On Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time our Church invites us to first read and reflect on a passage from the beginning of the first letter of the apostle Paul to the Galatians (1:13—2:10) entitled "The calling and apostleship of Paul". Our treasure, which follows, is from a short discourse by Saint Bonaventure, bishop.

Saint Bonaventure was born about the year 1218 at Bagnorea in Tuscany. He studied philosophy and theology at Paris and, having earned the title Master, he taught his fellow members of the Order of Friars Minor with great success. He was elected Minister General of the Order, a position he filled with prudence and wisdom. After being made Cardinal-Bishop of Albano, he died at the Council of Lyons in 1274. His writing did much to illuminate the study of both theology and philosophy.

The principal teaching of Saint Bonaventure's short discourse (often identified with his spiritual exhortations such as those found in The Journey of the Mind into God and similar brief works) is that the soul's ultimate purpose is loving union with God, attained not primarily through intellectual mastery but through humility, prayer, purification of the heart, and the fire of divine love. Bonaventure emphasizes that true wisdom is born from holiness rather than scholarship alone, and that the Christian life is a gradual ascent: from self-knowledge and detachment from sin, through contemplation of God in creation and within the soul, to a transformative encounter with God's love in Christ. Knowledge enlightens, but charity perfects; therefore, the highest goal of the spiritual life is not to know much about God, but to be deeply united to Him in love.

The Galatians to whom the letter is addressed were Paul's converts, most likely among the descendants of Celts who had invaded western and central Asia Minor in the third century B.C. and had settled in the territory around Ancyra (modern Ankara, Turkey). Paul had passed through this area on his second missionary journey and again on his third. It is less likely that the recipients of this letter were Paul's churches in the southern regions of Pisidia, Lycaonia, and Pamphylia where he had preached earlier in the Hellenized cities of Perge, Iconium, Pisidian Antioch, Lystra, and Derbe; this area was part of the Roman province of Galatia, and some scholars think that South Galatia was the destination of this letter.

St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians teaches that justification comes through faith in Jesus Christ, not through works of the Mosaic Law, and that to return to the Law as a means of salvation is to fall back into spiritual slavery. Paul insists that the Gospel he preached is of divine origin and defends the freedom of Gentile believers against those who required circumcision and legal observance. He presents Christ's death and resurrection as the decisive act that frees humanity from sin, the Law's curse, and the powers of the flesh. True Christian freedom, Paul explains, is not license but life in the Spirit, where believers are transformed inwardly and enabled to fulfill the Law through love, producing the fruits of the Spirit as the visible sign of life in Christ.