Francis of Assisi

Francis was born rich. His father was a cloth merchant prosperous enough that his son spent his youth as the leader of the young revelers of Assisi — fashionable, free-spending, popular, dreaming of becoming a knight and winning glory. He went to war, was captured, spent a long imprisonment in Perugia, came home sick, and somewhere in the convalescence the glory drained out of his ambitions.

He found Christ in two places that revolted him. Riding one day, he met a leper and, instead of fleeing, got down from his horse, embraced the man, and kissed him. Praying in a ruined chapel called San Damiano, he heard the painted crucifix tell him to repair Christ's house, which was falling into ruin. He took it literally at first and began carrying stones.

Then his father hauled him before the bishop, and Francis returned everything: money, inheritance, even the clothes on his back. He walked out of his old life owning nothing. Men began to follow him, then thousands of them, and the Order of Friars Minor was born almost by accident from one man's attempt to live the Gospel exactly as it was written.

Near the end, fasting on La Verna, he received in his own body the five wounds of the Christ he had spent his life imitating. He died two years later at the Portiuncula, laid on the bare ground at his own request, singing.

He was born in 1181 or 1182 in Assisi, a hill town in Umbria, the son of Pietro di Bernardone, a wealthy cloth merchant. Francis grew up with money, fine clothes, songs, friends, and the taste for a beautiful life. He wanted to be a knight. It was the great romantic ambition of his age, and he had the means to chase it.

War with Perugia broke the spell. Francis was captured and spent the better part of a year in prison. He returned home ill, and a later attempt at military glory ended almost before it began, turned back by a dream he did not yet understand. The world he had wanted — wealth, status, knighthood, admiration — began to look like nothing.

He drifted toward the poor, toward ruined country chapels, toward prayer. His father watched the heir to the family business become a man who gave the family's money away. The conflict was not a misunderstanding. Francis's conversion touched his father's purse, and that meant it touched the household order itself.

Lepers were the horror of the medieval world — disfigured, contagious, legally cut off, forced to warn others of their approach. Francis, by his own later account, could not bear them. The revulsion was physical and total.

One day, riding outside Assisi, he met one. Instead of turning away, he dismounted, put money in the man's hands, embraced him, and kissed him. In his Testament, Francis remembered the turn: what had seemed bitter was changed into sweetness Testament of St. Francis.

This is the Francis the sentimental picture leaves out. Before the birds and the gentleness, there was a hard act of will, a deliberate embrace of the thing he feared and loathed most. His tenderness was not softness. It was conquered revulsion.

Around the same time, praying in the half-ruined church of San Damiano outside Assisi, Francis heard the painted figure on the crucifix speak to him: repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin.

He took the words literally. He began rebuilding San Damiano with his own hands, then other small ruined churches nearby. To pay for the work, he sold cloth from his father's business and tried to give the money to the priest.

Only later did the larger meaning become clear. The house Christ wanted repaired was the Church, and Francis would rebuild it not by office or policy but by a life so radically obedient to the Gospel that the whole Church felt the shock of it.

Pietro di Bernardone wanted his money back, and he wanted his son brought to heel. He brought Francis before the bishop of Assisi to settle the matter publicly.

Francis returned more than the money. In front of the bishop and the town, he took off the rich clothes his father had bought him, placed the money with them, and handed the bundle back. He could now say with complete freedom, he declared, that he had one Father: the Father in heaven.

The bishop covered him with his cloak. Francis walked out of his father's house, his father's wealth, and his father's name. It is the founding gesture of his whole life: the man who owned nothing and therefore had nothing left to defend.

Francis did not set out to found an order. He set out to live the Gospel exactly as it was written, and other men asked to do the same. The decisive moment came in 1208, when he heard at Mass Christ's command to go out with no money, no bag, no spare clothes, and to proclaim the kingdom. Francis heard it and recognized his rule of life.

He called his chosen way Lady Poverty. His brothers were to own nothing, not individually and not as a community. They were to work for their bread and beg when work failed, living among the poor as the poorest of all. A man who owns nothing has nothing to lose and nothing to protect.

Men came. First a handful, then many. Francis went to Rome for approval, and Pope Innocent III gave it. The Order of Friars Minor, the lesser brothers, had begun.

In 1212, an eighteen-year-old noblewoman of Assisi named Clare heard Francis preach and was set on fire by the same Gospel. On the night after Palm Sunday she left her father's house, met Francis and his brothers, and let him cut her hair and clothe her in a rough habit. Her family tried to take her back. She would not go.

Francis placed Clare and the women who joined her at San Damiano, the first church he had rebuilt. There she founded what became the Poor Clares, the women's branch of the Franciscan movement. Clare embraced poverty as fiercely as Francis did and defended the privilege of poverty for her sisters after his death.

