Sancti Francisci Confessoris — 4 October, III classis
In the year of Our Lord 2026, the eighth centenary of his passing. This year the feast falls on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which takes precedence; the Saint is commemorated in the Office.
Mihi autem absit gloriari, nisi in cruce Domini nostri Iesu Christi: per quem mihi mundus crucifixus est, et ego mundo. “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.” — Introit of the Mass, from Galatians 6:14
I. Identitas et Origines
He was born at Assisi in Umbria in the winter of 1181–1182, the son of Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous cloth merchant who traded at the fairs of France, and of his wife Pica. His mother had him baptized Giovanni in the absence of his father; Pietro, returning from France, called the boy Francesco — “the Frenchman” — and the name prevailed. The world has known him by his father’s affection for a foreign market ever since.
He was raised for the counting-house and the town’s young nobility at once: lettered enough to keep accounts and read the Psalter, fluent enough in the French of the troubadours to sing their songs, generous with his father’s money, and the acknowledged leader of the revels of Assisi. His earliest biographer, Thomas of Celano, writing within three years of his death, does not soften it: the youth was vain, prodigal, and eager for the world’s applause. He also notes, almost in passing, that the young man was courteous by nature and could not bear to refuse a poor man who asked in the name of God.
In 1202 Assisi went to war with Perugia. Francis rode out with the citizen cavalry, was taken at the battle of Collestrada, and spent a year in a Perugian prison, from which he came home ransomed and ill. In 1205 he set out again, splendidly equipped, to join the papal forces under Walter of Brienne in Apulia. At Spoleto, the tradition of his companions relates, he heard in the night a voice asking whether it was better to serve the lord or the servant, and why he was forsaking the lord for the servant. He turned back to Assisi without explanation, to the ridicule of the town.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The leper and the crucifix
What followed was not a single illumination but a slow conversion of the appetites, and Francis himself, at the end of his life, located its beginning not in a vision but in a revulsion overcome. In his Testament he dictates that while he was in sin the sight of lepers was exceedingly bitter to him, that the Lord Himself led him among them and he showed them mercy, and that when he left them, what had seemed bitter was turned for him into sweetness of soul and body. The biographers fill in the scene: meeting a leper on the plain below Assisi, he dismounted, gave him alms, and kissed his hand. The order of the Testament matters. Before the friars, before the Rule, before the Stigmata, there is the leper.
In the ruined chapel of San Damiano outside the walls, as he prayed before a painted crucifix of the Umbrian Byzantine style, he heard — so the later lives and the companions’ tradition relate — the figure on the cross say: Francis, go and repair My house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin. He took the words at their plainest sense. He rode to Foligno, sold a horse and a load of his father’s cloth, and brought the money to the priest of San Damiano, who would not take it.
The renunciation
His father, finding goods and son both gone, had him dragged home, beaten, and locked up; his mother released him; and Pietro at last cited him before the bishop of Assisi, Guido, to recover the money. In the bishop’s court, early in 1206, Francis returned the coins, stripped off every garment he wore, laid them at his father’s feet, and said that from that hour he would say no longer “my father Pietro di Bernardone” but “Our Father, who art in heaven.” The bishop covered him with his own mantle.
He went out from Assisi in a peasant’s tunic, singing in French. He begged stones and rebuilt with his own hands San Damiano, then San Pietro, and then the little chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli in the woods below the town, which the Benedictines of Subasio held and which was called the Portiuncula, “the little portion.” It became the heart of everything after.
The Gospel of St. Matthias
On a feast of the Apostle Matthias — traditionally the twenty-fourth of February, 1208 — he heard at Mass in the Portiuncula the Gospel of the sending of the Twelve: Do not possess gold, nor silver, nor money in your purses: nor scrip for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor a staff (Matt. 10:9-10). He asked the priest to expound it, and when he had heard it, he said that this was what he had been seeking. He put off his shoes and his staff, exchanged his belt for a cord, and began to preach penance.
