A Circular Letter
On St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Our Celestial Confrere
Newly Proclaimed Doctor of the Universal Church
Fr. Clement of Milwaukee
Minister General
of the Friars Minor of St. Francis, Capuchin
To all the Fathers and Brothers of our Order, greetings and peace.
Our Lord, “the guide of wisdom and the director of the wise” (Wis. 7, 15), has deigned to grant our prayerful wish, expressed twelve years ago at the conclusion of a circular letter on the sanctity and the learning of St. Lawrence of Brindisi, where we wrote: “We hope and pray to God, that we may live to see the fruit of our labor, that is, that Lawrence, already resplendent with the crown of the saints, may shortly be adorned with the garland of the doctors of the Church, as outstanding scholars and academicians have requested of the Church.”[1]
The Lord has now graciously responded to our prayerful desires, since the Supreme Pontiff, John XXIII, now happily reigning, but a few months after ascending the throne of Peter, has issued an apostolic letter on March 19, 1959, declaring our illustrious and holy confrere, Lawrence of Brindisi, a Doctor of the Universal Church. Circumstances of such a nature surrounded this declaration as to make it plainly evident, that it was not just a fortuitous happening, but rather one planned by Divine Providence for the fulfillment of urgent needs of the Church, of Christendom, of all society.
First of all, it must not be considered a mere accident, that the eminently doctrinal work of St. Lawrence should have been given acknowledgment and publicity by that pope, who, before ascending the papal throne, was the highly beloved and scholarly patriarch of Venice and as such the metropolitan of the Venetian province. For St. Lawrence, though born in Brindisi in Apulia, was brought to Venice as a boy, in that city he was reared to religious, pious living; there in our Venetian province he received the habit of our Order and made his seminary studies; there he was ordained to the priesthood, taught theology, and ruled the province as provincial. From this city, too, he went forth, exulting like a giant to cover the highways and byways of Italy and all Europe in faithful fulfillment of the weighty mission committed to him by God for the welfare of his people. In the Venetian province, too, his literary works were preserved in manuscript and they have now been published by the fathers of that same province in a critical edition of fifteen volumes, and so the excellent treatises of Lawrence in the field of Mariology, theology and biblical studies have now been given to the world.
Our age has been called the Marian age; first, because of the overwhelming trend toward Marian studies and the progress made therein, and the resultant growth in devotion to the Blessed Mother Mary; then, too, because of the definition of the dogma of her Assumption into heaven and the recent introduction of the feast of Mary, the Queen; then, too, because of her frequent apparitions in different parts of the world; then, too, because of the extraordinarily solemn observances of the 100th anniversary of the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1954) and of the apparitions of Lourdes (1958).
But when speaking of the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of love and devotion to her we can by no means pass over the name of St. Lawrence of Brindisi; for in his life as well as in his writings he proved himself an exceptional devotee of the Blessed Virgin. For anyone who has read his life knows full well that Lawrence was a most loving child of Mary, an incomparable preacher of her privileges and her praises and a fervent promoter of devotion to her. Upon reading his Mariale leading Mariologists of our day do not hesitate to say that few men who have written on the subject of the Blessed Virgin have written so well as, none better than, St. Lawrence of Brindisi, and that he was the greatest Marian Doctor of his time and not the least among those of all times; for in praise of Mary it would be difficult to find language more fluent and unctuous than that of Lawrence.
His Mariale i s truly a Marian poem, the most beautiful, I should say, and the most comprehensive ever written these two thousand years since the beginning of the Christian era. For, whatever pertains to the Virgin Mary in the sacred scriptures, in theology, in tradition, in the writings of the Fathers, in the liturgy he gathers up, touches up and expands in a fervid phraseology all his own – seeming almost inspired from on high. He enters into, develops and extols the privileges of the Mother of God and all the singular features of her greatness. He glorifies her Immaculate Conception and her Assumption, body and soul, into heaven with sublime words of praise.
