A reflection on our Franciscan Heritage
by Jack Clark Robinson, OFM 

This picture was made in December, 2012 at the Interprovincial Novitiate Community, which was then located in Burlington, Wisconsin. Jose Carballo, standing in the center, was Minister General and had asked that the Definitoria of the seven Provinces of the Order in the United States all come together for the very first time. Several of the Definitoria, specifically the those of the three Provinces in the Midwest: St. John the Baptist, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Sacred Heart, along with Our Lady of Guadalupe had previously met together on a regular basis for several years. They had even conducted a few convocations, beginning with one with Minister General Giacomo Bini present in St. Louis in the fall of 2000. There had been a retreat at Serra Retreat in Malibu the previous summer as well to which all of the Definitoria were invited. But this meeting was different.

First, the Minister General had called together all of the Definitoria, so participation was high. Second, for the first time, the administrations of Holy Name and Saint Barbara Province, which had at that point not yet participated in any level of inter-provincial formation, got to experience a little bit of the interprovincial novitiate. Our own Jorge Hernandez was one of the novices who impressed all of the assembled friars with his remarks as to what the interprovincial novitiate meant to him. Soon after this meeting, Holy Name and Saint Barbara Provinces decided to join the interprovincial novitiate. Third, this meeting was specifically designed to pose questions about the future of the Order in the United States. What was happening now and how can the prospects for the future be enhanced?

The major decision of the meeting, the business sessions of which were held at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee and hosted by Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Province, was to name an Interprovincial Commission to study the current situation of the seven Provinces in the United States. The Commission was to present their findings and suggestions for how to move forward based on the information that they gathered to the Ministers Provincial of the United States, who would be gathered in San Diego in October 2013 as part of a regular meeting of the EnglishSpeaking Conference. Seven friars were named to the Commission shortly after the Milwaukee meeting ended, one from each Province. They were Dan Anderson of St. John the Baptist, Craig Wilking of Assumption, Michael Jennrich of Sacred Heart, Dominic Monti of Holy Name, Regan Chapman of Saint Barbara, Michael Dela Penna of Immaculate Conception and Jack Clark Robinson of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Jack was named chair of the Commission. The Commission began work in January 2013, first with a conference call gathering, fittingly enough with Jack back at the novitiate, the site of this picture, where he was teaching U.S. Franciscan history to the novices. The first decision of that conference call meeting was the approval of a prayer to be circulated to all the friars of the seven Provinces. Those same novices scattered among the Definitors in the picture, reproduced over a thousand copies of the prayer and sent it to the secretaries of the Provinces for distribution to all the friars.

That prayer is still worth remembering and praying, even as others followed it with unfolding developments in the Revitalization and Restructuring Process:
 
May Francis and Clare inspire us May all the friars who have gone before us pray for us. May we all help each other as brothers. Amen.