Saint Francis of Assisi

He gave up a rich cloth merchant’s fortune to take “Lady Poverty” as his bride. He embraced a leper, tamed a fierce wolf, and bore in his own flesh the five bleeding wounds of Christ.

With the folly of the Gospel, he shook a medieval Church entangled in money and power, and led countless people back to the simplicity of the manger at Bethlehem and the Cross of Calvary.

Raised in luxury, Francis was the ringleader of Assisi’s pleasure-loving young set: he spent money like water, wore splendid, outlandish clothes, and sang and played music in the streets all night. He dreamed of becoming a gallant knight and rising into the nobility.

In 1202, war broke out between the cities of Assisi and Perugia. Francis eagerly put on armor and went to battle, but Assisi was defeated and he spent more than a year as a prisoner in Perugia.

After his father ransomed him, in 1205 Francis again fitted himself out with a fine horse and gilded armor to join a military expedition in southern Italy.

Later, in his Testament, he wrote of that moment:

“What had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body!”

He had overcome his greatest fear and recognized the face of Christ in the most wretched of men.

At first, Francis took those words literally. He went home, took many bolts of his father’s fine cloth, sold them, and bought stone to restore San Damiano with his own hands.

From that moment, Francis belonged entirely to God. He put on the coarse tunic of the poorest local peasants, shaped like a cross and tied with a rope, and began the life of a wandering beggar.

His holiness soon drew his first companions, well-born and educated men of Assisi: Bernard of Quintavalle, Peter Catani, Brother Giles... They sold all their possessions, gave the money to the poor and came to live with him in simple huts at Rivo Torto.

In 1209 Francis wrote a short rule made up almost entirely of Gospel passages, and led eleven brothers to Rome to ask Pope Innocent III to approve it.

At first the powerful Pope refused, finding their way of life too poor and too strange. But that night he had a dream: he saw the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, mother church of the whole world, tilting and about to collapse, until a small, poor friar put his shoulder to it and held it upright.

Recognizing the friar as Francis, the Pope called him in, approved their way of life and allowed the brothers to go everywhere preaching repentance. The Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, was born.

In 1212, he helped Saint Clare of Assisi found the Second Order, the Poor Ladies, or Poor Clares. In 1221, he founded the Third Order for lay people living in the world who wished to follow his spirit of poverty and peace.

Seized and beaten by the Sultan’s soldiers, he asked to be taken to their master. Moved by Francis’s gentleness, courage and poverty, the Sultan received him with great respect, listened to him speak about Christ, and gave him an ivory horn as a keepsake before letting him return safely.

He wanted everyone to see with their own eyes the poverty and self-emptying love of the Son of God coming into the world. That is the origin of the Christmas crib set up all over the world every year.

He prayed for two graces: to feel the pain Jesus suffered in His Passion, and to feel the fire of love that moved the Lord to give His life for us.

Yet it was then, lying on a damp straw bed at San Damiano with mice scurrying about all night, that he composed his great poem, the “Canticle of the Creatures” (Cantico delle Creature).

The foundation stone of a splendid basilica in his honor was laid only two days after his death, on a hill where criminals had been executed, which the people of Assisi called the “Hill of Hell”; from then on it was called the “Hill of Paradise.” Yet for nearly six hundred years the exact place of his tomb was a mystery: fearing the saint’s remains would be stolen, the friars had hidden the grave deep beneath the floor of the church. Only in 1818 did Pope Pius VII allow it to be excavated. After fifty-two days of digging, the tomb was found, enclosed by iron bars, and when the coffin was opened his body was found almost intact, his head still resting on a rough stone, as poor in death as he had been in life. A new crypt was built on that spot, where he is venerated to this day, and above it the magnificent two-level basilica, with Giotto’s famous frescoes of his life, is one of the great works of art of the Middle Ages.

In 1979, Pope Saint John Paul II proclaimed him patron of ecology. In 2013, the first Pope from Latin America took the name Francis as a sign of his commitment to the poor and to the care of creation. The Church celebrates him on October 4 each year.

The Peace Prayer,

“Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace...”

, captures his whole spirit, and millions of Vietnamese know it by heart.