St. Francis

Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)

Francis of Assisi was the universally admired founder of the Order ofFriars Minor (Franciscans). Born Francesco Bernardone, son of a wealthy cloth merchant from Assisi, he was a popular,high-spirited youth, much inspired by chivalric ideals of the troubador and the knight.In his early twenties he experienced a gradual but profound religious conversion, expressed in a number of dramatic gestures such as the exchanging of clothes with a beggar and kissing the diseased hand of a leper. After he had sold family merchandise in order to rebuild a local church, his enraged father, disgusted by the son's unworldly instincts, brought him to judgment before the bishop's court. Here Francis freely renounced his inheritance and, in a memorable act, stripped off his clothes as well to signify totalabandonment to God.

Francis spent the next several years living as a hermit in the vicinity of Assisi, ministering to the needy, repairing churches, and attracting a small band of followers to his simple rule. Pope Innocent III's approval of the fledgling order in 1210 was a major triumph; rather than being rejected as yet another threatening, heretical movement, the "little brothers" were embraced as a powerful current of reform within the established church.



Following a preaching mission in the Islamic East (including a remarkable audience with the sultan in Egypt), Francis returned home in 1219 to face a crisis. The movement now numbered some five thousand adherents, and pressure was mounting to establish a more formal organization. Distressed by this drift away from earlier spontaneity and simplicity, Francis increasingly withdrew to live out his mission by personal example. Intense meditation on the suffering of Christ led to the famous experience of the stigmata, signs in his own flesh of the wounds of his Master. And although he was more a preacher than a writer, in 1223 he completed a second rule (adapted as the official Rule of the Order) and about 1224 his most famous piece, "Canticle of the Sun," a paean of praise for God and his creation. Ill and nearly blind, he was finally brought back to Assisi from his remote hermitage and died on October 3, 1226. He was canonized by his friend Gregory IX in 1228, and his body was soon moved to the newly constructed basilica bearing his name.



The key to Francis's life was his uncompromising attempt to imitate Christ of the Gospels through absolute poverty, humility, and simplicity. He loved nature as God's good handiwork and had a deep respect for women (such as his beloved mother and Clare, his follower). At the same time, his willing obedience to the papacy and the priesthood allowed them to embrace this otherwise radical reformer and saint.




Bibliography

R. Brooke, The Coming of the Friars; J. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews; L. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe; J. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from Its Origin to the Year 1517.