St. Bonaventure: Homily for Wednesday, July 15, 2026

St. Bonaventure. While these are simply the readings of the day, the gospel today is really connected, I think, with people like Saint Bonaventure who sought to seek understanding. In fairness, most people who lived in the time of Saint Bonaventure or Saint Thomas Aquinas had no knowledge of what they were saying because most people couldn’t read. Readings for Today.

St. Bonaventure

Today we celebrate Saint Bonaventure. He was a very gifted philosopher and theologian. A Franciscan, ultimately canonized. So powerful and effective that even after he died, because his head was incorrupt, the Huguenots, which were as much a religion, but not only that, but a military force in France, took his body and burned it.

What do we have to learn from Saint Bonaventure centuries later? He lived in the time of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Albert the Great. There were many great scholastic philosophers in his day and like the many scholastic philosophers, he focused on what were called the sentences of Peter Lombard, which were really a way of making sense, in a rational way, with the faith.

But with all due respect to my brother Saint Thomas Aquinas, who really thought that reason was the beginning and then faith, Bonaventure was quite the opposite. Everything for Bonaventure began with faith. We were inspired by God. We were able to love because God first loved us. And so it was God who extended to us a relationship in faith.

Moreover, once we recognized this faith, then reason had its appropriate place, helping us to make sense of the world around us and our relationship with God. Saint Thomas Aquinas describes theology as faith seeking understanding, which really would have been an understanding for Saint Bonaventure. With this reason and faith together, what God makes available to us is the possibility of mystical union. Not just in heaven, where we will know it completely, but even here on earth in our relationship with Jesus.

While these are simply the readings of the day, the gospel today is really connected, I think, with people like Saint Bonaventure who sought to seek understanding. In fairness, most people who lived in the time of Saint Bonaventure or Saint Thomas Aquinas had no knowledge of what they were saying because most people couldn’t read.

And so the role of faith and its development was really important, not with lofty and high ideals of philosophy and theology written by scholars, but by the lived example of faith. And Jesus reminds us of this in today’s gospel.

Intelligence, the ability to reason and to think critically, can only take us so far. The learned and the clever cannot always see the wisdom that God pours out to each one of us. In fact, those who receive this wisdom are the childlike, those who trust, those who recognize that they need the adults in their life to love them and care for them and provide an example.

And Jesus also tells us something that was very apparent to Saint Bonaventure. We know the Father because of the Son. We could see the Son. People had an experience of Him while He was on earth. Today, Jesus invites us into a deeper relationship with the Father. Let us pray that grace may fill our hearts, and so that we may not only see but accept the gift that God constantly pours out for each one of us.

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