This week, the Church celebrates Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (July 14) and Saint Bonaventure (July 15). These biographies and reflections can help you include these two saints in a special way in your daily prayers.
Born in the seventeenth century and canonized in 2012, Saint Kateri is known as a patroness of the environment. She is the first Native American saint.
Saint Bonaventure was a friend of both Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint (King) Louis of France. Not as well-known as other Franciscan saints, Bonaventure wrote many spiritual and theological works, including the Breviloquium, the ending of which may be incorporated into your prayers:
I pray, O God, to know you, to love you, that I may rejoice in you. If I cannot attain full joy in this life, may I at least advance from day to day until that joy becomes full. May the knowledge of you advance in me here, and there be made full. May love of you increase here, and there be full that here my joy may be great in hope and there full in fact.
Lord, through your Son, you command, you counsel us to ask, and you promise that we shall receive, that our joy may be full. I ask, true Lord, that I may be granted that my joy be full.
I ask, O Lord, as you counsel through the wonderful Counsellor, that I receive what you promise by virtue of your truth, that my joy may be full.
Meanwhile, let my mind meditate upon it, let my tongue speak of it ,let my heart love it, let my mouth talk of it, let my soul hunger for it, let my flesh thirst for it, let my whole being desire it until I enter into the joy of my Lord, who is the Three and the One God, “who is blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 1:25).
Image credit: Kateri: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, Bonaventure: Vittore Crivelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
