Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM | Updates

The Little Church Where God Finds Us

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As the feast of the Portiuncula approaches each August 2, I find myself returning to the small chapel where Francis first gathered his brothers and where Clare stepped into the life of the Gospel. This year, I want to bring that memory home — not to Assisi, not to a congress hall, but to the cotidiano: the ordinary, unremarkable ground where most of us actually live our faith. What does a thirteenth‑century friar’s walk into a Sultan’s camp, or a papal gathering of religious leaders, have to do with your Tuesday? Your Wednesday? Or any other ordinary day? More than it first appears.

A Grace Small Enough to Fit a Life

The Portiuncula is not a cathedral. It is one of the small, ruined churches Francis rebuilt with his own hands, so modest that it now sits, almost shyly, inside the far grander basilica built around it. And yet it is the place where he first received the brothers and Clare into the Gospel way of minoritas. It is the little portion of land from which he sent the friars out two by two into the whole world.

The most consequential sending in Franciscan history did not happen from a place of power. It happened from a room barely large enough to hold twenty people in prayer.

This matters for how we imagine our own cotidiano. We tend to assume that the significant things — the things God cares about — happen elsewhere: in the dramatic decision, the public stand, the once‑in‑a‑lifetime encounter. The Portiuncula insists otherwise. The little church is where the sending began. Our little portions — our rooms, our kitchens, our commutes, our shift changes — are not the waiting room before the spiritual life. They are where it happens. Our cotidiano is where we encounter God and where God finds us.

Peacemakers, Not Soldiers

My original essay spent a long time undoing two famous paintings: Francis daring the Sultan’s holy men to an ordeal by fire, and Clare driving off attacking Saracens with the Eucharist raised like a mighty sword. Neither occurred that way.

What the historical record recounts is quieter and, I think, more useful for our purposes today. Hoping for martyrdom, Francis crossed into the Sultan’s camp not as a combatant but as a guest, dressed in a rough patched habit that resembled the robes of the Sufi holy men who had shaped the Sultan’s own spiritual formation. He was welcomed, listened to, and sent home alive — having neither converted the other nor been martyred. The only fire present was that of the Holy Spirit moving both men to listen to each other as brothers. Francis left the encounter alive and changed.

Clare, for her part, could not have physically driven anyone off. She was too frail and unable to stand. What the witnesses at her canonization describe is a woman who, with the Blessed Sacrament brought before her at the threshold of the refectory, lay before it and prayed not only for her sisters’ safety but, I want to believe, for the safety of the very people threatening them.

Neither of them fought. Both made peace, and both did so from a position of vulnerability rather than strength.

Our own cotidiano is full of Saracens: the neighbor whose politics alarm us, the relative we have stopped talking to, the friend who ghosts us, the coworker whose faith — or lack of it — we quietly judge. The temptation is always toward the dramatically painted version of the story: the ordeal by fire, the vindication. The Spirit of Assisi asks something less satisfying and more difficult: showing up in the room of the person we fear and praying for and with them rather than against them.

Living Quietly Among the Rest

After his return from Egypt, Francis wrote into his Rule of Life a two‑fold instruction for the brothers living among Muslims: first, to live simply and quietly as minores (second‑class persons), admitting to being Christian without argument or debate; only afterward, and only if the Spirit clearly inspired it, to preach at all.

The friars who were killed in Morocco a year later did the opposite. They argued, they insulted, and they died for it — a testimony less to holiness than to how quickly quiet witness curdles into contest and one‑upmanship.

This is an uncomfortable mirror for our own moment, saturated as it is with argument and division. So much of our daily discourse, online and off, rewards exactly the posture Francis warned against: winning the exchange rather than living the witness. The socio‑spiritual question worth sitting with is not what you would say to the people who trouble you, but whether you are willing to simply live faithfully among them first — and let speech guided by the Holy Spirit, if it comes at all, come later and rarely.

The Pardon That Needed No Battlefield

Here is the detail from the original essay I most want to recover for our cotidiano. Plenary indulgences in Francis’s day were, as a rule, earned by fighting in the Crusades or making huge donations to the Church. Francis asked Christ for something else entirely: that anyone who entered this one small chapel, confessed, and prayed for pardon would receive the same full remission — no battlefield required, no donation needed.

