Learning about Secular Franciscans who have gone before us reminds me of how many wonderful ways there are to live our Franciscan vocation. On October 26, Franciscans commemorate one of our number: Blessed Contardo Ferrini, who lived in Italy and died in 1902 at only age 42. Contardo was not poor or especially humble in a social sense; he was a respected scholar of Roman law from a prosperous family. He did not have mystical visions or undertake heroic acts of service or charity. Living as a celibate layman, he became a Secular Franciscan in his mid-twenties.
But there was something special about Contardo; in the words of Pope Pius XII at the time of his beatification, Contardo “gave an emphatic ‘yes’ to the possibility of holiness” during the times in which he lived. He shared with St. Francis a great love of nature—in Contardo’s case, of hiking in the mountains. Contardo wrote these beautiful words: “Nature lives by the breath of God’s omnipotence, smiles in its joy of him, hides from his wrath—yet greets him, eternally young, with the smile of its own youth.”
Another wonderful and completely different example of Secular Franciscan saintliness is Servant of God Julia Greeley, who entered the OFS at about the time that Contardo died in the early 20th century. Julia was an enslaved African American woman born in Missouri, who had lost an eye in her childhood due to a whipping. She moved to Colorado at some point after being freed and became a domestic worker for wealthy white families. What made Julia extraordinary was that she used all the money she made to help those less fortunate than herself—in fact, she gave away her own burial plot to a man whose body was to have been laid in a pauper’s grave. Her case for sainthood is under investigation.
What did a highly educated Italian man from a well-off family and a barely educated American woman who lived all her life in poverty have in common? They cultivated 4 holiness in ordinary conditions and inspired others by their goodness. And what do they have in common with us? They looked at the Poor Man of Assisi and saw that he could teach them how to follow Christ in their time.
May we also find our own uniquely Franciscan way to live in holiness in our times—to be blessed and a blessing to all we meet.