In his post below Paul Moses helpfully links to the transcript of Pope Benedict's Catechesis on Saint Bonaventure at last Wednesday's general audience. This is the latest of his reflections on great ecclesial figures of the Middle Ages.Here is the passage that I found of particular interest:

This does not mean that the Church is immobile, fixed in the past and that novelties cannot be exercised in her. "Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt," the works of Christ do not go backward, do not fail, but progress, says the saint in the letter "De tribus quaestionibus." Thus St. Bonaventure formulates explicitly the idea of progress, and this is a novelty in comparison with the Fathers of the Church and a great part of his contemporaries. For St. Bonaventure, Christ is no longer, as he was for the Fathers of the Church, the end, but the center of history; history does not end with Christ, but a new period begins. Another consequence is the following: prevailing up to that moment was the idea that the Fathers of the Church were at the absolute summit of theology, all the following generations could only be their disciples. Even St. Bonaventure recognizes the Fathers as teachers for ever, but the phenomenon of St. Francis gave him the certainty that the richness of the word of Christ is inexhaustible and that also new lights can appear in the new generations. The uniqueness of Christ also guarantees novelties and renewal in all the periods of history.Certainly, the Franciscan Order -- so he stresses -- belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ, to the Apostolic Church, and cannot build itself on a utopian spiritualism. But, at the same time, the novelty of such an order is valid in comparison with classic monasticism, and St. Bonaventure -- as I said in the preceding catechesis -- defended this novelty against the attacks of the secular clergy of Paris. The Franciscans do not have a fixed monastery, they can be present everywhere to proclaim the Gospel. Precisely the break with stability, characteristic of monasticism, in favor of a new flexibility, restored to the Church her missionary dynamism.

I presume that the next figure to be discussed by the Pope is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Stay tuned.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

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