Miraculously, he got Rome to ratify it. He effectively made the entire economy of the Crusades’ grace obtainable by walking into a room the size of a bedroom and being honest before God. His was an anti‑war move and a move that put all social classes on an even praying field.

That is the socio‑spiritual heart of the Pardon of Assisi: grace was never rationed out only to the heroic or the violent or the wealthy. It was always available in the small, repeatable, unglamorous act. Confession. Prayer. Eucharist. Presence. Entering the little chapel wherever you happen to find it — which is to say, your actual life, your cotidiano.

¿Y qué? Where This Leaves Us

John Paul II, gathering religious leaders at Assisi in 1986, said something I return to often: that peace is built through a thousand small acts of daily living, and that in the ordinary way we treat the people around us, we are always already choosing for or against it.

That is the Spirit of Assisi translated into our cotidiano. Not a summit. Not a crusade, holy or otherwise. A thousand small choices, repeated, in spaces too modest to be painted by anyone.

So as the feast of the Portiuncula approaches, I am not asking you to travel to Assisi. I am asking where your own little chapel already is: the car before you walk into the house, the five minutes before the shift starts, the meal where the hard conversation keeps getting postponed.

Go in. Confess what needs confessing. Confess you are a sinner. Confess your faith in the Triune God. Pray for the well‑being of Pope Leo. Pray for the person you would rather not. Give Eucharistic thanks. Let pardon and well‑being (pax et bonum) be as available to you today as they were to a thirteenth‑century penitent walking into a rebuilt ruin outside Assisi.

¿Y qué? Now it is your cotidiano, and your turn to live the Spirit of Assisi.

Adapted from “Francis, Clare and the Ecumenical Spirit of Assisi,” One in Christ, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2012)

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Second-Class Brothers

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pietro di Bernardone was a prosperous cloth merchant in the Umbrian commune of Assisi. Proud of his commercial success, he traveled frequently to France in search of the finest textiles for his business. Like many merchants of the emerging merchant class, he trained his sons in the skills necessary for economic advancement: negotiation, accounting, and fluency in French. Despite his wealth, however, Pietro lacked one thing that money could not secure. He belonged to the minores, the merchant class, and he aspired to the social standing of the maiores, the noble elite.

He shared this ambition with his sons, especially his eldest, Giovanni, whom he might have affectionately called mio Franceschino—"my little Frenchman." History remembers Giovanni simply as Francesco or Francis of Assisi.

The society of thirteenth-century Assisi was marked by distinct social divisions. The maiores occupied the highest ranks of civic life and political influence. The minores were the second class comprised of merchants, artisans, and other free citizens who possessed economic resources but lacked noble status. Beneath both groups stood the miserabiles. These were the true lessers made up of lepers, outcasts, and the destitute, individuals who existed largely on the margins of society and civic recognition. Like many successful merchants seeking upward mobility, Pietro and his family desired entry into the ranks of the maiores. Francis initially pursued this aspiration through military service, hoping to distinguish himself and attain the status associated with the noble class. After two failed attempts his campaigns ended in disappointment. He failed miserably.

Where we are weak however, Christ is strong (Cf. 2 Cor 12:9). It was precisely through his experience of failure that Francis became open to a different vision. What had been a frustrated social ambition gave way to a profound evangelical conversion. The man who had sought to become a maiore came instead to embrace his identity as a minore. Significantly, when he named the brotherhood he founded, he chose the title Ordo Fratrum Minorum, the Order of Friars Minor. The name was neither accidental nor merely descriptive. It reflected a deliberate socio-spiritual choice on the part of Francis and his followers.

The traditional English rendering, "Friars Minor," is sometimes misinterpreted as "Lesser Brothers." Yet Francis and Clare did not understand minority as a statement of "spiritualized" humble inferiority. Rather, minority expressed a particular relationship to others. They stood in solidarity with those whom society regarded as lesser while remaining fully engaged with merchants, civic leaders, and nobles. Their vocation emerged from the social space between privilege and exclusion, between the upper classes and the no-class. By embracing the status of minores, the second-class, they were able to move freely among different social groups and serve as a point of connection between them.

