Miquel Baptista Gran Peris was born on 24 November 1620 at Riudoms in Catalonia, in a modest house on the little Carrer de la Butxaca that today bears his name, and was baptized that same day. His parents, Miguel, a poor farmer, and Catalina, gave him the little schooling their means allowed; at eight years old he left the classroom for the fields, tending flocks and working at his father's side. He was to remain, humanly speaking, an unlettered man all his life, yet God was already teaching him in the silence of the countryside the prayer that would make him a master of the interior life.
His heart was set on the cloister, but his father had other plans and arranged a marriage for him when he was eighteen. Miquel obeyed. Tradition preserved by his biographers relates that on the very night of the wedding he persuaded his young bride to join him in a vow of chastity, and that the two lived together as brother and sister. Sixteen months later she died, declaring to her mother and to the archdeacon of the cathedral of Barcelona that she died a virgin. Freed at last, and having overcome his father's resistance and the hesitations of the Father Provincial — who suspected that so recent a widowhood, and not God, was drawing him — he received the Franciscan habit as a lay brother in the novitiate of Sant Miquel d'Escornalbou, near Riudecanyes, on 14 July 1640, taking the name Bonaventura. He made his religious profession there one year later, on 14 July 1641.
The Catalan revolt soon brought French troops into the district. It is told that when the friars of Escornalbou fled before them, Brother Bonaventura alone remained, threw open the convent doors to shelter the terrified country people, and gathered them in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament; he then went out to the French commander and obtained that the soldiers withdraw without harming a single one of those he had taken in.
For seventeen years he served the Franciscan province of Catalonia. In 1643 he accompanied the friars who left Escornalbou to found a convent at Móra d'Ebre, and afterwards he was moved often, as obedience required, to Terrassa, Barcelona, Riudoms, Girona, Figueres, la Bisbal d'Empordà and the hermitage of Saint Agnes. Everywhere he took the humblest tasks: cook, porter, infirmarian, and questor begging bread from door to door. Those who lived with him spoke of his long vigils, his ecstasies, and the wonders God worked through his hands.
In March 1658, with his superiors' leave granted for only four months, he set out for Italy — a journey which the old accounts also surround with marvels. He prayed at Assisi and at Loreto, spent a time at Fonte Colombo where Saint Francis had written the Rule, and then settled in Rome, first at the Aracoeli and, two months later, as porter at the Irish College of Sant'Isidoro; he also stayed in the Irish friars' house at Capranica. In the great city the poor Catalan lay brother was recognized for what he was: a man of God. Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protector of the Franciscans, and Cardinal Cesare Facchinetti took up his cause and won him the freedom he needed against the opposition of superiors within his own Order.
On 20 August 1662 Pope Alexander VII approved the foundation of the Santo Retiro, houses of retreat governed by the primitive Rule of Saint Francis. The first was opened that same year at Ponticelli Sabino, at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, hidden among the mountains, where Bonaventura settled with fourteen companions — and where the founder himself took the office of cook. So began the Riformella, a reform within the Roman province of the Reformed Friars Minor, intended not as a new Order but as a place where friars and priests worn out by preaching could be restored in meditation and silence, and drink again at the wellspring of the Franciscan spirit. In 1666, as guardian, this man who could scarcely read composed the constitutions of his reform and had them printed at Naples, dedicating them to King Charles II of Spain.
The Riformella spread quickly to other retreat houses of the Roman province — Montorio Romano, Vicovaro, Pofi, Vallecorsa — and was later planted in Tuscany by Saint Leonard of Port Maurice, with two communities at Florence and one at Prato. In Rome, on land obtained from Cardinal Barberini, Bonaventura raised from its foundations the convent of San Bonaventura al Palatino, begun in 1670; the friars entered it in 1677, though the church was only consecrated in 1689, after his death. It became the principal house of his reform. He was guardian at Ponticelli and at the Palatine convent and, with the title of director and commissary, superior of all the communities of the Riformella. Four popes — Alexander VII, Clement IX, Clement X and Innocent XI — sought the counsel of the barefoot lay brother from Riudoms.
He never forgot the village that had given him to God. In 1679, at the request of the town councillors of Riudoms, he sent from Rome the relics of Saint Boniface, Saint Julian and Saint Vincent; ever since, Riudoms keeps the Feast of the Holy Relics on the second Sunday of May.
Bonaventura died at San Bonaventura al Palatino in Rome on 11 September 1684, aged sixty-three, still a lay brother, still poor, still obedient. The ordinary process on his virtues and miracles was concluded in 1732 and the cause introduced before the Congregation of Rites in 1736. Pope Pius VI declared him Venerable on 8 August 1775. Two healings were recognized as miraculous: in 1790 a woman in grave danger of death after a fall from a horse was inexplicably cured when his relic was applied to her; in 1818 a woman who had lain unconscious for three days after childbirth recovered instantly at the touch of his relics. The brief of beatification was issued on 21 May 1906, and Pope Saint Pius X proclaimed him Blessed the following month; his cause for canonization was resumed in December 1909. His praise is read in the Roman Martyrology on 11 September. His body rested first in the church of San Bonaventura al Palatino, and since 1972 it has been venerated in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the church of Saint James the Apostle at Riudoms, where each 24 November his relics are carried in procession through the streets of the village he never ceased to love.
May Blessed Bonaventura Gran obtain for us the grace to serve God gladly in hidden and humble work, and imitate today his silence before the Lord — take time apart for prayer, as he did, so that everything else may be done for love.
