When he entered the Dominican order, nearly every one of his classmates had what he jokingly called a spiritual girlfriend. Not an actual relationship, obviously, but a particular female mystic each man had grown personally attached to, someone whose writing he returned to again and again. Some had Catherine of Siena. Others gravitated toward Elizabeth of the Trinity. Father Bonaventure’s own attachment turned out to be Saint Faustina, whose writing he first encountered as a Protestant, long before he became Catholic.
He was serious underneath the joke about why this pattern exists, and it’s not simply about personal taste in devotional reading. Men and women, he argued, relate to Christ differently, not as a matter of one being better than the other, but as a real difference in how each is loved by him. Women, in traditional Catholic theology, are described as brides of Christ, loved and drawn into intimacy in a particular way. Men, especially priests, are described more often as servants or instruments, useful to him, put to work by him, but occupying a genuinely different relational position. Neither position is lesser. They’re simply different, the way a marriage and a friendship both involve real love while working differently.
That difference is exactly why reading female mystics matters for men specifically. A man reading Saint Faustina’s diary isn’t looking for a mirror of his own relationship with Christ. He’s getting to listen in on a conversation he wouldn’t naturally have access to otherwise; a particular register of tenderness Christ reveals specifically to his brides. Father Bonaventure described this as genuinely helpful for understanding who Christ actually is, not just how Christ relates to any one specific reader.
He offered a personal example that lands harder than any abstract theological point could. As a father himself, he said he loves his daughters differently from how he loves his sons, not more, but differently, in a way tied specifically to who they are as his daughters. Reading Faustina’s diary, where Christ tells her to ask for anything at all and he will give it to her, Father Bonaventure recognized that exact tenderness. It’s the same impulse he feels toward his own daughters, magnified and made perfect. Reading a female mystic, in other words, isn’t an optional devotional preference for men. It’s one of the more direct routes available to actually seeing a real dimension of God’s character that a man’s own relationship with Christ wouldn’t naturally surface on its own.
There’s a broader point sitting underneath all of this about receptivity. Women’s bodies, Father Bonaventure noted, are physically built around receptivity in a way that isn’t true of men. Catholic theology, following an older Aristotelian framework where body and soul are deeply linked rather than separate, holds that this physical receptivity carries over into a corresponding spiritual receptivity. Since every human being, male or female, stands in a fundamentally receptive posture toward God’s grace, women’s particular experience of that receptivity, expressed through the female mystics, ends up offering a privileged window into what our shared relationship with God is actually meant to look like.
None of this requires becoming a Dominican or tracking down a Polish-language edition of anything. It just means being willing to read outside your own instinctive frame of reference, even in prayer. If you’ve never picked up a book by a female mystic, Saint Faustina remains as good a starting point as any, not because women only see this part of God, but because they see this part of him with a clarity worth listening to.
For the rest of this conversation with Father Bonaventure, including why he believes Saint Faustina deserves the title Doctor of the Church, listen to the full episode.
