"I am also convinced that there is not a vocations crisis where there are consecrated people able to transmit the beauty of consecration with their own witness. You are called to this, dear formators. This is your ministry, your mission. You are not only 'masters;' you are above all witnesses to following Christ in your particular charism. And this is done if you rediscover every day the joy of being disciples of Jesus. From this joy comes the requirement to care always for your own personal formation, a formation that begins with a strong friendship with the only master.."
  

NEW YORK - Fr. Michael Della Penna, OFM, has published a book titled The Crucified Knight: The Spiritual Odyssey of St. Francis of Assisi According to Henry of Avranches.The book is based on the work that Michael did for the completion of his doctoral degree.

Below if the book's preface, written by Murray Bodo, OFM:

Crucified Knight.  A knight crucified from within.  What a stunning image that is!  But such was Francis of Assisi whose whole life was that of a spiritual knight fighting his own demons, overcoming whatever would keep him from being a spiritual advocate and protector of those rejected or neglected by society, whatever would keep him from calling everything in creation his brother and sister.  Such is the St. Francis who emerges in the pages of the second oldest hagiographical text about St. Francis, the so-called Versified Life of St. Francis by Henry of Avranches, renamed by Michael Della Penna, The The Crucified Knight, The Spiritual Odyssey of St. Francis of Assisi according to Henry of Avranches.

This epic poem, written in 1229/1220, was what I'd thought of as a mere versifying of Thomas of Celano's First Life of Francis.  I thought that, not because I'd read it, but because that's what most scholars said it was.  How wrong they and I were!  What Della Penna has done for us, through his deep and extensive research, is to show how this early writing is an epic poem in its own right.  And even though it follows the outline and original story written by Brother Thomas of Celano in 1227/1228, it has its own themes, its own hagiographical insights, and its own merits as a literary work.

I am amazed at how skillfully Della Penna has inter-woven sources medieval and modern to open up this extraordinary poem.  I have lived with his text for some time now, and for the first time, I see what Henry of Avranches was really about.  His whole book is based on an early dream of Francis, the son of the merchant Bernardone, in which he saw a room whose walls were filled with shields, and when he wondered whose shields they were, he heard a voice saying that they were for Francis and his followers.  And so Francis went to war twice in pursuit of that dream of knighthood, the first time ending up a prisoner of war in a Perugian prison, and the second time being told by God to return home to Assisi where it would be shown him what he was to do which, ultimately, was to repair God's house from within.

Even as Francis worked among the lepers and walked in the footsteps of the Crucified Christ, he never gave up his original dream of knighthood.  He became a Knight of Christ, ending up in Della Penna's words, a "Crucified Knight."  Everything in Henry's book-long poem advances that theme, as in Henry's icon of the stigmata of St. Francis:

O soldier of Christ, you alone, Francis, bore the scars

Of Life-triumph-in-death; hid in your soul when living,

And displayed in your flesh when dying.

And again Henry writes,

So does Jesus' passion remain implanted in his heart,

So imprinted right though the marrow of his soul,

That it cannot be hid, but must flood outwardly

And mark its likeness on his partnered flesh,

Becoming visible, as it were, through transparent limb.

It is as though Francis is already crucified from within, and so great is the love he has for Christ that what is within bursts forth in his flesh revealing that he is already a Crucified Knight.

I was amazed as I read parts of the poem at how brilliant is Della Penna's reading of the poem and how diligently he pursues his thesis by careful research of the aesthethics of the poem and of ancillary studies that contribute to a fuller understanding of how important such a study is.

Francis himself was a poet and wrote one of the great Italian poems in the Umbrian dialect, the "Canticle of the Creatures."  That a long, epic poem should have been written in his honor and so early, three or four years after his passing in 1226, makes the poem in any case worthy of serious consideration as a poem and not simply as a versifying of the Legend of Thomas of Celano.  And that is what Della Penna's book does: consider seriously this extraordinary epic of the Life of St. Francis.

What a delight it has been to read this book.  For years I'd been looking for a text that would open up the world of the Troubadours and of Chivalry as they related to and determined the way St. Francis responded to God's call.  He sang that call and he conducted himself like the ideal knight, a knight like St. George that the young Francis saw in a fresco at the school of San Giorgio where he attended school.  All of this I suspected but could not find an early source that confirmed my vision of Francis.

And here it was along in the Versified Life of St. Francis by Henry of Avranches, which I had dismissed as a mere versifying of the First Life of St. Francis by Thomas of Celano, merely making Celano rhyme, dividing it into stanzas, prettifying and adorning Celano's already fine, rhetorical text.

I'm grateful to my confrere Fr. Michael Della Penna for all the deep and wide research he did and for writing this wonderful study of St. Francis, the Crucified Knight.  This book adds another layer to all of the studies that have been done on St. Francis, and it reasserts and defends the place of poetry in the Franciscan story, beginning with Francis's own "Canticle of the Creatures."  St. Francis himself called himself the Herald of the Great King, and he is certainly that.  But he is also a Knight of the Great King, fighting those inner battles and righting those wrongs that contribute to repairing God's house, the Church itself.

This book opens up a whole new dimension of St. Francis for the reader who perseveres in reading this exciting story.

It can be purchased from Tau Publishing at: http://taupublishing.org/giftShopProductDetails.aspx?itemID=517