St. Francis of Assisi

St. Francis of Assisi was an Italian merchant's son who gave away his inheritance and founded the Order of Friars Minor, born at Assisi in 1181 or 1182 and dead there on 3 October 1226. He wrote a rule of life for men who owned nothing, preached across Italy and into Egypt, composed the Canticle of the Creatures in Umbrian Italian, and in 1224 received the stigmata on Mount La Verna, the first recorded case in Christian history. Pope Gregory IX, who had known him, canonized him in July 1228.

Francis is among the best documented saints of the Middle Ages, because some of his own writings survive: the Rule, his Testament, letters, the Praises of God written at La Verna, and the Canticle. Where this page says what Francis thought, it draws on those. Where it repeats a famous story, it says which source it comes from.

1. The Rich Kid

Francis was the son of Pietro di Bernardone, a cloth merchant of Assisi who traded into France, and of a mother called Pica. He was baptised Giovanni and called Francesco. He had money, clothes, friends and the ambition of most young men of the merchant class, which was to be made a knight and cross into the nobility.

In 1202 Assisi fought Perugia and lost badly at Collestrada. Francis was captured and spent about a year in a Perugian prison, then came home ill and stayed ill for a long time. In 1205 he set out for Apulia to join a military campaign, turned back at Spoleto after a dream, and returned to Assisi to the bafflement of everyone who knew him.

The turning point he names himself is not the war. In his Testament, dictated at the end of his life, he writes that while he was in sin the sight of lepers was bitter to him, that the Lord led him among them and he showed mercy to them, and that what had seemed bitter was turned into sweetness of soul and body. That sentence is in Francis's own words and it is the closest thing we have to his own account of his conversion.

2. "Rebuild My Church"

Praying in the derelict chapel of San Damiano below Assisi, around 1205, Francis heard the figure on the painted crucifix tell him to go and repair his house, which as he could see was falling into ruin. He took it literally. He sold cloth from his father's stock and a horse, offered the money to the priest at San Damiano, and set about repairing the building with his own hands and with stones he begged in the streets. He went on to repair San Pietro della Spina and the Portiuncula, the little chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli that became the home of his order.

His father took him to the bishop's court to recover the money and to force him back into the family business. In the square before Bishop Guido, Francis handed back the coins, stripped off his clothes and gave them to his father, and said that from then on he would say only "our Father who art in heaven". The bishop covered him with his own cloak.

The larger sense of the command, the reform of a Church in poor condition, was read into it by later writers. Francis himself repaired three chapels first, and the fact that he began with masonry is the point that keeps his conversion from being an abstraction.

3. Lady Poverty

In 1208 or 1209, at Mass in the Portiuncula, Francis heard the Gospel passage in which Christ sends out the disciples to take no gold, no bag, no second tunic and no sandals (Matthew 10:9-10). He asked the priest to explain it, and then treated it as the rule of his life.

The poverty he chose was concrete. His friars were to own nothing individually and nothing in common, to work with their hands for food, and to beg only when work failed. He forbade them money outright. He called them Friars Minor, the lesser brothers, choosing a term from the social vocabulary of the Italian communes for the people at the bottom. Later Franciscan writers personified his ideal as Lady Poverty, in the allegory known as the Sacrum Commercium, and the phrase is theirs rather than his.

Poverty for Francis is imitation of Christ rather than an economic programme. He returns constantly to the Lord who was poor at his birth, poor in his life and stripped at his death. In his Testament he insists on working, and he tells the brothers who cannot work to beg without shame.

4. The Stigmata

In September 1224, around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Francis was keeping a fast on Mount La Verna in the Apennines with a few companions. There, according to the earliest accounts, he saw a seraph with the figure of a crucified man, and afterwards carried in his hands, feet and side the marks of the wounds of Christ. He hid them, kept his hands in his sleeves and wore shoes for the rest of his life, and only a few brothers saw them before his death.

The evidence is unusually good for a claim of this kind. Brother Elias, the vicar of the order, announced the wounds in a circular letter written immediately after Francis died, to men who could ask the brothers who had washed the body. Thomas of Celano, writing his first life within two or three years of the death at the request of Gregory IX, describes them in detail. This is the first recorded instance of the stigmata in Christian history, and every later case is measured against it.

