Episode Details

Fr. Peter George Flynn opens with a brief provocation: Make Me a Channel of Your Peace is not a prayer by St. Francis. He traces the history of this famous misattribution — published anonymously in a small French Catholic magazine, La Clochette, in 1912, promoted during the First World War via Pope Benedict XV, popularised among American soldiers in the Second World War by Cardinal Francis Spellman, and later adopted as a morning prayer of the Missionaries of Charity by Mother Teresa.

He also ranges across the wider world of saintly misquotation: Padre Pio falsely linked to unapproved apparitions, the supposed Thomas Aquinas quote about wine and sorrow (he mentioned the bath and the sleep; the wine is an addition), and the endlessly misattributed “preach the gospel, when necessary use words” — something Francis never said and would not have believed. Fr. Peter then turns to the prayers St. Francis actually did say and write: the adoration he would prostrate himself to say before every church (We adore you, most high Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all your churches throughout the world), the prayer before the San Damiano crucifix (Most high glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my mind), and a survey of all the major forms of his prayer — liturgical, Marian, Eucharistic, charismatic — with a promise that the Canticle of the Creatures is coming. A guest joins Fr. Peter to reflect on St. Francis’s intimacy with Our Lady and a moving personal locution at Lourdes.

L'articolo The Franciscan Hour – “Preach the Gospel”: What St Francis *Really* Said – Fr Peter George Flynn proviene da Radio Maria.