Dear Friend,
When I think about what draws people to the Franciscan tradition, I always come back to one word: love. Not love as an abstraction, but love embodied, as Francis lived it. A love that moved him out of his comfort zone, out of Assisi, out of the walls he had built around his life, and into relationship with people he had been taught to fear or ignore.
This quarter, we are reflecting on love and compassion through a Franciscan lens. Compassion, as Sister Ilia Delio reminds us, is not merely a sentiment. It is solidarity: the willingness to enter into the suffering of another and to be changed by that encounter. Francis was changed by the leper. He was changed by the Sultan. He was changed by every encounter he was willing to show up for fully.
That is the kind of compassionate love I witnessed in our students. Teaching in the online MTS-FT program, I am always struck by it. Students from Singapore, from Australia, from Geneva, from across the United States, journeying together, forming real community, asking real questions about how their faith calls them to live out their vocation— this is the Franciscan tradition as it is meant to be experienced.
My hope for you, wherever you are in your studies or your ministry, is that this reflection deepens your sense of what you are being called toward. Many people are hungry for the Franciscan message today. You are a part of carrying it forward.
May the Lord give you peace.
Brother Keith Douglass Warner, OFM
President, Franciscan School of Theology
