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Hey everybody,
Today’s the feast of the great Capuchin saint Lawrence of Brindisi, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
Lawrence of Brindisi. Credit: threecharlie/wikimedia.Lawrence — whose baptismal name was Julius Caesar Russo — was born in 1559, and cared for by Conventual Franciscan friars after his father died, when lil’ Julius Caesar was seven.
Despite his unconventional Conventual raisin’, Lawrence became a Capuchin Franciscan in 1575, when he was 16, and then a priest when he was 23.
He was brilliant. Off-the-charts, scary smart.
For a Capuchin, that’s a cool attribute, because it meant that he wouldn’t be cordoned off in academia, but instead commissioned as a preacher, and charged with preaching to ordinary people about their call to holiness, in the wake of the Council of Trent.
He read Greek and Latin and Hebrew and Syriac, and a bunch of modern European languages.
He applied that knowledge to Sacred Scripture, which put him in a good position to preach against the emerging sola scriptura theology of the Reformation using Scripture, though not quite solely, as it were. He drew from rabbinic literature and the Fathers of the Church, and he did it for the practical purpose of helping Catholics stay Catholic when fervent Reformation
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