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The Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus
Book Five
Chapter Threea
JESUS WHO BRINGS FORTH FRANCIS
421b1At the close of the fifth statusb of the Church's pilgrimage,c the self-indulgent were teeming like oxen,d the avaricious crawling like reptiles, the arrogant as fierce as beasts, bringing an all-out defiling influence upon her life and causing her to be gnawed by a decep-
- In the second chapter of this Fifth Book, Ubertino writes: ". . . It is sufficient to recall that the Church of that time had been reduced to such a state of humiliation that Jesus did not intervene by means of a new offspring possessing the spirit of poverty, so that the Church would have to undergo a judgment of death, as the calamities of heresy oppressing the Church's surface clearly demonstrates." Cf. Ubertino, Arbor V II 421.
- For an overview of the development of the theology of imitation of Christ, see Edouard Cothenet, Etienne Ledeur, Pierre Adnés, Aimé Solignac, Bernard Spaapen, "Imitation du Christ," Dictionnaire de Spiritualité Ascetique et Mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1971), 1536-1601, 2355-2368; English translation, Imitating Christ, trans. Simone Inkey and Lucy Tinsley, with preface by John L. Boyle (St. Meinrad, IN: Abbey Press, 1974).
- The close bond between Francis and Dominic emerges in AC and 2C 148-149, cf. FA:ED II 342-4. For the Dominican perspective, see FA:ED II 782-805.
- Ubertino had already anticipated, in the first chapter of Book Five, the role of Francis: "Thus we can add to what we have called the Gospel status, the renewal in the Church by means of the least among the lesser, Francis, or to say it in a better way, by means of Jesus in Francis." Ubertino's view, in other words, is that Christ lives again in Francis and in him renews the Church, a theme to which the author repeatedly returns in this Fifth Book. (Cf. Ubertino, Arbor V 1, 409.)