Saint Francis of Assisi and Jesus of Nazareth

Francis was born in Assisi around 1181, son of a cloth merchant named Pietro di Bernardone who traded in France. Jesus of Nazareth was executed outside Jerusalem in the early thirties. Between the death of one and the birth of the other sit the collapse of Rome, the split between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054, and the first two crusades.

The world Francis grew up in ran on money. Assisi was a commune fighting its own nobles and then fighting Perugia, and Francis went to that war and came out of it a prisoner. The Catholic Encyclopedia says he was held for more than a year. He came home sick. The conversion started after that.

He met the gospel the way everyone met it then, read aloud in Latin at Mass. There was no printing press and no Bible in his pocket. Thomas of Celano describes the moment that set the whole order moving as Francis standing in a chapel while a priest reads the passage where Jesus sends the apostles out with no money, no bag, no spare coat, no shoes.

So there is no meeting to report and no conversation to cite. His biographers describe a voice from a crucifix at San Damiano and a vision of a six-winged seraph on a mountain. Both are visions, and Francis himself never wrote a word about either one.

Around 1206 Pietro di Bernardone hauled his son in front of the bishop of Assisi to recover money Francis had given away. Francis took off his clothes in the room and handed them back. The Catholic Encyclopedia records the line: "Hitherto I have called you my father on earth; henceforth I desire to say only 'Our Father who art in Heaven'." He walked out disinherited and with nothing on.

That scene is a staging of Matthew 19:21. Francis put the verse in the opening chapter of the Rule he wrote in 1221, together with the hard saying in Luke about hating father and mother. He knew exactly what he was copying.

In 1219 he sailed for Egypt in the middle of the Fifth Crusade and crossed the lines at Damietta. Soldiers seized him and took him to Sultan al-Kamil, who received him, listened, and let him go. The Catholic Encyclopedia says the preaching won no converts but did win better treatment for the Christian prisoners. Jacques de Vitry, a bishop who was at the siege, wrote that the sultan received Francis with courtesy. No Arabic source mentions the visit.

What Francis did afterwards is the interesting part. Chapter sixteen of the 1221 Rule sets out two ways for brothers who go among Muslims, and the first is to make no arguments at all: "let them be subject to every human creature for God's sake, yet confessing themselves to be Christians." The chapter opens by quoting Jesus sending sheep among wolves. Two years later, when Honorius III confirmed the shorter Rule that the order actually lives under, that chapter had shrunk to a paragraph about asking permission. The two ways are gone from it.

In September 1224, on Mount La Verna, Francis saw a seraph and afterwards carried the five wounds. Brother Leo was on the mountain with him. Thomas of Celano put the wounds into the first official life within three years of the death.

Francis never mentions them. Two scraps of his handwriting survive, a letter to Brother Leo kept at Spoleto and a small crumpled parchment from that same stay at La Verna kept in the sacristy at Assisi. On the parchment he wrote praise of God on one side and a blessing on the other for a friar who was being torn apart by temptation and wanted something in the saint's own hand to hold. Leo added three notes to authenticate it, and the third is what dates the praises to after the seraph and the wounds. Francis wrote about God. Leo wrote about Francis.

Francis left letters, two rules, his Testament, a set of admonitions and some prayers. Father Paschal Robinson translated them into English in 1906 and that translation is public domain, so you can read the man directly instead of reading about him.

Here is the prayer he says he used in every church he entered, recorded in his Testament: "We adore Thee Lord Jesus Christ here and in all Thy churches which are in the whole world, and we bless Thee because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world."

His own account of his conversion has no crucifix in it and no angel. It has a sick man he did not want to look at. "When I was in sin it seemed to me very bitter to see lepers, and the Lord Himself led me amongst them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, that which had seemed to me bitter was changed for me into sweetness of body and soul."

On where Christ can be found now, he is blunt: "in this world, I see nothing corporally of the most high Son of God Himself except His most holy Body and Blood." That sentence explains the fierce respect he kept for priests he thought were bad men. He says why in the same breath. In them he sees the Son of God, and they are the ones who hand over the Body and Blood.

In the Letter to All the Faithful he compresses the Incarnation into a clause about money. The Word of the Father, "being rich above all, willed, nevertheless, with His most Blessed Mother, to choose poverty."

And in chapter twenty-two of the 1221 Rule, on enemies: "For our Lord Jesus, whose footsteps we ought to follow, called His betrayer friend, and offered Himself willingly to His crucifiers."

Read enough of it and a pattern shows. Francis almost never writes about Jesus as a teacher of ideas. He writes about a poor man, a body on an altar, and a set of footprints you are supposed to step into.

Lepers. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus puts out his hand and touches a man whose disease made touching him unthinkable. The written account Francis left of his own turn puts a leper at the center of it and says the disgust turned into sweetness. He went and lived near them and washed them.