Now, if it be true that we could scarcely imagine a Mariology more comprehensive, and above all, more solid, more complete, or more subtle than that of St. Lawrence of Brindisi; if it be true that this wonderful Marian work, so deservedly prized and praised by both the theologians and the sacred orators, will prove a highly efficacious means toward consummating the triumph of the Blessed Mother in these critical times, that is, toward that glorification of her, as decreed by the magisterium of the Church in this Marian age in the midst of the splendors of the Lourdes centenary; if all this be true, then we must be led to the belief that the Mother of God herself must have desired the name of her ardent lofty minstrel, heretofore unknown to most of the faithful, to be associated with her in her glory.
As for us, the brethren of St. Lawrence and the continuators of his apostolate, it behooves us and is proper for us before all others to interest ourselves in and to bind ourselves to make a study of his Marian doctrine, to attain to a full understanding of it and so to spread it among the faithful, that we may con- tribute our part to the triumph of Mary and to the salvation of mankind, floundering about in the deadly errors of our times.
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July 22nd of this year is the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of St. Lawrence, an event that should be celebrated with a solemnity becoming a man so great. Who would fail to see in this happy coincidence of the declaration of his doctorate and this anniversary the workings of Divine Providence, intending to show forth to all the world the greatness of our saint and to make known and extol his learning and his doctrine? To us it seems to be the will of God, that present-day society, infected by the foul cancer of materialism, should be reminded of and again imbued with the teachings of the Brindisian, doctrines which enabled him to strengthen the faith of his own contemporaries and to uncover the heresies, aimed at undermining the foundation not only of the Catholic faith but also of sound philosophy and of civic life, and threatening ever more gaping wounds on the mystical body of Christ.
It is well known and generally conceded, that the pernicious errors that infect modern society, and which have reached out even into the fields of theology, philosophy, sociology and of political and economic science, derive from those which divided and tore asunder Christendom in the 16th and 17th centuries, the very heresies, that is, against which Lawrence in his day inveighed with fiery pen and tongue. From this it is apparent how truly Lawrence can be called a man of our age in his life, in his spirit, in his apostolate, in his writings, so replete with the fundamentals of genuine Catholic doctrine, which has ever been able and is able still to put to flight all error and to confute the adversaries of truth.
The system of humanism, so called, by inducing disharmony between reason and faith, between philosophy and theology, between civil and ecclesiastical authority, undermined the very foundation of society, civil and religious. Al this paved the way and presented the opportunity for Luther, the founder of Protestantism, to disseminate new and accumulating errors and to pry away a large section of the Catholic population from the solid rock of the Apostolic See. For, by denying the primacy of Peter and his successors, by abolishing the priesthood, by rousing a diabolical hatred against the Church and her visible head and the hierarchy generally, by granting free interpretation of the Scriptures, by admitting the supremacy of civil and temporal society over the religious and spiritual, all this of necessity led to the most baleful errors, such as the absolute power of rulers, illuminism, pantheism, positivism, and finally to most abominable materialism, denying God Himself and the whole supernatural order, and reducing man, created, redeemed and sanctified for eternal happiness in heaven, to the low level of brute creation. Thus it has come to pass that, while the enemies of God seek to eradicate all religious and supernatural life, we have come to witness and, indeed, to take active part in the life and death struggle that is waging between light and darkness, between good and evil, between the spiritual and the material, between God and Satan.
As to the ultimate outcome of this struggle we need have not the least doubt. Even now our Lord gives us the assurance: “Have confidence; I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16, 33). Victory always was and always will be God’s. But in this warfare, we, the sons of him who proclaimed himself the herald of the great King, must be the bravest warriors of them all, and make an effective contribution toward that victory, even as St. Lawrence did in his day.
