This week’s issue looks to some of the personal connections that have shaped the Portsmouth community. Perhaps it is an opportune moment, then, in anticipation of next week’s great solemnity of All Saints, to remind our oblates of two important personal connections linking all Benedictine oblates. Oblate quiz: who are the two principal patron saints of Benedictine oblates? If you guessed St. Benedict or St. Gregory the Great, you would not be far wrong, for as an oblate of Portsmouth Abbey these two are indeed of principal significance. But more accurately, oblates also benefit from the patronage of two saintly oblates: Henry II of Bavaria and Frances of Rome.  

Saint Henry II, oblate

Saints Henry II and Cunigunde

Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, also called “Henry the Exuberant,” was a Bavarian leader who linked his political authority to the church, greatly strengthening its position in the power dynamics of 11^th-century Europe. Historian Donald Attwater writes: “Henry’s chief concerns were the consolidation of the power of the German monarchy, and reform and reorganization in the church, the second in subordination to the first.” (Attwater, 147) He challenges the claims of Henry having a “celibate marriage” to his saintly wife Cunigunde of Luxembourg, although their union did not produce an heir. Despite these ambiguities, Henry was a supporter of clerical celibacy, was without doubt a devout and committed to the church, concerned with the integrity of its leaders and the orthodoxy of its doctrine. He also was deeply rooted in monasticism. While it is debated as to whether he ever truly desired to become a monk, he did in fact become an oblate. Attwater notes that St. Odilo of Cluny was one of his friends. He was canonized by Pope Eugene III in 1146, the sole German monarch so honored. 

Saint Frances of Rome, oblate

Frances of Rome was born in the eternal city in 1384 into a family of nobility. Like our other oblate patron, Frances was a married lay person, who became deeply involved in the care of her husband, Lorenzo de’ Ponziani, whom Attwater says returned “a broken man” from an exile stemming from the attack on Rome by Ladislas of Naples. He survived until 1436, after forty years of marriage to Frances “without a quarrel.” Frances has already long been devoted to the care of the sick: “From an early age Frances was of an ascetic disposition, with a strong feeling for the sufferings of others, and recurring epidemics of plague and civil war gave ample scope for her charitable activities” (Attwater, 135). She became associated with the Benedictine monks of Mount Oliveto, eventually creating a new oblate group, the Oblates of Tor de’ Specchi, a community which still exists. 

Notes: 

Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (1965) 

Images:
Henry II: Berlin, Mosaik aus dem Jahre 1903 von Heinrich II im U-Bahnhof Richard-Wagner-Platz, ursprünglich im Hotel "Bayernhof" (Potsdamer Straße), 1975 umgesetzt (U.S. Public Domain)
Henry and Cunigunde: 15^th Century (U.S. Public Domain)
Francesca of Rome : Unidentified (Italian?), Untitled (St. Francesca Romana), ca. 1650, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Public domain)