Aquinas High School - Trumpet Yearbook (La Crosse, WI)

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personal, and then found it spreading to include vast multitudes of lay people. For was he not the sun? Does not the sun illumine the whole world? Has it not the power ol warmth, of love, of tenderness? lsn't the compounded Sun made up of Light, Obedience, and an intimate contact with every being? Francis too was illum- ined with God, he longed only to be obedient to his Mastery every man to him was Brother, He was the very essence of seraphic joy, of hu- miliation, and of sacrifice. The whole world called him a Fool, and he was glad. Francis died as the sun dies: at twilight when the long day is tired and the sun is as tired as the day it has served. There were birds who had stayed to sing for him for the last time the songs he and Nature had composed. And as the stairs to a new life were revealed to him, heavy lines of brilliant light crossing and climbing the darlcened horizon, he lcnew that Love alone endures. There was no more pain, only a cool, strange peace. And he who in life had lcnown only a weary road, was in death carried triumphantly on white wings into the Kingdom ot Love. All his life was love and because the degradation of the modern world has great need of that ele- ment, the Church offers a solution in Love, Poverty, and Obedience. Thus, because of his inspiration, Francis has been used as a Light for our yearboolc to carry the three elements composing his frail brown slceleton body and the one love he called Poverty, a procla- mation of social justice. Two friends, Saint Dom inic and Saint Francis enter prominently into Dantes conception ofthe Heaven of the Sun. ., 4?.vz:5'i,s .f zrlrz- -- - ' law: 3.4 l

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From the lips of Saint Thomas of Aquinas, Dante gives an account in his Paradiso of the life and work of Saint Francis, which for brevity, accuracy and comprehension has never been equalled. OREQJOR D Dante, meeting in his Paradiso Thomas Aquinas, through him produces the most able biography of St. Francis of Assisi ever claimed by the fickle Muse ol Literature. That was in the thirteenth cen- tury. Now, seven centuries later, this Trumpet looks back into the heavens, to retell in print and picture the story First told to Dante by the patron of our school. The present century and the thirteenth cen- tury have an economic background with problems that in many ways are comparable. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest father of Wisdom and Philosophy, Thomas, son ol Dominic, friend to the Umbrian Poverello, told as a friend of Francis the story of that saint in the lull light ol Heaven's Empyrean crown. And as he arose to speak, the heavens were atten- tive to his every word: Therefore let him who speaketh of that place, Say not Assisi for he would say little, But, Orient, if he properly would speak for from out that slope, there where it breaketh most its steepness, rose upon the world a sun . . . Yet he lived not until God sent His own widow, Poverty, to teach him the walks ol life that meant eternity to him. Francis, the sun that rose on a new era, proclaiming praise where praise had been rebuffed, lifting from the sordidness ol poverty a clean soul, sweet in the eyes of God, building bridges that spanned the ravine ol difference between the two great classes of men, and calling them love, or as the modern world has translated them, his means ol social jus- tice, this same Francis meant his reform to be only

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,rg The lite long ambition ol St. Francis ol Assisi to become a missionary in the Orient is realized in part when he appears before the Sultan. Last July Sister M. Charitina left Aquinas to talce up a worlc which, in the words ol Pope Pius Xl, is the greatest and the holiest of all Catholic undertakings - that of a missionary. When she came to live among us, the quiet presence of her powerful character made us turn our heads a little from the juvenile wall4 of lite and now we find ourselves a little older and wiser than we were yesterday. Foolish and arrogant in our youth, we slighted her aid at first as something un- necessary. But she lcnew that we were EDIC foolish, arrogant, and young. And so she taught us how to love, for Charity was a part of her name, before we lcnew it, we had grown attached to her idealsf we discovered that adolescence has ceased to be a sordid state of life, and that it is the most important period in which to develop personality and nourish char- acter, she taught us a code of decency in so gentle a tone, with so masterful a meaning, that we were not languid in gathering up her intentions and when she felt that we lcnew a little about what a personality should resemble, she said to us: Malce the world a little more beau- tiful for your having been in it. From then on, Sister meant something to a great many. One day she told us to hold fast our dreams, and to lceep one secret corner in our hearts where little dreams may go. To scores of us it was a phrase we had unlcnowingly waited lor. There were never many people willing to tell us that dreams and dreamless action constitute the glory of youth. It has to be someone courageous, the lcind whom one never misses until the courageous one has searched the atmosphere for a higher ad- venture. And that same day, she com- pleted our admiration ol her by telling us that she had always wanted to be a missionary. And because she had gar- nered a right to dream, her dream became a reality, and she went away in the autumn when the world was warm and