But whence did our Brindisian draw that wealth of learning that enabled him so stoutly, by word of mouth and pen, to confute and refute the errors of his times? Mostly from assiduous reading of the Sacred Scriptures and meditating upon them, especially the Holy Gospels of our Lord Jesus Christ, those same sacred Books, indeed, which the reformers claimed they had rediscovered for the people, and which they misused for the dissemination of their errors. Lawrence was in all truth an evangelical preacher. The gospel was the principal subject matter and a characteristic note of his sermons. After preaching the gospel and explaining it over and over again, he still always found new interpretations and new practical applications of it to life and answers to all questions there, as nine volumes of his works clearly show. And the fruits of his multiple apostolate, which he realized in so many parts of Europe, flowed especially from the fact, that always and everywhere he proclaimed the gospel message to the faithful, to the Jews, to the heretics and to those in high places.
When he was ordered by the Supreme Pontiffs to preach to the Jews he not only learned the oriental languages, he also gathered and studied a great number of scripture commentaries, dating from the earliest centuries down to his own times, and thus acquired such a knowledge of sacred literature, that even the Jews called him “an ark of the sacred books,” and “a living bible.”
When he was sent to Bohemia to defend the faith against the inroads of the Protestants, although he was so deeply versed in the theological disciplines, he still was bent upon making a deep study of all the books that had been published in favor of and against the Lutheran heresy, so that he might the more readily detect and the more forcefully refute the errors of Protestantism.
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Again, full of the spirit of counsel and fortitude, he undertook onerous missions to the rulers of peoples in the interest of justice and peace among the European nations and for the welfare of the populace, undergoing severe difficulties and fighting many a bitter battle; for which reason he endeavored to acquaint himself with all the religious, political and social questions of his day. With a body weakened by austerities and suffering the agonies of gout, he covered a great part of Europe, almost always barefoot, until the day of his death, which overtook him far from his homeland, in distant Lisbon, where he had been acting as a legate, pleading for justice and freedom for an afflicted, oppressed people.
In our day, too, men are struggling for unity and harmony among the free nations, for the conservation of peace and liberty in the world. To this sublime end the Church has always been bending all effort and solicitude even unto the present Supreme Pontiff, John XXIII. For on January 25th of this year, in the papal chapel of the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, he, in keeping with the centuries-old tradition of the Church, announced an Ecumenical Council to meet the present problems of the Christian world, a council, that would serve not only for the building up of the faithful but also as an invitation to our separated brethren to find a way of unity of faith, so ardently wished for and desired by so many men in all parts of the world. Now the whole lifework of St. Lawrence was nothing other than one continuous, intensive apostolate for harmony in justice and peace among all the nations of Europe and for the return of our dissident brethren to unity with the one, holy, Catholic, apostolic, Roman Church.
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So Holy Mother Church has now publicly and authoritatively placed this brother of ours among her Doctors. She sets him before us as a perfect exemplar and teacher of the life, the spirit, doctrine, and the apostolate, whose footsteps we should follow and whose work we should continue. And we can and must carry on his work, because of the very fact that we are Friars Minor Capuchin; because even today we move among people afflicted with so many errors; because, on account of our particular manner of life we are reverently looked upon as men of the people – Fratres populares – and so have the happy gift of mingling with all classes of society, especially among the working people, and exercising the apostolate among them. Let us, then, capture the spirit of St. Lawrence; let us emulate his virtues; let us equip ourselves with the armor of his zeal and learning, in order that we may repeat the wonders of his apostolate, especially among those of lowlier conditions, who are more readily misled by the false prophets who hold forth a promise of a happy life on earth and deny the eternal one in heaven.