Here is the key to the virtues of his life, and the reason the Church gives him the Introit Mihi absit gloriari. Francis did not invent poverty as a programme; he obeyed a Gospel he had heard read at the altar, as literally as a child obeys. His poverty was the poverty of Christ who “being rich, became poor for your sakes” (2 Cor. 8:9), embraced not as a social theory but as conformity to a Person. He called her Lady Poverty, and the troubadour’s language was not decoration: he courted her as a knight courts the lady for whom he has renounced everything else.
Beside poverty stood humility, which he named minoritas: his brothers were to be fratres minores, the lesser brothers, never prelates, never above anyone. Beside both stood obedience, simplicity, an unaffected and sometimes alarming joy, and an intense, almost sensory reverence for the Body of the Lord, for the words of Scripture, and for the hands of priests that consecrate. He never sought ordination to the priesthood; the sources show him serving as deacon, and he held himself unworthy of more.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
The brothers and the Rule
Companions came: Bernard of Quintavalle, a wealthy man of Assisi, who sold all he had and gave it to the poor; Peter Catanii, a canon lawyer; Brother Giles, the simplest of them. When they were twelve, in 1209 or 1210, Francis went with them to Rome and laid before Innocent III a short rule made almost entirely of Gospel sentences. The Pope, after hesitation, gave it oral approval and licensed the brothers to preach penance. The later lives add that Innocent had dreamt of the Lateran basilica tottering and a small, poor man holding it up on his shoulder; the dream belongs to the devotional tradition, but the approval itself is history.
On Palm Sunday, 1212, Clare di Favarone, a young noblewoman of Assisi, fled her family’s house by night to the Portiuncula, where Francis cut her hair and clothed her in penance; from her grew the Poor Ladies of San Damiano, the Second Order. Later, for the married and those in the world who sought a life of penance, there arose the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, the Third Order. Within a decade the friars numbered in the thousands and had crossed into France, Germany, Spain, and Hungary.
Damietta
Francis wished for martyrdom and tried three times to reach the Saracens. In 1219 he succeeded, joining the crusading army before Damietta in Egypt. He crossed the lines with a single companion, Brother Illuminato, and was brought before the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, to whom he preached Christ. The Sultan heard him courteously and sent him back unharmed. The fact is attested by an independent contemporary witness, Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre, who was in the camp; the more dramatic details — notably Francis’s offer to enter a fire with the Sultan’s imams to prove the faith — come from St. Bonaventure’s later life.
The order grows beyond its founder
He returned in 1220 to find the brotherhood straining under its own success: ministers seeking privileges and houses, learned men seeking a less literal Rule. He resigned the government of the order, placing it first in the hands of Peter Catanii and, after Peter’s death in 1221, of Brother Elias of Cortona, and said that from then on he would be as one dead to the brothers’ governance. He wrote one Rule in 1221, which was never sealed, and then, in retreat at Fonte Colombo, the shorter definitive Rule, which Honorius III confirmed by the bull Solet annuere on the twenty-ninth of November, 1223. It opens with the sentence that remains the Franciscan charter: that the Rule and life of the Friars Minor is to observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, living in obedience, without anything of their own, and in chastity.
It must be said plainly that the tension between Francis’s literal poverty and the needs of a vast, learned, preaching order did not end with the Rule. It marked the generation after him and divided the order for a century and more. The saint did not resolve it; he suffered it.
Greccio
At Christmas of 1223, in the hermitage of Greccio, he had a manger prepared with hay, an ox and an ass, so that he might see with bodily eyes, as he said, how the Child had lain. Midnight Mass was sung over the manger; Francis, vested as deacon, chanted the Gospel and preached on the Babe of Bethlehem. From that night descends the Christmas crib of the whole Latin Church.
