Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

St Francis is the most extraordinary figure that the Italian church has produced, a revolutionary spirit who took Christianity back to basics. The impact that he had upon the evolution of the Catholic Church stands without parallel, and everything he accomplished in his short life was achieved by nothing more persuasive than the power of preaching and individualized example. Dante placed him alongside another Messianic figure, John the Baptist, and his appeal has remained undiminished - Mussolini called him “il piu santo dei santi” (the most saintly of the saints). The events of his life, though doubtless embellished by myth, are well chronicled. He was born in Assisi in 1182, the son of a wealthy merchant and a Provençal woman - which is why he replaced his baptismal name, Giovanni, with Francesco (Little Frenchman). The Occitan literature of Provence, with its troubadour songs and courtly love poems, was later to be the making of Francis as a poet and speaker. One of the primeval writers in the vernacular, Francis ordered the foundation of a great Franciscan literary tradition - his Fioretti and famous Canticle to the Sun (”brother sun & sister moon”) stand comparison with the best of medieval verse.

In line with the primeval life of most male saints, his formative years were full of drinking and womanizing; he was, says one chronicler, “the first instigator of evil, and behind none in foolishness”. Illness and imprisonment in a Perugian slammer incubated the first seeds of contemplation. Abstinence and solitary wanderings soon followed. The call from God, the culmination of several visions, came in Assisi in 1209, when the crucifix in San Damiano bowed to him and told him to repair God’s Church. Francis took the injunction literally, sold his father’s stock of cloth and gave the money to Damiano’s priest, who refused it.

Francis subsequently renounced his inheritance in the Piazza del Comune: before a large crowd and his outraged father, he stripped unclothed in a symbolic rejection of wealth and worldly shackles. Adopting the peasant’s grey sackcloth (the brown Franciscan usage came later), he began to beg, preach and mix with lepers, a deliberate embodiment of Christ’s invocation to the Apostles “to heal the sick, and carry neither purse, nor scrip [money], nor shoes”. His message was disarmingly simple: throw out the materialistic trappings of regular life and return to a love of God rooted in poverty, chastity and obedience. Furthermore, learn to see in the beauty and profusion of the natural world the all-pervasive hand of the Divine - a keystone of humanist thought and a departure from the doom-laden strictures of the Dark Ages.

In time he gathered his own twelve apostles and, after some difficulty, obtained permission from Pope Innocent III to found an order that espoused no dogma and maintained no rule. Francis himself never became a priest. In 1212 he was instrumental in the creation of a second order for women, the Poor Clares, and continued the vast peregrinations that took him as far as the Holy Land with the armies of the Crusades. In Egypt he confronted the sultan, Melek el-Kamel, offering to undergo a trial by fire to establish his faith. In 1224 Francis received the stigmata on the mountaintop at La Verna. Two years later, nursing his exhausted body, he died on the mud floor of his hovel in Assisi, having scorned the offer of grander accommodation at the bishop’s palace. His canonization followed swiftly, in 1228, in a service conducted by Pope Gregory.

However, a split in the Franciscan order was inevitable. Francis’s message and movement had few sympathizers in the wealthy and morally bankrupt papacy of the time, and while his popularity had obligated the Vatican to applaud while he was alive, the papacy quickly moved in to quash the purist elements and encourage more “moderate” tendencies. Gradually it shaped the movement to its own designs, institutionalizing Francis’s message in the process.

Despite this, Francis’s achievement as the first man to fracture the rigid orthodoxy of the hierarchical Church remains beyond question. Moreover, the Franciscans have not lost their philosophic edge, and their views on the primacy of poverty are thought by many to be out of favour with the current pope

Tags: baptismal name, brother sun, canticle, courtly love poems, fioretti, frenchman, italian church, john the baptist, literary tradition, messianic figure, mussolini, occitan literature, personal example, revolutionary spirit, santi, st francis, sun brother, troubadour songs, vernacular, wealthy merchant