CORDONI, Bartolomeo da Città di Castello, Blessed. - Observant Franciscan of the Umbrian province, b. in 1471 of a noble family, d. near Tunis in 1535, probably on 10 (or 9) August. He was a pupil of Poliziano in Florence; having married, he had two daughters, but after the death of his wife he became a Franciscan in the convent of S. Maria degli Angeli (May 1504). He assisted the plague-stricken at Terni (1526) and at Gubbio (1527). A missionary in Morocco (1534), he was beaten for the faith; the following year he encouraged the Crusaders of Charles V in the assault on the fortress of La Goletta (Tunis), defended by the Barbary corsairs. For the eminence of his virtues he was venerated as blessed.
His disciple the theologian Ilarione Pighi of Borgo S. Sepolcro, with the approval of Card. Grimani, published posthumously (Perugia 1538) the mystical little work De unione animae cum supereminenti lumine, written in the form of a dialogue, partly in Latin and partly in Italian. The Capuchin Girolamo da Molfetta, who prepared a 2nd edition of it: Dialogo della unione spirituale de Dio con l'anima, dove sono interlocutori l'amor divino, la sposa anima et la ragione humana (Milan 1539), with the approval of the inquisitor of Milan. Subsequently a printed broadsheet was put into circulation, in which a new way of praying, taken from the epilogue, was taught by means of geometric figures, probably the work of another author. The Holy Office condemned (8 March 1654) the book and the epilogue. They were nevertheless reprinted at Venice in 1593 and in 1598 (?), with a false indication of the author: fra' Bartolomeo da Castello, Capuchin; a new condemnation by the Holy Office (29 Jan. 1600, published on 7 Aug. 1603), and still in Feb. 1647 there is talk again of a «little book»: Dialogo abbreviato dell'unione spirituale di Dio con l'anima. Because of these censures the Dialogo is still on the Index.
C. makes a profound and fervent analysis of divine love, which leads the soul to union with and transformation into God; of the means or ways to attain it: humility, faith, the Eucharist, self-renunciation, infused Grace, the gift of love; of the operations of the soul fixed in love. He draws on the Holy Fathers and the scholastics, but above all on Jacopone da Todi and Ubertino da Casale. He protests his total adherence to the judgment of the Church; the first editor notes the opposition of some confreres to the doctrines of the pious master; those, for example, of the exaltation of faith with respect to works, of the continuous Mass that the loving soul celebrates in Christ, of the «inspiration» between God and the soul whereby it generates and offers Christ to the Father, which could lend themselves, in an atmosphere of Protestant doctrinal subversion, to equivocal interpretations; the real abuses, moreover, induced by the «Epilogo», provoked the condemnation. Of this condemnation the annalist Giuseppe da Cannobio and the bibliographer Bernardo da Bologna were unaware, attributing the work to Girolamo da Molfetta, probably confusing him with the celebrated preacher and polemicist Giacomo da Molfetta.
Bibliography10 works
Ilarino da Milano