Saint Francis of Paola
Saint Francis of Paola wanted to live a quiet life of solitude. He managed to do this in a cave near Paola, but soon followers began to gather. He formed them into a community which emphasized pretty severe penance and austerity. Saint Francis also had a public life assisting in the French court.
Lent with the Saints: Bernardine of Siena
Genesis 17:3–9; Psalm 105:4–5, 6–7, 8–9; John 8:51–59
When I was a boy, it was customary for Catholic men and boys from around my city to march in a “Holy Name” parade. We came from all over town and ended up at the ballpark, where an altar was set up for prayer and Benediction, the blessing with the Blessed Sacrament. This popular devotion was to counteract the improper use of the name of Jesus and to witness to the Catholic faith in a secular world. It is a devotion made popular in the fifteenth century by the Franciscan Bernardine of Siena.
Solitude and Communion
At critical moments in his life, Jesus was in solitude, but was solitary with his close disciples. When he knew he was a marked man waiting for the midnight knock on the door, or in his case the betrayer’s kiss in the garden, his instinct was to go near to the desert—a place associated both with solitude and with the deepest of all relationships, in the ground of being. And he went there with those human beings whom he understood best and who, for all their failings, understood him best. Solitude is truthful and often delightful, even when painful.