This insight remains relevant for the Franciscan family today. Minority is not simply a personal virtue of humility; it is also a social and ecclesial stance. Life in this tradition calls for a position that neither seeks power nor withdraws from engagement. Instead, it enables the friar or sister to stand between groups, fostering relationships across social, economic, and cultural boundaries. Eight centuries after Francis, the Order's identity as Second-Class Brothers continues to challenge its members to act as a bridge between those who possess resources and those who lack them, between those with social standing and those who remain on the margins, knowing full well that bridges are meant to be walked on. The friars minor can bring the poor to the rich as brothers and sisters. As second-class brothers, the friars can leverage their privilege on behalf of the truly lesser ones, helping the powerful see the outcast not as a problem to be solved but as kin to be loved and embraced.

In this sense, the enduring significance of Franciscan minority lies not in being "lesser than" others, but in choosing a place from which reconciliation, service, and fellowship become possible. Francis, Clare, and the original community discovered that authentic greatness is found not in becoming a maiore, but in freely embracing their vocation as minori.

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Racism of Omission

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As a young man, I was introduced to the spiritual practice called the "examination of conscience." It is a good way to reflect on yourself and your life and improve it in line with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The examination calls us to consider the wrong we've done in thought, word, or deed. But it also calls us to consider our sins of omission, which is to say the good we could have done and didn't.

Back in 2011, I was listening to a friend complain about the plight of ethnic and racial minorities in the USA. I still remember the discrimination I lived through as a child in the Texas school system, which tried to X out our Latino/a and Mexican heritage, culture, and identity. We've come a long way, to be sure, in the struggle for human rights and equality, but as most of us know, we still have a long way to go. As my friend described her experience, it dawned on me that she had not experienced direct racism or discrimination, but rather she had been a victim of what I call racism of omission.

Racism of omission is everywhere, but as a Franciscan I especially see it in religious institutions. Often it is not so much what an institution does to or against a person of color (African American, Latino/a, Native American, Asian American, Middle Eastern...) as much as what it omits to do. For example, when I was in the seventh grade, I was finally able to go to a non-segregated school. I had been a bright student in the Mexican-American elementary school I attended and was used to being called on often. When I suddenly found myself in a classroom with "white" kids, I realized that the teachers would not call on the Latino/a kids. The teachers were not explicitly discriminating against us. They pretty much simply ignored us. Theirs, however, was an overt sin of omission. Racism of omission dictated that teachers prefer to support and encourage the white students. They were usually never mean to us or insulting of our origins; they simply did not give us the opportunity to show what we knew or could do.

Sadly, good Christian institutions like schools, parishes, and Church communities fall into racism of omission without ever really thinking about it. I would call them to practice a good examination of conscience and reflect not only on how they are overtly racist but on how they have practiced racism of omission. When attempting to make your institution more welcoming, consider what you could do to make it more welcoming to people of color. Is your bulletin only in English? Why isn't it in Spanish or Vietnamese as well, for example? When you invite guest speakers to your programs, are they always white men and women? Why don't you invite Lebanese, Nigerian, Brazilian, or other specialists from racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities? The answers to these questions will vary, and many of them are rationalizations and justifications for racism of omission.

More recently, our religious and educational institutions have pretended to be gender inclusive by referring to Latinos, Latinas, and Latines as LatinX, trading the gendered o, a, and e endings for an X. I, for one, resent that label and refuse to be X'ed out. Coming from a lifetime of having educators and others try to X out my Latinidad, I find LatinX troublesome. Many people and institutions adopt it without ever considering what it implies and how it affects Latino/a/es. Here the omission is no longer an oversight. It becomes a choice.

That is the difference worth naming as we mark the years since I first wrote this reflection in 2011. The racism of omission I saw in a seventh-grade classroom was, at least, unconscious, the fruit of habit and comfort rather than intention. What LatinX represents is the same omission but now dressed up as inclusion and chosen in plain sight. The examination of conscience must come to terms with both.

A cursory search today turns up several thousand pages using the phrase racism of omission. The reality it names is old. The naming is not. Carmen Nanko-Fernández's 2010 book Theologizing en Espanglish already credits me with the term, a year before I sat down to write this reflection, and I had been speaking of it in conversation and in presentations before that. Neomi DeAnda, a friend and fellow theologian, has spoken with me about this same reality, using the language of racial omission, or what she also calls the invisibility of race. She points to how mainstream discussions of race in the United States operate on a rigid Black-White binary, one that omits Latino/a/es and other ethnic and racial groups from the conversation entirely.

