Man from Assisi
by Mike Oettle
WHAT sort of
picture comes to your mind when you read the calendar entry for 4 October?
“Francis of Assisi, Religious, 1226” it says. Here is a man so identified with
nature, writes Sibyl Harton, “that he has become a sort of patron-saint of
animal mixed-grills and sentimental bird-tables”.[1] But the most imortant thing about Francis is his asceticism[2] – and it is worth noting that he shares the title patron saint of Italy with that other notable ascetic Catherine of Siena (1346-80). Some people might think of him as “Brother Sun” after the popular film Brother Sun, Sister Moon (although these his way of speakng of the light of day and of night).
Thanks to that film, though, one image is probably fixed in the popular mind: this son of a wealthy merchant taking off his clothes and leaving home without them. Born in the Umbrian town of Assisi[3] in 1181, or ’82, he was known as Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone (Francis son of Peter Bernardone).[4] In 1202 he became a soldier and fought in a petty local war. Held prisoner for a year, he fell ill on his release. After trying again to enlist, he had a dream which sent him home to await a call to a new kind of knighthood. Previously one who loathed beggars and lepers, he now found himself among beggars and felt such compassion for one that he kissed him. Visiting the ruined church of San Damiano, outside Assisi, he saw Jesus in a dream, saying: “Go, Francis, and repair my house, which, as you see, is well nigh in ruins.” Taking cloth from his father’s shop and a horse, Francis sold them and tried to give the money to the priest at San Damiano’s. His father, angered at what he saw as theft, summoned him before the magistrates and, when Francis refused to acknowledge the court, before the bishop. Francis’s response in the bishop’s court was to take off every stitch he wore but a hair shirt. The astonished bishop gave him a cloak, and thus clad, Francis went off to live a life of poverty and devotion. His father’s response? Picking up his money and his son’s clothes, he cursed Francis.
Returning to San Damiano’s, Francis began to work at its restoration. But refusing to take food from the priest there, he took a bowl and went begging in Assisi, among his former friends. Branches and thatch gave him a shelter. A chapel of St Peter and the chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli[5] were next restored, and it was at this last chapel, on St Matthias’s Day, 24 February 1208 – two years after his departure from his father – that he sensed that the house Christ wanted him to restore was the Church Universal. He felt called to a ministry of itinerant preaching as Jesus had commanded the Twelve in Matthew 10 – without gold, silver or spare clothing. He soon gathered followers, and when they numbered 12 he went to Rome to get the approval of Pope Innocent III, which he received verbally on 16 April that year – now regarded as the founding date of the Franciscan Order. Women entered the order in 1212 when Francis gave a habit or dress like his own to an Assisian noblewoman named Clara, remembered as St Clare of Assisi. The women who followed her were called Poor Clares. And in 1221 Francis formed the Third Order of Brothers and Sisters of Penance, made up of lay folk who remained in their homes and did not take vows, but carried out the principles of Franciscan life.
Francis was not ready to take up the administration of the growing Franciscan Order. He continued fasting, praying and preaching, and after several attempts to take the gospel to Islam went to Egypt in 1219, where he managed to preach before the Sultan. This potentate was reportedly impressed, and gave Francis permission to visit the holy places in Palestine. But Francis had to return to Italy as his friars (as the Franciscans were called) were getting troublesome. He appointed a vicar (someone to lead the order for him), who soon died, and had to appoint another. A major problem was that Francis’s simple rule was inadequate for a large and growing order, and he spent some years revising and expanding it. After it was approved in 1223, he withdrew increasingly from the world.
Francis “considered all nature as the mirror of God and as so many steps to God”.[6] All creatures were to him his brothers and sisters, as he so clearly wrote in his Canticle of the Creatures (also called the Canticle of the Sun), “in which God is praised for all His creatures, finally even for Sister Death”.[7]
Suffering and visions characterise what was left of his life (just 44 or 45 years), the last period of which he spent with Clare and her sisters at San Damiano’s – and it was here that he composed that famous canticle. He also received the marks of Christ’s passion, which he kept secret, but after his death in 1226 – characteristically in a rapture of suffering – it was announced generally that Francis had borne the Stigmata.
Rome proclaimed him a saint just
two years later, in 1228, and in 1230 his remains were moved to the basilica
being built in his memory at the west end of the city of Assisi. In 1979 he was proclaimed patron saint of ecologists.
His order remains, but it never could adhere closely enough to his simple example. The party which tried hardest to do so was eventually suppressed, and three different orders of friars today claim descent from Francis’s band of preachers. The Poor Clares have, perhaps, set a better example.
