The quarrel with his father was provoked by Francis’ stealing of some bales of cloth to pay for the materials he needed to repair the church of S. Damiano, where he had heard Christ on the Crucifix there say, “Go and repair my house, which you see is falling down.”  In 1206 his father brought him before the Bishop and in the course of the dispute Francis tore off his clothes, renounced his father and dedicated himself to God.   The Bishop provided him with simple clothing, held together with a piece of old knotted rope that happened to be lying around.   Francis was about 25 years old.

     He occupied himself with prayer and the repair of churches and the care of lepers.  After two or three years of life as a solitary wandering beggar the first disciple to join him was a well-off bourgeois, Bernard of Quintavalle, who discovered Francis spending the whole night in prayer on his knees, just saying the words “My God!  My God!“  Four years of his new evangelical life of poverty and prayer brought him recognition at Rome by Innocent III for a rule of life for himself and the twelve companions who had by now joined him.  They were called the Friars Minor. They lived a communal life in huts of wattle and daub with no furniture at the Portiuncula near a leper colony, begging when necessary.   They went on preaching tours, which surely helped to procure at last the end of the civil war in Assisi in 1209, and Francis discovered a talent for preaching.  In the intervals between tours they stayed in their huts or in the forest round about spending the time in contemplative prayer.

     Some of the preaching tours were to quite distant places, such as Dalmatia, Morocco, Spain and the front line of the Crusades in Egypt and the holy Land.   These do not seem to have been very successful.   The Sultan was politely impressed by Francis, some friars were lynched in Morocco and inconvenient storms or the untimely illnesses of Francis spoilt other ventures.  At home, Chiara Offreduccio aged 19, who was to found the Poor Clares, received the habit from Francis at the Portiuncula about 1212.

    Important Church events at this time were the Lateran Council in 1215 at which Francis was present and met Dominic, and the death of Innocent III and accession of Honorius III in 1216 from whom Francis obtained the indulgence of the Portiuncula.  Another sign that Francis’ “crusades” were to be in Italy was his friendship with Cardinal Ugolino who wanted him to stay in Italy.   In spite of this however St Francis persisted with farflung missionary enterprises, which he only abandoned when news came of troubles within the now rapidly expanding Order.     Ugolino and the Roman court naturally wished to organise the Order in the cause of reform, but Francis opposed anything which would lead to any loss of the original simplicity and poverty and rebuked the friars at Bologna for living in a house built of stone and planning to found a school.

   Recognising that he was not the man to reinvent the Friars as a force for clerical renewal Francis resigned his office of Minister General in 1220 and devoted himself to trying to work out an acceptable Rule.  Eventually in 1223 Honorius III approved the Regula Bullata.  Francis also composed a Rule for the Third Order, Tertiaries who lived with their families and earned their living, while following Franciscan ideals without the vows of religion.

    Having settled the Order’s basic constitution and withdrawn from any responsibility for administering it, Francis spent the last few years of his life in mystical activity.   He inaugurated the Presepio, the Christmas crib at Greccio at which he read the Gospel of the Nativity as deacon with such effect that those present were moved to tears.   The next year he made a retreat of several weeks on Mount La Verna which had been donated to him by Count Orlando di Chiusi in 1213 and he received the Stigmata.   While gravely ill, so that he became blind, he wrote a poem, The Canticle of the Sun, while recuperating in the garden of  St Clare’s monastery at San Damiano.  Meanwhile he was suffering agonies from the physicians of the Roman court who were treating him in various places to which he had to be laboriously and painfully carried.   He died at the Portiuncula October 3^rd 1226, aged 45.  In 1228 he was canonized by Cardinal Ugolino who had become Pope Gregory IX.

     Probably the best introduction to Franciscan spirituality is The Little Flowers of St Francis, obtainable in the edition of the facsimile of the Limited Editions Club, by Templegate Publishers, in which you can meet St Francis and his disciples at their devotions and enjoy the simplicity of the irrepressible Brother Juniper.

ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI

 

       Assisi, the city where St Francis was born, was rent by a civil conflict between the nobles and the bourgeoisie in 1199.  In 1200 Chiara Offreduccio, who subsequently became St Clare, and her family, who belonged to the noble party, left Assisi to take refuge in Perugia.   But Francis, being the son of a notable businessman, a cloth merchant, was among the leaders of the party of the bourgeoisie.   War also broke out between Assisi and Perugia.    In the war with Perugia he took part in the Battle of Ponte San Giovanni at which he was taken prisoner for a year by the Perugians and became ill.   In fact Francis’ health was not very robust all his life.    When he was released in 1203 he publicly withdrew from the war and also became well known for his kindness to the poor and to lepers.   So in some ways his conversion looks rather similar to St Ignatius Loyola’s conversion, where also a brief experience of war and illness led to a spiritual renewal.