After the morning Liturgy and breakfast, the brothers spent Saturday morning’s session in their particular work groups: Atelier Pascal Rywalski, Marco D’Aviano, Solanus Casey, and Alejandro Labaca. They discussed the two presentations on power and Capuchin minority. At the end of the morning, they met in a Plenary session. Each group secretary presented the results of their work. Two basic themes seemed to surface from the working groups: 1) that we have power and that we cannot eliminate all power in the Order; 2) that we need to continue to look for new ways of exercising power in the Order in the spirit of our minority after the examples of Jesus and Francis. In the afternoon, some participants made a short pilgrimage to the little church of the Portiuncula where the Poverello of Assisi founded the Order of Friars Minor in 1209. Francis loved this area. While living here, he ministered to the lepers and the outcasts of society. During this time he began to frequent the ruined little chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, also known as the Portiuncula (a little portion of land). Francis died here on October 3, 1226. On Sunday, some of the brothers will continue their pilgrimage to other places of importance to Franciscan spirituality and heritage, among them will be (if weather permits): La Verna (where Francis received the Stigmata) and Monte Casale (where Francis encountered some robbers). In case of bad weather, we will go to Cortona.

After a first week of work there was no sunny weekend in Umbria for the tired delegates. Snowfall in the higher regions of Tuscany forced us to cancel the pilgrimage to La Verna (The Stigmata of St. Francis in 1224) and Montecasale (a hermitage of St. Francis’ days and now a house of Prayer of the Tuscan Capuchin Province). Instead Claudio Iacopi, the legendary bus owner and driver with the trumpet, took us to Cortona, some 70 km from Assisi. We first visited the Church of San Francesco, built by Br. Elia, a native of Cortona, minister general after St. Francis and the builder of the Sacro Convento in Assisi with the triple church over the tomb of Francis. As the church is under repair, we could not visit the tomb of Br. Elia, a great man, but much maligned in the course of history. He died 750 year ago in 1254.
In the Cathedral (for two years Br. Flavio Carraro was bishop of Arezzo-Cortona-San Sepolcro before being moved to the much bigger Diocese of Verona in northern Italy), an enthusiastic parish priest gave us a rich description of the many saints depicted and venerated in the church. The adjacent diocesan museum has an extraordinary collection of famous paintings of the like of Luca Signorelli and Fra Angelico.

A few kilometres outside town we celebrated mass at our friary of Celle di Cortona, the first Franciscan Friary in the world, as Br. Luciano pointed out. St. Francis visited the solitary place on a steep mountain slope for the first time in 1211 and had a small friary built. On his last visit a few months before his death it is said that Francis wrote his testament in Celle di Cortona. After having been abandoned for a long time, the people offered the place to the Capuchins who have lived there ever since 1537. For centuries it was the novitiate of the Tuscan Province, now it is a house of prayer, a true place of silence and recollection. We saw the oratory and cell of St. Franics, the small friary built by Br. Elia, the novitiate corridor with its 20 tiny cubicles, very evocative of the roots of our Order.
The rain kept on all day, but a good Italian lunch with a fine glass of local wine kept us in good spirits and we finished the pilgrimage with a visit to the shrine of St. Margaret of Cortona, the 13th century penitent tertiary. Her origin as a poor peasant orphan, her love union with a noble man, the tragic loss of her partner in a hunting accident and the subsequent rejection by both families – that of her noble relatives as well as her own, make her a modern figure. Her life of penance, dedication to the sick and poor and the strength she drew from her intimate life in Christ make her a model of Christian life for our times.