Sociologists have only recently caught up: Social Problems devoted a special issue to the concept in 2025, and related experimental work appeared in the Du Bois Review not long before that. As far as I can tell, in Latino/a/e theological circles and perhaps beyond, I may be the one who gave this reality its name. It seems the theologians were there first to address the issue; it is, after all, a sin, and sin requires a good examination of conscience in the movement of conversion.

The examination of conscience is a good practice for those who wish to improve their social and spiritual life. Reflecting on your institution's racism in what it thinks, says, does, or fails to do (cogitatione, verbo, opere, et omissióne) will help you bring racism of omission under control and, hopefully, to an end.

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Franciscan/Clarian Spirituality

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Thu, 2 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the product of several lessons, conferences and retreats I have shared with the Friars, the Poor Clares, Secular Franciscans and Franciscan Sisters. En conjunto with them I have developed and reflected on these priorities that I hope to turn into a book for Franciscan/Clarian formation. Click on title to go to the file.

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Mary's Prayer for the USA

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The USA marks 250 years on the Fourth of July this year, a milestone wrapped in flags, fireworks, and a familiar founding story. I confess I find myself uneasy with how easily "America" and "the USA" get treated as the same word, the same place, the same story. America is far older than 250 years. It carried peoples, nations, and ways of life long before 1776, and even before 1492. Nations come and go, and a nation's birthday is not the world's feast. Sitting with that distinction, I keep returning to a prayer older than either the USA or América: the Magnificat, the song of a poor teenager from an occupied land, María of Nazareth (Lk 1:46-55).

La Virgen María was a poor woman among an oppressed people, her land bent under the weight of Roman imperial power. In her cotidiano as a marginalized woman in an occupied land with an uncertain future, she did two things before God. First, she praised Adonai, the God of her ancestors. Echoing Miriam, the revolutionary sister of Moses; overshadowed by the Holy Spirit as the Ark of the New Covenant, carrying her unborn child within her womb, she lifted her gaze to God and proclaimed:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

For God looks on the lowliness of his servant,

henceforth all generations will call me blest.

The Almighty does great things for me,

and holy is his name.

She did not let the harshness of empire or her own poverty rob her of dignity or hope. Her body bore the weight of her time, but her soul sang the greatness of God. In this she was already faithful to the Reign her Son would proclaim; a reign measured in a very different register than empires, nations and anniversaries.

This fidelity to the reality of God’s Reign did not deny the sinful and oppressive reality in which she found herself and in which she would give birth to the Son of God. It led her to the second part of her prayer. In prayer, the pregnant Virgen María knew how to stand before God and to challenge him. With the tenderness of a strong woman, she issued a grateful demand:

God has mercy from age to age,

on those who fear him,

God shows might with his arm,

scattering the proud-hearted;

God casts the mighty from their thrones,

lifting up the lowly,

God fills the starving with good things,

sending the rich away empty.

God protects Israel, his servant,

remembering his mercy,

the mercy promised to our ancestors,

for Abraham and his children forever. (Beyond Piety, 52)

These are not gentle words. They are a lament that wants to know why mercy hasn't yet arrived in full and a demand that it does.

As the USA celebrates 250 years, María, daughter of an oppressed people, mother of a poor Son who would be executed by the empire of his day, gives voice to those still waiting at the margins of this nation's story: to the descendants of the people who were here long before any flag was planted, to migrants and refugees kept on the far side of walls and borders, to all whom a triumphant national narrative tends to leave out of the photograph.

And yet María does not only indict or condemn. She prays! She invites us to look into the eyes of God and find, even now, reason for hope; to refuse despair even as we refuse to look away from what is unjust.

María, madre de Jesús, invites and challenges us, on this anniversary, to hold both truths: gratitude for whatever genuine good these 250 years have brought, and an honest reckoning with a much older history this date does not capture. She calls us to scrutinize the maternal heart of God and to find the strength for a loving lucha. As mother of mercy, she calls us to a peaceful, persistent struggle for the rights of the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, the migrants and refugees, and the original peoples of this land, whose story is far older than the nation now marking its quarter‑millennium. With her faith and courage, let us pray:

God, your mercy is from age to age on those who fear you,

Show might with your arm, scattering the proud-hearted;

Cast the mighty from their thrones, lifting up the lowly,

Fill the starving with good things, sending the rich away empty-handed.

