Francis de Sales Gliebe — My Lady Poverty

Born Adolph Gliebe in a Gottschee German village in Austria-Hungary, Francis de Sales Gliebe came to California as a child, entered the Franciscans, and became a teacher, pastor, and verse dramatist. At St. Anthony’s Seminary beside Old Mission Santa Barbara, he brought classical training and Franciscan history together in My Lady Poverty (1912), a five-act blank-verse drama tracing Francis of Assisi’s passage from worldly ambition to radical renunciation. A year later he wrote The Planting of the Cross, a Serra bicentenary pageant staged for thousands on the Mission steps and subsequently filmed under director Lorimer Johnston. The film is lost or unlocated, but the printed pageant survives as a vivid record of the meeting of poetry, Catholic ritual, school theatre, tourism, mission mythology, and early Southern California motion pictures. This edition resets both recoverable plays from their original page images, preserving dramatic lineation, speakers, stage directions, songs, prose passages, and meaningful shared-line indents while removing scan artifacts and accidental narrow-page wraps.