fransje 2

For me, Francesca’s appeal...

is in her warm and very human personality.

She was no dried up prune of a saint. She was intensely alive to everything human and capable of the grand passions without which life is bleak and dreary. She suffered struggles, endured sorrows, and bore with every manner of disappointment and hurt. One cannot say that Francesca’s holiness was of the tidy sort. One might even say that Francesca’s life was a mess.

Her desire to serve God and live for him was continually frustrated by persons and circumstances. It was precisely in the midst of these conditions that Francesca grew in holiness, 'setting nothing before the love of Christ' [RB 4:21], and 'never despairing of God’s mercy' [RB 4:74].

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As a young girl, Francesca did not want to marry.

She lived, after all, in the city of the Church’s shining virgin martyrs: Agnes, Cecilia, and so many others. Like them she wanted to consecrate her virginity to Christ, but her parents had other plans for her. The first big decision in her life was out of her hands.

At the age of thirteen, she gave in to her parents and married Lorenzo Ponziano, the wealthy nobleman they had chosen for her. Francesca was expected to be the perfect socialite, charming, beautiful, witty, and worldly as only Romans know how to be worldly.

In her heart she longed for the cloister...

but the will of God had placed her, concretely, in a setting far removed from it.

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Lorenzo, Francesca’s husband, treated her always with love and respect. He accepted, that he had married an unusual woman, that she would never be like other Roman wives, and that there was something in her that he, try as he might, would never be able to satisfy.

Francesca loved Lorenzo. She recognized his qualities, and accepted that loving Lorenzo was part of God’s plan for her. It is said that through all their married life, Francesca and Lorenzo never once had a quarrel. For that alone they should both be canonized...

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Francesca is best known for a sagacious [scherpzinnig] remark, one that two centuries later Saint Francis de Sales would echo. “Devotion in a married woman,” she said, “is most praiseworthy, but she must never forget that she is a housewife. Sometimes she must leave God at the altar, to serve Him in her housekeeping”.

An indication of Francesca’s Benedictine vocation was in her devotion to the Divine Office. One day in praying the Hours she was interrupted five times in succession. Each time she closed her book, attended to what was asked of her, and then returned to her prayer.

After the last interruption, she found the words of the antiphon she had been trying to pray written in letters of gold. God rewarded her patience as much as her zeal for the Divine Office.


~bron~