Protect Israel and all nations, remembering your mercy,

the mercy promised to our ancestors and their children forever.

As we celebrate, let us consecrate the whole world to God, and the USA to the Immaculate Virgen María, Mother of Mercy and Justice. Let us trust that she who sang of thrones overturned and the hungry filled will hold this nation, and this much older land, in her maternal heart where, like every mother, she holds her Son long after his birth.

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Felix Question

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 1985, as I was finishing my MDiv at the Catholic Theological Union, I was focused on writing an 85-page essay synthesizing everything I had absorbed over four years of theological and pastoral study. As I wrote, I would share what I was learning with my amigo Felix — a name that means happy. He would listen patiently as I went on and on about God, Mary, and the Saints, explaining pneumatology, ecclesiology, ethics, and spirituality. It helped me process my thoughts, and it felt good to share them with him.

Then one day Felix looked me straight in the eyes and asked, simply: "¿Y qué? So what?"

Dumbfounded, I fired back: "What do you mean, '¿Y qué?'"

He finished his question: "So what? How is the world a better place because you are studying theology? How is the world improved because you got an education?"

I have been haunted ever since by what I now call the Felix Question. It goes to the very heart of the Gospel message of Jesus Christ, and for us Christians, it can be asked of any education: So what? How is the world a better place because you studied business? Because you earned a degree in psychology? Because you got your PhD in physics?Jesus insisted that what we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do for and to him (Mt 25:40). He called us the salt of the earth and warned us not to lose our flavor (Mt 5:13). His own mission statement is nothing less than bringing good news to the poor, release to captives, sight to the blind, and liberation to the oppressed and marginalized (Lk 4:18–19); in other words, Jesus came to answer the Felix Question, to improve the world in which he found himself.

And what about us? How does our education feed the hungry, clothe the naked, set prisoners free, bring health to the infirm? Are our relationships improving at home, at work? Is at least one person's life better because of what we learned? Is our city a better place? Can our education bring peace, justice, and liberation to a world oppressed by pollution, war, terrorism, and poverty?

I have made Felix's question the heart of my Socio-Spiritual Method for the study of Christian Spirituality, inviting my students and me into a transformative social and spiritual retrieval of the Christian classics. Felix is still waiting for our answer. ]]>

The Study of Christian Spirituality: A Reflection by Fray Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Spirituality is the human search for what gives life meaning and, at the same time, draws us beyond ourselves into the service of the common good. It is carried by the human spirit. our corazón, that deep unity of body and soul within one person. For Christians, this inner movement is never solitary or self-made: it is awakened, guided, and brought to fulfillment by the Holy Spirit, who conforms us to Christ, directs us toward the glory of the Father, and opens us to the healing of neighbor and creation.

In this sense, spirituality is the art and sometimes the struggle of bringing body and soul into harmony, while discovering that such harmony is never meant to remain private. The great religious and philosophical traditions arise here as communal wisdom, widening the individual's horizon toward a larger memory, a larger voice, a larger Spirit. Christianity stands within this wide human family, yet it also makes a distinctive confession: that the Spirit of Jesus is not simply one guide among others, but the living divine breath who sustains our personal and communal striving, drawing all things into communion with God, one another, and the whole of creation.

Christian spirituality, then, can be described as the lived synthesis of our human religious seeking en conjunto with the life of Jesus the Christ, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father in the communion of saints. It is a harmony not only of interior life, but of relationships, vertical and horizontal, mystical and social, contemplative and active.

This is where the academic study of spirituality enters with both humility and a certain quiet fire.

As Mary Frohlich reminds us, spirituality is a self-implicating field: the scholar is never untouched by what is studied. What we study comforts and challenges us. A spiritual classic such as Augustine's Confessions, the writings of Francis and Clare, or Bonaventure’s contemplative ascent in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum does not remain safely on the page; it presses back upon the reader. Yet this implication is not only personal. If it is truly evangelical, it is also social. A “spiritual classic” is not limited to texts, but includes practices, artworks, institutions, persons, and movements that endure through time and continue to provoke conversion and deeper life in the Spirit in imitation of Christ to the glory of the Father.

Because spirituality is a human reality, its study naturally draws on many disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, and theology. Far from fragmenting the field, this variety reveals its depth: the human person is always already a meeting place of meanings and experiences.