IV. Mors et Cultus
La Verna
In the late summer of 1224 he withdrew with a few companions to Mount La Verna in the Casentino to keep a Lent of fasting in honour of St. Michael, from the Assumption to Michaelmas. About the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, as he prayed, he saw a Seraph with six wings, fixed to a cross, descending toward him; and when the vision passed, there appeared in his hands and feet the marks of nails and in his side a wound. He is the first person in the history of the Church credibly attested to have borne the Stigmata of the Lord.
The witness is unusually strong. His companion Brother Leo kept until his death a small parchment on which Francis had written, in his own hand on La Verna, the Praises of God and a blessing for Leo; Leo’s note on it states that it was written after the vision of the Seraph and the impression of the Stigmata. The parchment survives at Assisi. Celano and Bonaventure both treat the wounds at length, and those who washed the body after death saw them. Pope Benedict XI granted a feast of the Impression of the Stigmata, which Paul V extended to the whole Latin Church; it is kept on the seventeenth of September. The Epistle of his own Mass ends with St. Paul’s sentence: Ego enim stigmata Domini Iesu in corpore meo porto — “for I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body” (Gal. 6:17).
Sister Death
The last two years were a long passion. His eyes, diseased since the East, were failing; he suffered in the stomach and liver; the physicians at Rieti cauterized his temples with a white-hot iron, and he spoke to the fire beforehand, asking Brother Fire to be courteous to him. In this condition, lodged in a hut beside San Damiano in 1225, nearly blind and tormented by mice, he composed in the Umbrian vernacular the Canticle of Brother Sun — Altissimu, onnipotente, bon Signore — one of the first great poems of the Italian language. He added a stanza later to reconcile the bishop and the podestà of Assisi, who were at feud; and at the end, a stanza praising God for Sister Bodily Death.
He asked to be carried to the Portiuncula to die. On the evening of Saturday, the third of October, 1226, he had himself laid naked on the bare ground, had the Passion according to St. John read to him, and began the Psalm Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi (Ps. 141), and died as he was praying it. He was about forty-four. Because the day was reckoned from sunset, his death fell liturgically on the fourth, and there his feast has stood ever since.
His body was carried into Assisi by way of San Damiano, where Clare and her sisters were permitted to see him one last time, and laid in the church of San Giorgio.
Canonization and cultus
Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, the order’s protector and Francis’s friend, had become Pope Gregory IX. He canonized Francis at Assisi on the sixteenth of July, 1228, less than two years after his death, and the next day laid the foundation stone of the Basilica of San Francesco. In 1230 the body was translated there in secret and so carefully hidden that it was not found again until 1818; Pius VII confirmed the identification. It rests in the crypt of the lower basilica.
The Popes of the modern period have repeatedly returned to him. Leo XIII, for the seventh centenary of his birth, wrote the encyclical Auspicato concessum (1882), commending the Third Order as a remedy for the disorders of society; Benedict XV wrote Sacra propediem (1921) on the same order; Pius XI, for the seventh centenary of his death, wrote Rite expiatis (1926), presenting him as the image of Christ to a world sick with greed and pride. Pius XII named him, with St. Catherine of Siena, principal patron of Italy in 1939.
In the traditional Roman calendar his feast is kept on the fourth of October, with the Mass Mihi autem absit gloriari; the Impression of the Stigmata on the seventeenth of September. [For orientation only: the reformed calendar retains 4 October as an obligatory memorial and removes the Stigmata from the General Calendar.]
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Francis left few writings, and they are short, unadorned, and dense with Scripture. Several deserve to be read whole.
The Testament (1226). Dictated near death, it is his own account of his conversion and his last will for the brothers. It begins with the lepers: Dominus ita dedit mihi fratri Francisco incipere faciendi poenitentiam — “the Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance.” It contains his prayer before every church, which belongs on the lips of every Catholic: Adoramus te, Domine Iesu Christe, et ad omnes ecclesias tuas, quae sunt in toto mundo, et benedicimus tibi, quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum — “We adore Thee, Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all Thy churches throughout the whole world, and we bless Thee, because by Thy holy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.” And it gives his reason for honouring priests, even sinful ones: that in this world he sees nothing bodily of the Most High Son of God except His most holy Body and Blood, which they alone consecrate and administer.
