You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an Apostolate helping Catholics

understand, live, and share their faith.

Hi, welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGeehan. I work here at the Augustine Institute.

And today I am with Dr. Chris Mooney, Professor of Theology at the Augustin Institute. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Mary. It's great to be able to talk about our saint today.

Today we're going to talk about St. Bonaventure. So the point of Catholic saints is to look at

our friends, our saint friends in heaven as inspiration for our own lives today. So I'm excited

to share with you a little bit about St. Bonaventure and learn from Dr. Mooney all about him.

So St. Bonaventure, he is a Franciscan friar. What else, when did he live? What are some basic

biographical facts that we should know about him to sketch out his life? Yeah, St. Bonaventure is a

great medieval saint, but not a household name. Unless maybe you live in Bonaventure, New York, or went to St. Bonneventry

New York.

It's true.

Most people don't know Bonaventure, but he was almost an exact contemporary of Thomas Aquinas,

who's much more known by Catholics.

But Aquinas and Bonaventure are actually kind of two great

representatives of two different traditions in the high Middle Ages in the 13th

century. Thomas Aquinas a Dominican and Bonaventure a Franciscan. So Bonaventure

was he was not actually born Bonaventure, that's a name he took on later, a

religious name. It seems like a

religious name. He was born Giovanni in Italy around the year 1221, so high middle ages. Just about

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