Saint Bernardine of Siena

Saint Bernardine of Siena was an Italian Franciscan and priest, one of the best-known popular preachers of fifteenth-century Italy. He spread devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus and helped the Franciscan Observance to grow. The Church remembers him on May 20, the day of his death.

He was born on September 8, 1380, at Massa Marittima, into the noble Albizzeschi family. By the age of six he had lost both parents; relatives raised him, and he spent his youth in Siena, where he studied law. In 1400, when plague struck the city, he and his companions from the confraternity at the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala cared for the sick for four months.

On September 8, 1402, at the age of twenty-two, he entered the Friars Minor. He chose the Observants, who wished to keep the Rule of Saint Francis in poverty and austerity of life. In 1404 he was ordained a priest. From 1417, beginning in Genoa, he traveled from city to city through northern and central Italy. Crowds came to hear him, and his sermons brought conversions and reconciled feuding factions. Three times he declined to become a bishop, in Siena, Ferrara and Urbino, so that he could go on preaching the Gospel.

The heart of his preaching was the Holy Name of Jesus. While preaching he showed the faithful a tablet with the monogram IHS painted in gold and surrounded by rays, and people placed this sign on churches, homes and public buildings. For this his opponents accused him of heresy. Summoned to Rome, he appeared before Pope Martin V, who acquitted him and allowed him to continue preaching.

He denounced usury, which crushed the poor, and called cities torn by hatred to concord. His sermons also bore the harshness of their age: he spoke fiercely against people accused of witchcraft and against the sin of sodomy, and his words about Jews, especially Jewish moneylenders, fed hostility toward them. This side of his preaching is judged critically today.

In 1438 he became vicar general of the Observants for all of Italy. He renewed or brought into the Observance some three hundred friaries, and among his disciples were Saint John of Capistrano and Saint James of the Marches. In 1442 he resigned the office in order to devote himself solely to preaching. In 1444, already in poor health, he set out to preach in the Kingdom of Naples. He reached L’Aquila gravely ill and died there in the Franciscan friary on May 20, 1444, laid, according to tradition, on the bare ground.

Pope Nicholas V canonized him on May 24, 1450. His body rests in L’Aquila, in the basilica that bears his name. Polish Observants are called Bernardines after the patron of the first Observant friary in Poland, founded in Krakow in 1453 by Saint John of Capistrano. In 1980, on the six hundredth anniversary of his birth, John Paul II prayed at his relics in L’Aquila and urged families to bring the Name of Jesus back into their homes.