in mind that ‘fraternal life is always and everywhere to be basic requirement of the formation process’ and for the individual fraternities to be capable of carrying out the task of formation, they should draw inspiration and encouragement from the primary fraternity, that is provincial fraternity.