All accounts made him out to be the merriest of mendicants, but a mystic whose overpowering faith compelled other men to follow him. |
Francis was born in 1182 in the Italian town of Assisi, 80 miles north of Rome. He was named Giovanni; however, his father, Pietro Bernardone, a wealthy cloth merchant, nicknamed him "Francesco" due to his father’s great liking for France.
Francis, rich, affable, and daring, was a natural leader among his peers and enjoyed an easy early life. While growing up he had an ambition to be a noble knight. This boyhood dream was nearly fulfilled when he went off to participate in one of the many skirmishes between the Italian city-states. He was captured and held prisoner when his city lost a battle to the neighboring Perugia. Here,  while a prisoner for nearly a year, he enlivened the days of boredom with songs and stories for his cellmates.
During this time, Francis began a seven-year conversion journey; it began with a dream in which God told him his desires were wrongly placed. He returned home, and events in his life now began to shape his rebirth and his distancing from the early life of self-indulgence and frivolity: an encounter with a leper on the road; his public renouncement of the family wealth before the townspeople and local Bishop; his vision of the crucified Christ in the tiny run-down church at San Damiano telling him to "repair" His church; and his predilection for the beggars and other poor who began to surround him.
Francis journey to holiness was a circuitous one, but in the end he embraced a life of simplicity and poverty. He slept in the open, sometimes in caves around his native city, publicly begged for food, and spoke eloquently of an all-giving and loving God. Imitating Christ led Francis to the poor; for if anyone mirrored the life of Christ on earth, it was the poor. He joined them in his own impoverished life style, not because he liked to be poor, but because Christ was poor.
As Francis continued his simple life, other young men began to see the genuineness of his ways, his generosity and his passionate love of the Lord, and they joined him becoming the Friars Minor, the First Order of St. Francis. Later, another wealthy youth of Assisi, Clare, made known her intentions to him. Against the wishes of her parents, she did so, but Francis placed her with the Benedictine Sisters until other young women joined her. Together they formed the Poor Clare contemplatives, the Second Order of St. Francis.
With his small band of brothers, Francis walked to Rome in 1210 and they were given permission by Pope Innocent III to live a life of poverty as wandering preachers. Thus began a period of travel and conversion for Francis--even to the Moslem areas of the Nile delta and to the Holy Land. When he returned to Italy, Francis found that his brotherhood now encompassed thousands of members, many of whom preferred the tight organization and authority levels found in other religious groups, as well as houses of study and similar activities. Dissension over the manner of living Francis' ideal became more evident. Difficult years ensued for the saint, marked by the occasional joys of the manger scene at Greccio, his reception of the stigmata, (the wounds of Christ), at Mount La Verna, and his composition of the famous "Canticle of Brother Sun," which expressed his brotherhood with all creation in praising God. The years of wandering and poverty had made Francis quite ill, and he began to face blindness as well. The suffering and sometimes humiliation he endured was finally relieved when Sister Death visited him on October 3, 1226 and led him to Christ—the goal of all his longings.
Francis left a legacy of faith characterized by selfless giving and the spirit of love. Thus, he loved every creature without measure or discrimination. His example reminds us of the sincerity and generosity with which we are to serve Christ in each other, whose image we find in the countenance of the poorest of the poor. This has been the Franciscan heritage throughout eight centuries and it continues to inspire us today as evidenced by the worldwide growth of the Franciscan movement both among the religious and laity. |