Eager to Love, by Richard Rohr, and When Saint Francis Saved the Church, by Jon M. Sweeney

Near the azaleas in front of the first house we owned, my wife and I put a small statue of St. Francis, his arms holding a basket of birdseed. When we sold the house two years later, we forgot to take the statue. For the next several years, whenever we would drive by, we would contemplate whether we should have one of our kids dash into the yard and retrieve our Francis.

Richard Rohr and Jon Sweeney, the authors of two new books on St. Francis, would be united in this advice to us: forget the statue. “Birdbath Francis­canism,” as Rohr calls it, is only preventing you from learning from the real St. Francis. And now that we have a pope named Francis, Rohr and Sweeney believe there’s no better time to rediscover the real St. Francis and his relevance for today. Each author sets out to paint a portrait of the real Francis’s spiritual vision.

Fans of Rohr’s work will be glad he did. In Eager to Love, Rohr outlines the contours of what he takes to be the authentic Franciscan way, which turns out to look uncannily like the spiritual vision Rohr himself has been articulating for decades. Francis is an exemplar of what Rohr calls mature religion. He writes, “Mature religion serves as a conveyor belt for the evolution of human consciousness. Immature religion actually stalls us at very low levels of well-disguised egocentricity.” Rohr associates Francis with a highly evolved human consciousness.