Over time, I have found it helpful to approach any spiritual classic through five interwoven lenses of descriptive analysis: Context, Participants, Content, Process, and Aspirations; what my students have come to call CPCPA.

Context asks about the world in which a classic lives: its history, social tensions, geography and worldview.

Participants considers who is present and who is being formed: God, humanity, community, and the self, each in theological and human depth.

Content explores the sources of meaning and revelation, Scripture, certainly, but also nature and history, where the Word continues to echo beyond written text.

Process looks at the practices that shape transformation: virtues nurtured, vices resisted, and the rhythms of communal and personal formation.

Aspirations turn toward the horizon: what spiritual maturity looks like, what holiness tastes like, what kind of human being a tradition is calling forth.

Taken together, these lenses allow us to read with the whole human person not only with the mind, but with memory, imagination, emotion, feeling and lived experience. They weave together the personal, the academic, and the communal: what is happening in me, and what is happening among us.

And yet the goal is never simply analysis. A spiritual classic is not a specimen to be dissected but a living witness to be appropriated in transformative retrieval. The task is allowing the tradition to form the scholar, nourish the community, and serve the world.

For this reason, Christian scholarship in spirituality never proceeds without prayer. The same Spirit who inspired Scripture, who moved the saints, and who continues to stir hearts across history is invoked again, quietly and faithfully, before every act of research and reflection. The scholar asks, in effect, that the Spirit who inspired the text may also illuminate its interpretation.

In the end, spirituality is both science and art, discipline and devotion, talent and training: a way of reading reality so that the world itself might once again become prayer.

Or, with a touch of Franciscan simplicity, it is learning how to study the fire without forgetting it can warm, illumine, or burn.

And so, the work continues always with the quiet hope that understanding becomes wisdom, and wisdom becomes life. And that is why we study on our knees, even when the desk is piled up high with research.

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My next book

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I typed the last word.

After years of research and writing, Santa María: Priestly Mother of Mercy is complete—now it just has to get past the series editors. The book explores the Marian spirituality of El Conhorte, the 72-sermon collection of Sister Juana de la Cruz, a Franciscan mystic and abbess in early sixteenth-century Spain. Her sermons, preached across the liturgical year and often delivered in ecstasy, offer a theology of mercy and inclusivity marked by pastoral tenderness and theological depth.

At its center is a striking vision: Santa María as sacerdote grande, the great priestly mother of mercy. I argue that Juana’s Marian theology is distinctly Franciscan, pastorally rich, and remarkably ahead of its time.

This project feels especially timely, as Juana was beatified by Pope Francis in November 2024, and her five-hundred-year-old voice is only now being rediscovered. The book is forthcoming with Fordham University Press in the series Disruptive Cartographers: Doing Theology Latinamente.

Deo gratias.

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Reinterpreting Clare of Assisi: From Healer to Liberator

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Clare of Assisi is often remembered as the devoted disciple of Francis—the “planticella” who flourished in his shadow. Yet this familiar portrayal risks obscuring a more historically and theologically significant reality: Clare as a figure who not only received the Franciscan charism, but actively shaped its spiritual and ecclesial expression.

Recent developments in historical and Franciscan studies, particularly the recovery and critical translation of medieval sources, have made it possible to reassess her role. Clare now emerges as a subject in her own right; as a woman whose radical commitment to poverty and evangelical life constituted a subtle but real challenge to the social and ecclesial structures of her time. As such, she offers a model of Franciscan life not limited to cloistered women but relevant to Christians across vocations.

A key text in this reassessment is the Processo di Canonizzazione di Santa Chiara (Proc), discovered by fray Zeffirino Lazzeri, OFM, and published in the 1920s. The Processo provides a textured account of Clare’s life through the testimony of those who knew her. It depicts a woman of noble origin who deliberately relinquished her status as a maiore to live among the poor, embodying the evangelical logic of dispossession (sine proprio).

Attention to the language of the Processo is especially revealing. In many Spanish and English translations, the Umbrian Italian term liberazione is rendered as “healing.” While not incorrect, this choice narrows the semantic range of the original. A reading attentive to the umbro-Italian text suggests that Clare’s actions are consistently understood not merely as acts of healing, but as moments of liberation.