But we must convince ourselves that the secret of any truly efficacious apostolate, as St. Lawrence himself taught and demonstrated, consists in the interior life, in intimate union with God. For, if we are to lead others to an understanding and a love of the gospel, we ourselves must appear as a living, practical gospel in the eyes of the world. If we would impart Christ to others, our own heart must be filled with Christ. The fruits of the apostolate will be more plentiful or more sparse according as the spiritual life of the apostle himself is more intense or more remiss. Who was ever engaged in more various and distracting activities than was St. Lawrence? As we read his biography and note his manifold labors, it would appear that he had very little time left indeed to look after himself and to lead a sheltered life in the solitude of the cloister. But at the same time it is apparent that he lived withdrawn in the cell of his heart, intimately united with God, that he zealously observed the seraphic rule and the constitutions of the Order, from which he never wished to be exempted, and that he was thus enabled to perform such outstanding work as to be the admiration of all and to attain the heights of sanctity. Surely, it is no exaggeration to say that few men indeed have succeeded so well as St. Lawrence in combining the depths of interior life and the ineffable joys of the contemplative life with the sublime charismatic gifts and with such varied and manifold activities of life.
Thus it has come to pass that, as we look back over the past three and a half centuries, we Friars Minor Capuchin find that his figure towers above all the members of our family, however illustrious they may have been by reason of holiness or doctrine or other endowments, as can clearly be seen from the history of the Order, from the biographies published down through the times, and from the artistic representations of him. Hence it is not strange, then, when Our predecessors in office founded the International College in Rome, where our young men were to be trained in higher studies and in the Franciscan spirit, they should choose to place it under the patronage of St. Lawrence of Brindisi and so name it.
It could rightly be said, that St. Lawrence unites in his person all that is distinguished and glorious in the whole Seraphic Order founded by St. Francis. For, like St. Bonaventure, he was an incomparable preacher of the faith, a devoted champion of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ardent in his devotion to the Blessed Eucharist, a perfect examplar for superiors; like St. Anthony of Padua and St. Bernardine of Siena, he was a powerful preacher in word and in deed; like St. John of Capistrano and St. James of Picena he was tireless in defense of the faith against heresy; as a trusted papal legate he handled the most delicate political negotiations, he was a most astute adviser of Christian princes in their government of the people and in their protection of the Faith.
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Let us, then, beloved fathers and brothers, rejoice and give boundless, heartfelt thanks to God for the new distinction with which he has deigned to honor our Order; after the example of St. Lawrence, let us prove our gratitude especially in this, that as time goes on we render more and more faithful service to God and to His Church and that we strive to spread the kingdom of Christ far and wide. For, vain would be all our glorifying, vain all our rejoicing and exulting over our confrere now listed among the doctors of the Church unless we bend every effort to imitate him and to emulate his holiness of life, his studiousness of doctrine and his zeal in the apostolate. If St. Lawrence is set up as an example to all the faithful, especially now that his feast has been extended to the universal Church, how much more does this apply to us Capuchins, who have taken up the same life, who profess the same rule, who wear the same habit, who are governed by the same regulations? It is always in place, but especially on this occasion, to recall those words of St. Augustine: “They (the saints) do not need our feasting of them; they are rejoicing with the angels in heaven. But they do rejoice with us, not when we honor them but when we imitate them…. To honor them without imitating them is nothing more than false flattery… This is the only meaning of this festivity; there is no other.”[2]
We furthermore suggest that this happy event, reflecting so great honor upon our Order, should be noted everywhere throughout the world by appropriate celebrations, by arranging sacred functions at which sermons should be preached on the new Doctor, by setting up public discussion and study groups and meetings of learned men; by writing books, commentaries and articles in our periodicals, and by any other means that would serve to make known the life of our saint, his accomplishments, his written works, his apostolate, the immortal merits he acquired on behalf of the Church and of her faithful, and to give them the greatest possible publicity.
And now, dearly beloved sons in the Lord, as we congratulate you and rejoice with you and thank God together with you, accept the seraphic blessing, which we impart to you, one and all, with paternal love.
Given at Rome, in our General Curia, April 16, 1959, on the feast of the Solemn Commemoration of Our Holy Father, St. Francis.
Fr. Clement of Milwaukee
Minister General