It’s about brotherhood.
Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, a brother of the Order of Friars Minor, has pursued Franciscan spirituality throughout his life because of the unity he finds in its members.
Perhaps his passion for the spirituality is why the 1975 graduate of Harlingen High School has just been installed as the (John) Duns Scotus Chair of (Franciscan) Spirituality for the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago.
“The Franciscan chair or Scotus chair was endowed in order to hire someone, myself, to basically do research and teaching in the field of Franciscan spirituality,” Cavazos-Gonzalez said. “That’s the spirituality that was started by Francis and Clare of Assisi in the 12th century.”
And what is that spirituality?
“It’s the spirituality of the men and women who follow the Gospel in the footsteps of Francis and Clare of Assisi,” he said. “There’s an emphasis on poverty and being second class people rather than fighting and struggling for the first class. So, there’s an emphasis on that. There’s an emphasis on prayer, on seeing the goodness of God in all creation and in all people and in all religions.”
St. Francis of Assisi was an Italian of the 12th and 13th century who founded the Franciscan orders of the Friars Minor, according to www.britannica.com.
He also founded the women’s Order of St. Clare and the lay Third Order. He was a leader of the movement of evangelical poverty, says the website.
When Cavazos-Gonzalez began his journey in service to God, he studied the priesthood with the intention of serving the Diocese of Brownsville.
For me it’s been a dream of mine ever since I started teaching as a professor in 1999. I heard about the chair and always hoped and dreamed that someday I would be able to sit on that chair.
But he then started seeking to belong to a religious brotherhood.
“So my spiritual director gave me a book on the life of St. Francis, and it was about the same time as ‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon,’ was out again,’” he said.
The 1972 film was about the life of St. Francis. Cavazos-Gonzalez saw the movie, read the book, and fell in love with St. Francis.
However, one little problem. The aspiring young clergyman had never actually met a Franciscan. Were they still around?
And of course, his spiritual director laughed and said, “What do you mean do they still exist?”
Brother Cavazos-Gonzalez is now one of them. He’s embraced his Franciscan spirituality throughout his life as a clergyman, and he feels great satisfaction at having been appointed to this position at CTU.
“For me it’s been a dream of mine ever since I started teaching as a professor in 1999,” he said. “I heard about the chair and always hoped and dreamed that someday I would be able to sit on that chair.”
He explained further the details of the chair.
“It’s an endowed chair at the Catholic Theological Union,” said Cavazos-Gonzalez. “Most universities and graduate schools have what are known as endowed chairs, meaning that somebody donated a whole bunch of money, usually at least a million dollars. The chair uses the interest from that in order to promote a certain field of study.”
The Franciscan chair — the Scotus chair — was endowed for the purpose of hiring someone to do research and teach in the field of Franciscan spirituality. When he first aspired to this opportunity, he didn’t have any tenure. In fact, he wasn’t even a full professor – yet.
So, he had to take some departures for a time to acquire those qualifications. He taught the theological study of Christian spirituality for 15 years at CTU before moving to Rome in 2014 to work in Educational Technology at the Pontifical University Antonianum. This university is a teaching and research institution sponsored by the Order of Friars Minor, says the www.antonianum.eu website.
The Catholic community seemed to be taking more notice of his focus and capacity when, in March 2020, he became the “pontifically appointed Secretary of the Pontifical Academy of Mary International,” he said.
“The Pontifical Academy of Mary International is one of the various academies that the Vatican has,” Cavazos-Gonzalez said.
What drew me to Franciscan spirituality was the sense of being brothers and sisters to each other in the way of the Gospel, of helping and assisting each other rather than competing with each other
Interestingly, these academies are not teaching institutions, he said, but instead are centers of research and learning. PAMI focuses its research on what Christians believe about the Virgin Mary. And this brings up a curious discovery that even Muslims believe in the Virgin Mary.
“One of the best-known secrets is that traditional and orthodox Muslims have a great devotion to the Virgin Mary,” he said.
The narrative about this concept becomes more intriguing by the moment.
“There is more written about the Virgin Mary in the Koran than there is in the Bible,” he said. “Mary is the Virgin Mother of the prophet Jesus. For them Jesus is not the Messiah, he is a prophet, but they acknowledge that is a product of virgin birth. They don’t say how. They acknowledge his greatness, and if he was great then his mother was great. And Jesus and his mother were the only ones, according to Muslim tradition, who were never touch by Satan at the moment of their birth. The rest of us, including the Prophet Mohammed, were touched by Satan.”
So thorough was his dedication to learning, research and spirituality that, in June 2022, Pope Francis released him from his position with PAMI to take his current posting at CTU, the one to which he had aspired for so many years. Now he can continue his research and also teach others the knowledge he has acquired over a lifetime as a Franciscan friar.
“What drew me to Franciscan spirituality was the sense of being brothers and sisters to each other in the way of the Gospel, of helping and assisting each other rather than competing with each other,” he said. “We are an evangelical order, but we’re not like the evangelicals of the United States. Ours, rather than looking for a prosperity gospel, we look for being with and working with the second and third class of people.”
Cavazos-Gonzalez’s coedited book on methods for the study of spirituality is scheduled for release this spring. He is also finishing a book about the Marian Spirituality of Sor Juana de la Cruz Vasquez Gutierrez, a Spanish Franciscan sister who was a mystic, a pastor and a preacher in the early 1500s.