For example, sor Pacífica recounts that when several sisters fell ill, Clare made the sign of the cross over them, and “all were liberated” (Proc I,16). This terminology recurs throughout the testimonies: physical illness, psychological distress, demonic affliction, and even communal threats such as war are described in terms of liberation. The pattern suggests that Clare’s contemporaries perceived her not simply as a healer, but as a mediating presence through whom God’s liberating action became effective.

This raises an important theological question: how are we to interpret this liberating dimension of Clare’s spirituality?

Clare did not develop a systematic theology of liberation. Nevertheless, the Processo discloses a coherent forma vitae minorum, a spiritual configuration in which liberation is embodied rather than theorized. Her conversion may be read as a decisive sequela Christi in the form of an embrace of the minores and the poor, while her praxis manifests a constellation of interwoven elements: a contemplative worldview, a preferential option of poverty, a commitment to universal fraternity, a Eucharistic sense of mission, and ongoing formation in the sign of the cross. Taken together, these dimensions constitute a lived, Franciscan spirituality of liberation grounded not in abstract discourse but in an evangelical way of life.

To read Clare in this way is not to impose a modern framework anachronistically, but to allow her witness to enter into dialogue with contemporary theological concerns. As has been shown in the case of Francis by authors such as Leonardo Boff and Pedro de Anasagasti, the saints often disclose dimensions of the Gospel that remain perennially relevant, even as their historical expressions differ.

Clare of Assisi, read through the lens of liberation, does not simply belong to the past. She offers a theologically rich and historically grounded witness to the transformative power of the Gospel; a power that liberates and calls forth agents of liberation in every age.

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Spiritualogian

Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am a Latino, a Franciscan and a spiritualogian. Most people know what a Franciscan is, but very few have heard the term spiritualogian. I coined the word about 24 years ago, around 2002, to distinguish theologians who specialize in spirituality from those working more broadly in spiritual theology. As I wrote in Beyond Piety, "Spiritualogians are scholars dedicated to the advancement of the academic discipline known as spirituality" (p. 3).

To be clear, spiritualogians are Christian theologians, not anthropologists, psychologists, or sociologists. That distinction matters. Spirituality is studied across all of those fields, but each approaches it with different methods and goals. Spiritualogians are not primarily interested in analyzing spirituality as a social or psychological phenomenon. Our concern is the spiritual growth, formation, and development of the Christian faithful.

Michael Downey, in Understanding Christian Spirituality (1997), offers a helpful framework. He describes spirituality in three ways: first, as an existential reality grounded in personal experience; second, as communal, shaped by religious traditions and often embodied in saints and exemplary figures; and third, as a field that can be studied in an academic or scientific way.

Of course, not everyone is called to study spirituality academically. But some of us are. Among scholars, there is no full agreement on whether spirituality is best understood as a science or simply as an academic discipline. Often, the difference comes down to emphasis; some prefer the precision implied by "science," while others are more comfortable with the broader category of academic study.

I must admit, though, that words like "scientific" and "academic" can sometimes feel as if they drain the Spirit right out of spirituality. For that reason, I have increasingly begun to think of Christian spirituality as an art.

The Capuchin friar Ignacio Larrañaga, writing on prayer, describes prayer itself as an art. Like any art, it requires discipline, practice, and sustained study, but it is also, at its core, a gift, a grace. The same, I would argue, is true of spirituality itself.

There is an ancient insight from the Toltecs of Mexico: the true theologian is an artist. It is the artist who, through painting, sculpture, and music, can communicate something of God to the soul in ways that abstract theological writing often cannot. Talent plays a role; it cannot simply be taught. But it can be cultivated over time through sustained attention and practice.

And yet art is not opposed to study it is itself a discipline. Artists learn by studying the masters, by analyzing form, balance, color, and structure, so that their own work might deepen and mature. In a similar way, growth in the spiritual life depends on both grace and formation. One becomes a person of spiritual depth through learning, practice, and engagement with the great spiritual movements and figures of the past, as well as the living witnesses of the present.

So yes, spirituality can be studied. It has existential, communal, and academic dimensions. But more than anything, it is a self-implicating art. It is a kind of painting in which the artist does not stand outside the work, but places himself or herself onto the living canvas of the Gospel and tradition. In this way it becomes socio-implicating as well improving the world and building up the Reign of God.

Would that all of us might learn to become such artists!

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