St. Bernardine of Siena

Bernardine of Siena was the most celebrated popular preacher of fifteenth-century Italy, and his career deserves attention for the energy and practical effect it achieved on an extraordinary scale. He was born in 1380 at Massa di Carrara, orphaned young, raised by devout relatives, and tended plague victims in Siena during the epidemic of 1400 with a dedication that cost him his health for years afterward. He entered the Observant Franciscans in 1402 and began preaching around 1417 with results that almost immediately attracted attention far beyond the ordinary.

For the next twenty-seven years, until his death in 1444, Bernardine preached continuously across the length of Italy. His campaigns in individual cities lasted for weeks at a time, with audiences that sometimes filled the cathedral piazza for days running. In Siena in 1427, listeners wrote down his words as he spoke, and the resulting vernacular transcripts — imperfect as phonetic records always are — give us something close to the actual sound of the preaching, with its humour, its energy, its sudden swings between comic anecdote and theological rigour.

The devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus that Bernardine propagated throughout his ministry is what most demands attention. The IHS monogram on a sunburst tablet, which he showed to crowds at the end of his sermons and asked them to venerate, drew accusations of novelty and of idolatry from critics who were not few. He was summoned to Rome three times to answer for the practice. Each time he was examined and exonerated. Pope Martin V, Pope Eugene IV — both found the devotion sound and Bernardine's promotion of it legitimate. He was also an energetic administrator who reformed numerous Franciscan friaries into the strict Observant practice and who, in his last years, was offered and declined three Italian bishoprics.

He died at Aquila on one of his preaching journeys, worn out. He was canonized in 1450 — six years after his death, a speed that reflected the intensity and breadth of popular conviction about his holiness.