The Admonitions. The first is a meditation on the Holy Eucharist as the continuation of the Incarnation: every day the Son of God humbles Himself, as when He came from the royal throne into the womb of the Virgin; every day He comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of the priest. The second places the sin of Adam in the appropriation of the will — the making of one’s own will a possession — which is why for Francis poverty reaches past goods to the self. Another states the whole of his anthropology in a sentence: what a man is before God, that he is, and no more.
On true and perfect joy. In a short dictated piece, Francis imagines returning to the Portiuncula on a winter night, frozen and bleeding, and being refused at the door by his own brother as an impostor. If he bears it patiently and without disturbance, he says, there is true joy, and the salvation of the soul. It is the Gospel of today’s Mass — learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart (Matt. 11:29) — reduced to a single scene.
The Canticle of Brother Sun. It is not a hymn to nature but a hymn to the Creator through His creatures, and its grammar is the grammar of the Benedicite of the Three Children (Dan. 3). It ends in pardon, infirmity, and death, and it blesses those whom death finds in God’s holy will.
What he did not write. Two sayings commonly attributed to him are not his. The prayer beginning “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” first appeared anonymously in a small French devotional bulletin in 1912 and was attached to his name some years later by way of a holy card bearing his image; it is a fine prayer, but it is a twentieth-century one. Nor is the counsel to “preach the Gospel always, and if necessary use words” found anywhere in his writings or the early lives. What he actually laid down, in the Rule of 1221, is that all the brothers should preach by their works — and the same Rule regulates the preaching of words, for he preached constantly and expected his friars to do so. He should be read in his own words rather than in the sentiments of later admirers, and his own words are sterner and better.
VI. Oratio
Deus, qui Ecclesiam tuam, beati Francisci meritis, fetu novae prolis amplificas: tribue nobis; ut, ad eius imitationem, terrena despicere, et caelestium donorum semper participatione gaudere. Per Dominum nostrum.
“O God, who by the merits of blessed Francis dost enlarge Thy Church with the fruitfulness of a new offspring: grant us, that in imitation of him we may despise earthly things and ever rejoice in partaking of the heavenly gifts. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiratio
Deus meus et omnia. “My God and my all.”
VIII. Practice
Examine. Francis located the sin of Adam in appropriation — in treating one’s own will as a possession. Ask, then, not only what you own, but what you are holding as your own: an opinion you will not surrender, a grievance you keep, a reputation you guard, a plan you will not let God revise. Where would you be refused at the door and lose your peace?
Do. Two things this week. First, go toward your leper: the person, task, or place you have been avoiding out of distaste, and show mercy there without announcing it. Second, give away one thing you would rather keep, and do it quietly, as one who has heard Do not possess gold, nor silver read at the altar.
Pray. The Collect of the feast; and, whenever you enter or pass a church, Francis’s own prayer from the Testament: Adoramus te, Domine Iesu Christe… quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.
Devote. The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery, the Crucifixion, contemplated as Francis saw it on La Verna; or the Stations of the Cross, the devotion his sons carried home from the Holy Places and spread through the whole Church. At Christmas, set up the crib, and remember Greccio.
Ad Ulteriorem Studium
If you wish to go deeper, the Lives of the Saints path continues with those who walked beside him — St. Clare, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Bonaventure, whose Legenda Maior made Francis the “angel of the sixth seal” — and with the great mendicant founders of his age, beside St. Dominic. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the question his life forced on the schools: the place of poverty in the state of perfection, as St. Thomas treats it in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, qq. 186 and 188), and the Franciscan school that followed him. The Church History path treats the thirteenth-century reform, the Fourth Lateran Council, and the long poverty controversy within his order. And the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path opens onto the Stations of the Cross and the Christmas crib, the two devotions that the whole Latin Church received from him and his sons.
Sancte Pater Francisce, ora pro nobis.