Saint Francis of Assisi is popularly known as the Patron Saint of animals and the environment as well. His feast day is on October 4. In this time many animals are brought to church to be blessed by priest.
St. Francis was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone but nicknamed Francsco "the Frenchman" by his father, Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous silk merchant, which made him belong to a rich family. He went
to school for only a few years, sufficient enough for acquiring the skills a cloth merchant
needed. As a teen-ager, he belonged to a gang of rowdies from rich
Assisi families who, of a night, would eat a fine dinner, get drunk,
and commit every kind of
debauchery. Francis, a high-spirited boy, was their leader and paid the
bills, which made him popular
As a youth, Francesco was also a devotee of troubadours
and was fascinated with all things Transalpine.
Although many hagiographers
remark about his bright clothing, rich friends, and love of pleasures
,
his displays of disillusionment toward the world that surrounded him
came fairly early in his life, as is shown in the "story of the beggar."
In this account, he was selling cloth and velvet in the marketplace on
behalf of his father when a beggar came to him and asked for alms
.
When a business deal was finished, Francis abandoned his wares and
ran after the beggar. When he found him, Francis gave the man
everything he had in his pockets. His friends quickly chided and mocked
him for his act of charity. When he got home, his father scolded him in rage.
Francis’s
world was filled with violence—between the papacy and the Holy Roman
Empire, between Assisi and other towns, and, in the town itself, between
the merchant class and the local nobility. In 1202, around the age of
twenty-one, he himself went to war, in a battle between Assisi and
Perugia. He was apparently glad to go. He got to wear fine clothes and
ride an excellent horse. But Assisi was soon defeated, and Francis spent
a year in a dank prison, with rats, before his father was able to
ransom him.
Upon his return to Assisi in 1203, Francis returned to his carefree life
and in 1204, a serious illness led to a spiritual crisis. In 1205,
Francis left for Puglia
to enlist in the army of the Count of Brienne
. A strange vision made him return to Assisi, deepening his ecclesiastical awakening.
It was believed that in prison the change in Francis
began. As his friends noticed, he had lost heart for revelry. He began to avoid the sports
and the feasts of his former companions. In response, they asked him
laughingly whether he was thinking of marrying, to which he answered,
"yes, a fairer bride than any of you have ever seen," meaning his "Lady Poverty
".
He spent much time in lonely places, asking God for enlightenment. He took to nursing lepers, the most repulsive victims in the lazar houses
near Assisi
.
After a pilgrimage to Rome
, where he joined the poor in begging at the doors of the churches, he said he had a mystical vision of Jesus Christ
in the country chapel of San Damiano
, just outside of Assisi, in which the Icon of Christ Crucified
said to him, "Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you
can see, is falling into ruins." He took this to mean the ruined church
in which he was presently praying,
and so he sold some cloth from his
father's store to assist the priest there for this purpose.
His father, Pietro, highly indignant, attempted to change his mind,
first with threats and then with beatings. In the midst of legal
proceedings before the Bishop of Assisi
,
Francis renounced his father and his patrimony, he stripped naked in public, placed his clothes at his father’s
feet, and said that from then on God, not Pietro di Bernardone, would be
his father
For the next
couple of months he lived as a beggar in the region of Assisi. Returning
to the countryside around the town for two years, he embraced the life
of a penitent
, during which he restored several ruined chapels in the countryside around Assisi, among them the Porziuncola
, the little chapel
of St. Mary of the Angels just outside the town, which later became his favorite abode, s
pent whole
days there, praying. Finally, he began sleeping there as well.
In a written document about him, Francis said that his conversion was due to his
work with lepers, a number of whom lived outside Assisi. He explained,
“God allowed me to begin my repentance in this way: when I lived in sin,
seeing lepers was a very bitter experience for me. God himself guided
me into their midst and among them I performed acts of charity. What
appeared bitter to me became sweetness of the soul and body.” Lepers
were horrifying to people at the time, not only because of their
unsightly affliction—black boils, truncated limbs—but because the
disease was thought to be caused by sin. If a leper wanted to approach a
town, he had to do so at night and ring a bell to warn people of his
presence.
In Roberto Rossellini’s “The Flowers of St. Francis” (1950),
the best of the many movies made about the saint, a leper, sounding a
bell, goes past the hut where Francis and his fellows are bedded down.
Francis rouses himself, catches up with the man, and embraces him. We
see the leper only darkly: his blackened skin, its clammy sheen. We see
Francis’s face directly, with no tears, just an ardent gaze. This is one
of the most appalling and thrilling scenes in Western cinema, and it
epitomizes the idea that evidently fired the young Francis. As he saw it
now, the more a person was despised, the more he or she resembled Jesus
in his last agonies, when he was abandoned by almost all the people he
had come to save. To obey Jesus, therefore, you had to join those who
were abandoned. At this point, in the words of
Francis’s “Testament,” “God gave me brothers.”
In 1206, the year that he
renounced his inheritance, two young Assisians joined him. By 1208, the
group numbered twelve. The Franciscan movement had begun. In Francis’s
view, property, by arousing envy and, therefore, conflict, was the one
thing most destructive to peace in the world. Thus the community lived,
as completely as possible, without property. To be part of the group, a
man had to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, and, like
Francis, sever all ties with his family. Francis’s followers dressed the
way he did—dirty tunic, no shoes. Their home was a wretched little
shack outside the town. When the owner decided he wanted to house his
donkey there, they were kicked out. Then, in a district called the
Portiuncula, they found a ruined church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, and
they built wattle-and-daub cells around it. This remained their
headquarters for the rest of Francis’s life.
By day, the brothers
did the kinds of work that Francis felt were sanctioned by the Gospel.
They renovated churches, tended to lepers, performed manual labor for
farmers and artisans, preached, and prayed. They could accept a payment
of bread and fruit for their labor, but they were not allowed to have
money. Nor could they, in any way, save up for the next day. They could
not own any dwelling they lived in. (They rented the church in the
Portiuncula from a local abbot.) They could not store up food. They
couldn’t soak vegetables overnight.
An entailment of the rule of
poverty was humility. In the “Testament,” Francis writes that he and the
other friars were subject to all, superior to no one. (He eventually
called the group the Friars Minor, as they are still known today.) They
were to see themselves as brothers even to people whose lives directly
opposed their aims—notably, the rich.
While he was praying on the mountain of Verna, during a forty-day fast in preparation for Michaelmas
(September 29), Francis is said to have had a vision on or about September 14, 1224, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross
, as a result of which he received the stigmata.
Brother Leo, who had been with Francis at the time, left a clear and
simple account of the event, the first definite account of the
phenomenon of stigmata
"Suddenly
he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross. This angel
gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ."
Suffering from these stigmata and from trachoma
, Francis received care in several cities (Siena, Cortona, Nocera)
to no avail. In the end, he was brought back to a hut next to the
Porziuncola. Here, in the place where it all began, feeling the end
approaching, he spent the last days of his life dictating his spiritual
testament. He asked his superior to have his clothes removed when his last hour came and for permission to expire lying naked on earth, in imitation of his Lord. He died on the evening of October 3, 1226, singing Psalm
142(141) –
"Voce mea ad Dominum".
PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there in injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy.
Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
Seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen
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ST. VINCENT FERRER
ST JOHN VIANNEY
ST. LORENZO RUIZ
ST. PEDRO CALUNGSOD