She was his companion in spirit. When Francis was blind and in pain, it was near Clare at San Damiano that he composed the Canticle.

In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the lines between the Christian and Muslim armies at Damietta and asked to see the Sultan, al-Kamil. He went poor, unarmed, and willing to die.

He preached Christ openly. The Sultan did not convert, by the accounts, but neither did he kill Francis. He listened, treated him with courtesy, and sent him safely back. In an age of holy war, Francis crossed a battlefield to meet his enemy face to face and offer him the Gospel.

At Christmas of 1223, in the little town of Greccio, Francis arranged a living representation of the Nativity: a manger, hay, an ox and a donkey, the people gathered by torchlight while Mass was offered. He wanted them to see the poverty of Christ's birth — the straw, the cold, the tenderness of God made a child.

Every Christmas crib in church or home descends from that instinct. Francis made the Gospel concrete. He wanted people to touch and see the fact that God had made himself poor and small for love of them.

In the late summer of 1224, two years before his death, Francis withdrew to La Verna for a forty-day fast. He was worn down, nearly blind, and longing to be conformed completely to the crucified Christ.

Around the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, while he was praying at dawn, he saw a vision of a seraph bearing the figure of the Crucified. When the vision faded, the marks of Christ's wounds appeared on Francis's hands, feet, and side. He bore them for the last two years of his life and tried to keep them hidden.

His is the first recorded case of the stigmata in Christian history, and the early attestation is unusually strong. Brother Leo, who cared for Francis, left written testimony. The Church has not needed to make the event theatrical. A man who spent his life trying to imitate the crucified Christ was, at the end, marked by him.

In the last year of his life, nearly blind and in constant pain, Francis composed the work that is most purely his: the Canticle of the Creatures, also called the Canticle of Brother Sun.

It is a hymn of praise to God sung through creation. Francis praises God for and through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and Sister Mother Earth. Near the end, sick and dying, he added praise even through Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living person can escape.

It is one of the earliest poems in the Italian language, and it has never stopped being loved. But it is not nature-worship. It is praise of God, the Most High and good Lord, offered through a created world that Francis received as gift.

By autumn of 1226 he was dying. He asked to be taken back to the Portiuncula, the little chapel near Assisi where his movement had begun. At the end, he asked the brothers to lay him on the bare ground, stripped of even his habit, so that he might die as he had lived: poor, holding nothing, in the hands of God.

He blessed his brothers, asked for bread to be broken in memory of the Last Supper, had the Passion according to St. John read aloud, and died singing the psalms. It was the evening of October 3, 1226. He was forty-four or forty-five years old.

Fewer than two years later, on July 16, 1228, Pope Gregory IX canonized him at Assisi. The man who wanted to own nothing is buried under one of the most beloved churches in the world.

In 1979, Pope St. John Paul II named Francis patron of ecology. It is a fitting honor and an easily misunderstood one.

Francis loved creation because he loved the Creator. He did not worship nature; he worshiped the God whose handiwork nature is. He saw every created thing as a reason to praise God. The creatures were his brothers and sisters because they shared one Father.

Understood rightly, his patronage is a gift to a confused age. It shows that a Catholic can love the created world precisely because it is created: not God, but charged with the glory of God.

He matters now because he took the Gospel literally, and it worked. Everyone admires the Sermon on the Mount in theory. Francis is the man who actually did it: gave away everything, loved enemies, blessed the poor, took no thought for tomorrow, and found freedom.

His poverty was not contempt for good things. It was freedom from grasping. In a culture arranged around acquiring and keeping, Francis is still disruptive: a rich man who discovered that the way to be free was to let go of everything.

And the sentimental version is a lie. The true Francis is not a garden statue. He is a man who embraced a leper to conquer his own disgust, stripped in a public square to be free of his father's money, crossed a battlefield unarmed, and bore the wounds of Christ. He was gentle because he was first brave.

Francis wrote little, and most of what shaped his popular image came later. Go first to the genuine sources: the Canticle, the Testament, the Admonitions, and the early Lives.

Read the Canticle of the Creatures slowly, noticing that every created thing leads back to God. Then read the Testament and the Admonitions, plain words from Francis to his brothers. After that, read Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure. Save the Little Flowers for what it is: beloved legend that catches his spirit without functioning as eyewitness history.

This is how the Canticle begins, and it is the key to everything. Before a single creature is named — before Brother Sun and Sister Water and Sister Mother Earth — there is God, the Most High, the all-powerful, the good, to whom all praise belongs.

Francis does not begin with nature. He begins with the Lord of nature, and only then turns to the creatures, who are praiseworthy because they are his. Get that order right, and you have Francis. Get it wrong, and you have a garden statue.