entry Nov 2013
St. Francis of Paola (San Francesco di Paola)
This basilica in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples is named for Saint Francis of Paola (1416-1507), a mendicant friar and the founder of the Roman Catholic Order of Minims. Francis was born in the town of Paola, not far from Cosenza in the region of Calabria. Unlike most founders of men's religious orders, Francis was never a priest; in that respect he followed in the path of his own patron saint, the one for whom he was named, Francis of Assisi. As a boy he entered a friary of the Franciscan Order to fulfill a vow made by his parents.
After a pilgrimage to Assisi, he
and two companions became recluses and
founded a religious community in Paola
known as the Hermits of Saint Francis of
Assisi, marked by the traditional
Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience. Francis added the additional
austere vow of year-round Lenten
abstinence from meat and other animal
products. (Indeed, Roman Catholic
hagiographies, which often list the
purported miracles of saints, tell of
Francis' extreme devotion to the welfare
of animals, even to the extent of raising
beasts from the dead that had been
slaughtered to be eaten!) On a less austere note, I was pleased to
learn that as the order spread to other parts of Europe,
the Munich friary of
the Minims
started to
brew beer in
1634 as a
means to
support
themselves. I
don't know
whether the
friars drank
their own
beer. I hope
so. (It's just
fermented
hops! No
animals, eggs
or cheeses
were harmed or
devoured in
the brewing of
this beer,
and, besides
this austerity
stuff can take
its toll after
a while.) An
independent
brewery still
continues to
brew the beer,
called
Paulaner
(image of
logo, left).
It takes its
name from the
town of Paola.
(photo: Luigini)
In
1454 Francis built a large monastery and
church in Paola (photo, right) and,
shortly thereafter, several new
monasteries in Calabria and Sicily. He
also established convents of nuns, and a
third order for people living in the
world, after the example of Francis of
Assisi. The name of the order was changed
to the Minim friars ("the least ones") by Pope Alexander VI.
Francis of Paola is the patron saint of Calabria as well
as a patron saint of mariners; he was canonized in 1519.
The Order of Minims was never very large, but it is
still in existence, primarily in Italy, with the general
curia and an international college in Rome. Outside of
Europe, there are Minim friaries or convents in Brazil,
Columbia, Mexico, and the USA; outside of Italy in
Europe, the order is also present in Spain and the Czech
Republic. Outside of Rome in Italy, the order is present
in Paola, Genoa, Perugia, Cosenza and in Naples at the
basilica that bears his name and at the church of S.Maria
della Stella. (In France, there were prominent
sites dedicated to Francis of Paola since, at the
insistence of Pope Sixtus IV, Francis went to the
spiritual aid of the dying king, Louis XI;
Francis then spent 20 years of his life in
France in service to that monarch's
successors, Charles VIII and then Louis
XII.)
There are countless painting and statues of Francesco. Well-known paintings are by Gandolfini, de Ribera, Tintoretto and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In 1957, to mark the 450th anniversary of his death, the Italian state issued a stamp of this "patron of mariners" (image). It depicts the saint in a miraculous crossing of the straits of Messina. The stamp shows him rescuing a sailor whose ship is seen sinking in the background; Francis, standing on water, spreads his cloak on the water, ties one end to his staff and uses this "sail" to get the mariner ashore. It is a depiction of one of the miracles traditionally attributed to Francis in hagiographic literature. In 1861 Franz Liszt dedicated a piano piece to this event in the life of the saint (Liszt's own namesake), and then later a choral work: An den heiligen Franziskus von Paula (Searle catalog #28). The libretto is by Martha von Sabinin.
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