St. Francis of Assisi

The real Francis vs. the birdbath

Francesco di Bernardone was born in Assisi in 1181 or 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant — which is why, with a certain irony, he is a patron saint of merchants. His youth was spent on clothes, songs, and dreams of knightly glory. War with the neighboring city of Perugia got him a year as a prisoner; illness and a series of unsettling dreams got him something worse for his career prospects — a growing suspicion that God wanted his whole life.

The turning point, by his own account, was not a vision but a leper. Francis was revolted by lepers — he says so himself. One day on the road he met one, dismounted, gave him alms, and kissed him. In the Testament he dictated near the end of his life, he marks that moment as the hinge of everything: “What had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body.” Conversion, for Francis, was not a feeling. It was the moment the untouchable became embraceable.

What followed scandalized Assisi. He gave away his father’s goods until his father dragged him before the bishop to disinherit him — whereupon Francis stripped off his clothes, returned them, and declared that from now on his Father was in heaven. He rebuilt ruined chapels with his hands, begged his food, and owned nothing. When others began to join him, he wrote them a rule that was little more than lines from the Gospel: sell what you have, give to the poor, take nothing for the journey. Pope Innocent III approved the little brotherhood around 1209–1210. Within a generation, the Franciscans numbered in the thousands. The birdbath Francis preaches to sparrows; the real Francis also walked into Egypt during the Fifth Crusade, crossed the battle lines, and preached Christ — courteously, and unarmed — to the Sultan al-Kamil.

“Rebuild my Church”: San Damiano

Early in his conversion, praying before a painted crucifix in the crumbling roadside chapel of San Damiano, Francis heard Christ speak to him: “Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin.” He took it literally — he hauled stones and rebuilt San Damiano wall by wall, then two more chapels after it.

The tradition delights in the double meaning he only discovered later: the house falling into ruin was not a chapel but the Church herself, worldly and weary at the turn of the thirteenth century — and the renewal that came through this one man’s literal-minded obedience reshaped Western Christianity. The account of the San Damiano crucifix comes from his early biographers, and the Church presents it as the founding tradition of his vocation. The crucifix itself survives, venerated in Assisi in the Basilica of St. Clare.

The stigmata of La Verna

In September 1224, two years before his death, Francis was in extended prayer and fasting on Mount La Verna when — as his companions and earliest biographers attested — he received the stigmata: wounds in his hands, feet, and side corresponding to the wounds of the crucified Christ. It is the first recorded case of stigmata in the history of the Church. He concealed the wounds as best he could and carried them, in constant pain and near-blindness, for the last two years of his life.

The Church has always presented the stigmata of Francis soberly: attested by eyewitnesses at his death, accepted in the bull of his canonization era, and understood not as a spectacle but as the outward seal of a life so conformed to Christ crucified that the body followed where the soul had already gone. Seven centuries later, the same phenomenon would be reported in another Italian Franciscan — Padre Pio — who took Francis as his father in religion.

Francis died at Assisi on the evening of October 3, 1226, singing, laid at his own request on the bare ground. Pope Gregory IX canonized him less than two years later, on July 16, 1228. His feast is kept on October 4.

The Canticle of the Creatures

Near the end — blind, in pain, a year after the stigmata — Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures (also called the Canticle of Brother Sun), one of the earliest great poems in the Italian language and among the earliest works of Italian literature, period. It is not a nature poem. It is a blind man’s litany of praise through the creatures he can no longer see: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, our sister Mother Earth — and, in a verse added on his deathbed, “Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape.”

This is why the modern Church made him patron of ecology — Pope John Paul II declared it formally in 1979, and Pope Francis, the first pope ever to take his name, opened his environmental encyclical Laudato si' with the Canticle’s own words. Francis’s love of creation was never sentimentality about animals. It was theology: every creature a word spoken by God, and therefore a brother or a sister.

The quotes he never said — and why the world loves him anyway

Honesty requires a correction, and the correction is worth more than the slogan. The most famous “Francis quote” — “Preach the Gospel at all times; use words if necessary” — appears nowhere in his writings or in the earliest biographies. No serious Franciscan scholar attributes it to him. Ironically, Francis preached with words constantly, and sent his friars out to do the same. The authentic kernel is in his Rule of 1221, where he tells the friars: “Let all the brothers preach by their deeds.” Deeds and words — not deeds instead of them.

Likewise the beloved Peace Prayer — “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…” — is not his. It first appeared, author unknown, in a small French devotional magazine, La Clochette, in 1912, and became attached to Francis around 1918 when it was printed on a holy card bearing his image. It is a beautiful prayer, thoroughly Franciscan in spirit, and about seven centuries too late to be Franciscan in authorship. We include it below, honestly labeled — because a true prayer wrongly attributed is still a true prayer.

Why does the world keep pressing its best words into his mouth? Because Francis is the saint people trust with their highest ideals — peace, simplicity, mercy toward every creature. Non-Catholics who agree with the Church on almost nothing make an exception for him. On his feast day, October 4, parishes around the world hold pet blessings — dogs, cats, the occasional bewildered iguana — a small, cheerful liturgy of the conviction he actually held: that every creature belongs to God, and is loved.

In Their Words

Prayers