Ecclesiology and the Franciscan Charism

Book excerpt: This volume of the Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner on Ecclesiology and the Franciscan Charism contains some of the most practical of all of Fehlner’s writings. This volume is divided into three parts. In the first, we are treated to Fehlner’s first reflections on ecclesiology in the wake of Vatican II and his own earlier research into Bonaventure’s ecclesiology and Duns Scotus’s teachings on grace and personhood. To Fehlner, these studies, along with his Tractatus de gratia and teaching notes on the mission of the Holy Spirit, all from the 1960s, contain the rationes seminales of the entirety of his later thought. In part two, we find writings mainly from the following two decades on the Conventual Franciscan charism, the ecclesiola, the church in microcosm. Here we can readily discern the radical effects of Fehlner’s encounter with Maximilian Kolbe and this volume’s close affinity with volume six of this series, on St. Maximilian Kolbe. In part three of this volume, comprising essays from the final fifteen years of his life, Fehlner brings his lifetime of prayerful contemplation and research directly to bear upon practical spirituality. In these essays, Fehlner’s spiritual testament, our author presents his Catholic and Franciscan charismatic vision of Christian life.