Franciscans International unites followers and friends of St. Francis in working towards a more just and peaceful world.  The life of St. Francis inspires our work for integrity of creation, peacemaking, and concern for the poor.  So who was St. Francis? 

Francis’s world is a medieval world of non-unified Italian city-states warring among themselves for the lands surrounding their walled cities. He is born in 1182 in the Umbrian town of Assisi, and is baptized, John. At the time of his baptism his father is away on a business trip to France; and when he returns, he changes his son’s name to Francesco, the Frenchman.

Painting by Piero Casentini

True to his name, the boy grows up enamored of the French language and of the tales of the Knights and Ladies of French Romance. He is a carefree, generous young man who pursues the good life with gusto, partying and carousing with his friends. But throughout all the levity of his younger years, he dreams of becoming a knight, a serious, bloody enterprise. And when a war breaks out between Assisi and its neighbor, Perugia, he gets his chance to ride off to war as a knight of Assisi, only to be captured as a prisoner of war in the defeat of Assisi in the very first skirmish.

How could he have known that this was the end of war for him, this humiliating defeat of his hometown? And how could he have known that the year of imprisonment in a Perugian prison would change him deeply? At just 21 years old, Francis returns home to Assisi a broken man, to lie in bed for a year. The richest young man in Assisi, Francis spent a year in prison, then a year in bed. His companions had dubbed him the King of the Revels: Francis, the son of the cloth merchant, Pietro Bernardone, and the French woman, Lady Pica.

He will try to go to war again as a knight in the papal army battling the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor, but God has other plans. In a vision, God tells Francis to return to Assisi where it will be revealed to him what he is to do. And so Francis retreats from war, and one day while he is praying before the crucifix of the dilapidated little chapel of San Damiano, outside the walls of Assisi, he receives his call from God. From the crucifix comes the voice, “Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.”

Francis is to build and to repair, not to tear down with weapons of destruction. He begins to beg stones and repairs with his own hands the run-down chapel of San Damiano, which is the “house” Francis believes his vision refers to. It is this house, this little church, but it is more. It is the larger house, the Christian Church itself that he is to repair.

Francis learns this larger implication of the vision one day when he sees a leper on the road and impulsively jumps from his horse, gives coins to the leper and embraces him. Unbelievably, he is not repulsed but filled with joy, for he realizes he has embraced his Lord, Jesus Christ.

And so it happens that Francis goes to live among the lepers, ministering to them and learning from them. Here, he realizes, are the living stones; and together, they are building the Kingdom of God on earth. Here is God among the rejected, the despised, the poor.

Thus it begins, the Franciscan rebuilding of the Church. Others soon join Francis, and they become a brotherhood, and the Church approves their way of life to live with the poor as poor men who observe the Holy Gospel wholeheartedly.

Francis and the brothers preach and work with their hands for their daily bread; and when they receive nothing for their labor, they beg for food. They continue to live with the lepers, making peace with them and with all people and all creation by making peace with their own aversion to the lepers. They embrace them instead of running away.

Women come to join them; the first is Clare, the daughter of the knight, Favarone. And the Bishop of Assisi gives Clare and her companions, as their cloister, San Damiano, the church Francis himself restored with his own hands. There they live in extreme Gospel poverty in contemplation of the Poor Crucified Christ. They work with their hands and depend on the begging of the brothers for their sustenance. They pray for and minister to the sick who are brought to their door.

Francis, in the meantime, is expanding the brothers’ ministry beyond Assisi to all of Italy and beyond. He himself, with one or two brothers, makes missionary journeys preaching conversion and forgiveness which he sees as THE means of peacemaking. He travels to Spain, France, Switzerland, Dalmatia, and even to Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. He tries to be a peace-maker between the Christians and Muslims, going so far as to enter the camp of the Sultan, again preaching conversion of heart and forgiveness. The Sultan listens and gives Francis safe passage through his kingdom.

The animal and plant worlds, too, receive Francis’ compassionate love. He reaches out to and reveres all created things. He preaches to the animals and birds and fish. He embraces and tames the ravening wolf of Gubbio.

He preaches always the God-man, Jesus Christ. Francis tries to make him visible and tangible, as when, three years before his death, he celebrates Midnight Mass with live animals to recreate the first Christmas, thus popularizing the tradition of the Christmas crib.

The following year, while Francis is in deep prayer on the mountain of LaVerna in Tuscany, he receives the sacred stigmata, the five wounds of Christ, becoming himself a visible image of his crucified Lord.

Shortly afterward he sings his Canticle of the Creatures, his swan song that sums up his life and attests to the peace, joy, and integration a life of love and forgiveness brings. He sings of all creatures as his brothers and sisters and bids them forgive one another if they want to be crowned by God. He then welcomes even death as his sister and embraces her.

The man who longed to be a knight, a man of war, dies a man of peace at peace with God, with himself, with all of creation. God changed his heart, and his changed heart changed the world.

Contributed by Murray Bodo OFM