Money. Francis opened his 1221 Rule with the verse about selling everything, and he meant his friars to own nothing individually or together, which is a harder reading than any order before him had attempted.

Being sent out empty. Celano says that when Francis heard the passage about taking nothing for the road, he "immediately put off his shoes from his feet, put aside the staff from his hands, was content with one tunic, and exchanged his leather girdle for a small cord." The cord is still what Franciscans wear.

Enemies. Jesus told people to love them. Francis wrote the verse into his Rule and then walked into the camp of the man the crusade had come to kill.

Creatures. Jesus pointed at birds and wildflowers as an argument against worry. Francis preached to birds near Bevagna, and in September 1225, going blind and in constant pain in a reed hut at San Damiano, he dictated the Canticle that calls the sun a brother and the earth a mother. The verse that calls death a sister came later, in the last days of his life, when he had something specific in mind.

Both men died young. Jesus was around thirty three. Francis was in his forty fifth year.

Catholics ask Francis to pray for them. Catholic teaching keeps the categories apart with two Greek words. Adoration, latria, belongs to God alone. Honor, dulia, is what a saint receives. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia is unsentimental about the difference and says the phrase adorare sanctos, to adore the saints, "certainly now sounds scandalous."

Many Protestants draw the line earlier and ask Francis for nothing at all. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 allows honoring the memory of saints so believers can imitate their faith, then states plainly that "Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor." Both sides are reading the same verse in First Timothy and hearing different things in it. This page is not the referee.

Francis was canonized in 1228 by Gregory IX, well after the split between Rome and the Eastern churches, so he is not among the saints the Orthodox churches commemorate on their calendars.

Then there is what the wounds do. Christian teaching says the wounds of Jesus accomplish something. The wounds of Francis accomplished a resemblance. Francis assumed as much. His own prayer puts him on the receiving end of the sentence: Thou hast redeemed the world.

Devotion has always reached for language that puts Francis very close to Christ. Catholic writers read that closeness as conformity, a copy taking the shape of the original, and they say so explicitly to rule out the other reading. Many Protestants hear the same language and object anyway, and they reach for the passages where a creature offered worship refuses it. Francis is not the one making the claim. He wrote himself into the sentence as somebody who had been redeemed.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. It is on retreat cards and funeral programs and the wall of a lot of church halls, and Francis never saw it.

It first appeared in French, in December 1912, in a small devotional magazine in Paris called La Clochette, published by the Ligue de la Sainte-Messe with no author's name on it. The Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon sent it to Benedict XV in 1915. An Italian version ran in L'Osservatore Romano in 1916.

Around 1920 a French Franciscan printed it on the back of a picture of Francis under the title Priere pour la paix, still with nobody's name attached. The first person to attach a name was Etienne Bach, in 1927, through a French Protestant movement called the Knights of the Prince of Peace. Kirby Page printed it as Francis's own in Living Courageously in 1936, which is how it entered English. The Second World War did the rest.

The historian who traced all of that is Christian Renoux, and his study was published in 2001 by Editions franciscaines, the Franciscan house in Paris. The Franciscans went looking and found it was not his. Pray it if you love it. Just stop telling people he wrote it, because the things he did write are better and hardly anyone reads them.

Born in Assisi about 1181. Rich father, cloth trade, a war with Perugia, more than a year in prison, a long illness. The conversion ran from roughly 1205 to 1206, starting with lepers and ending in front of the bishop with his clothes in his father's hands.

Innocent III approved his way of life verbally around 1209. Clare of Assisi left home on the night after Palm Sunday in 1212 and the Poor Clares began. Francis wrote a long Rule in 1221 that Rome never sealed, and a shorter one that Honorius III confirmed on 29 November 1223. At Christmas that year he staged the crib at Greccio, and Europe got the nativity scene from it.

Egypt and the sultan in 1219. La Verna and the wounds in September 1224. The Canticle at San Damiano in September 1225, while he was nearly blind. He died on the evening of 3 October 1226, in his forty fifth year. Gregory IX canonized him on 16 July 1228, under two years later. His feast is 4 October.

The searches clustered around his name are practical. People want the peace prayer, the date of the feast, the list of things he is patron of, and whether their parish is running the animal blessing on 4 October.

Underneath that there are usually two people. One is holding a dying animal. The other is about to do something expensive with their life, quit, give money away, walk out of a family business, and is looking for permission.

For the first, Francis is honest company. He added the verse about Sister Death to the Canticle when he was the one dying, not from a safe distance, and he called her a sister no living person escapes. He was not cheerful about it. He blessed it anyway.

For the second, read the actual story before you borrow it. His decision cost his family a business and cost him his father, and he was disinherited in public. It was slow and ugly and it took years to finish. Anyone selling you a clean version of that is selling you something.