The theology Francis's contemporaries drew from it is conformity to Christ crucified. St. Paul writes to the Galatians that he bears on his body the marks of Jesus (Galatians 6:17), and the Franciscan reading is that a life spent imitating the poor and crucified Christ was finally marked in the flesh. Francis lived about two years afterwards, in increasing pain, nearly blind from an eye disease contracted in the East.

5. The Order, the Rule and Clare

Companions began joining in 1208. In 1209 or 1210 Francis walked to Rome with about eleven of them, and Pope Innocent III gave verbal approval to a short rule made mostly of Gospel texts. The movement grew far faster than anyone had planned: within Francis's lifetime there were thousands of friars spread across Europe, and by 1217 the order was organised into provinces with missions beyond Italy.

That growth caused the central conflict of his last years. A handful of men living in huts could own nothing; an international order with houses, novices and study needed buildings and books. Francis resigned the leadership around 1220. A revised rule was drafted, and in 1223 Pope Honorius III approved the Later Rule, the Regula bullata, which is the rule Franciscans profess today. His Testament, written near the end, insists on the earlier strictness in a tone that reads as a warning.

In 1212 an eighteen-year-old noblewoman of Assisi, Clare, left her family's house on the night of Palm Sunday and came to the Portiuncula, where Francis cut off her hair and clothed her in a rough habit. She founded the community at San Damiano that became the Poor Clares, and she fought for decades to keep the privilege of poverty for her nuns. Read more on our page for St. Clare of Assisi.

Francis also wrote a rule for lay people who wanted to live his spirit while staying married and in their trades, which became the Third Order, now the Secular Franciscan Order. At Greccio in 1223 he set up a manger with an ox and an ass for the Christmas Mass, which is the origin of the Christmas crib.

6. Damietta: Francis and the Sultan

In 1219 Francis sailed to Egypt during the Fifth Crusade, crossed the lines at Damietta with Brother Illuminato, and was brought before the sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. He was received, spoke with the sultan and his religious advisers, and was sent back to the crusader camp unharmed.

Several independent sources report the meeting, including Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre, who was in Egypt at the time. What was said is not recorded reliably, and the later stories of an offered trial by fire come from Franciscan tradition rather than from the earliest witnesses. Two things are clear from the sources: Francis went to preach rather than to fight, and both men behaved with courtesy in the middle of a war. Popes have returned to the episode repeatedly in the modern era when speaking about relations with Muslims.

7. The Canticle of the Creatures

Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures, also called the Canticle of Brother Sun, in 1225, mostly while ill and nearly blind in a hut at San Damiano. It is one of the earliest surviving poems in the Italian vernacular. It praises God through Brother Sun, Sister Moon and the stars, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire and Sister Mother Earth.

Two verses were added later. When the bishop and the civil governor of Assisi were in a bitter quarrel, Francis added the stanza praising God through those who forgive for love of him and bear sickness and trial in peace, and had it sung before both men, who were reconciled. As he was dying he added the verse welcoming Sister Bodily Death. Pope Francis took the opening words of the poem, Laudato si', as the title of his 2015 encyclical on the care of creation.

8. The Record and the Legends

The reliable layer is Francis's own writings and the early lives: Thomas of Celano's first life of 1228 or 1229, written for the canonisation, his second life of about 1247, the Legend of the Three Companions, and St. Bonaventure's Legenda Maior of 1263. Bonaventure's version was made the official life by the general chapter of 1266, which ordered the earlier lives withdrawn, a decision that lost material and is one reason modern scholars work hard on the earlier texts.

The much-loved stories of the wolf of Gubbio, and many of the charming anecdotes told about the early brothers, come from the Fioretti, the Little Flowers of St. Francis, a devotional compilation made in the fourteenth century, more than a hundred years after his death. They are edifying tales rather than testimony. The sermon to the birds is different: it appears already in Celano's first life, which puts it in the earliest layer.

The prayer beginning "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace" is not by Francis. It first appeared anonymously in French in a small devotional magazine in 1912, and his name became attached to it during the First World War. It is a good prayer and it is a twentieth-century one.

The saying "preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary use words" is likewise absent from his writings and from the early lives. Francis preached constantly, in words, and his Rule regulates who may do it.

9. Why the Church Holds Him Up

The first thing is literal obedience to the Gospel. Francis's method was to hear a passage, ask what it said, and do it. The Church holds that up because it is available to anyone, with no education and no office required.

The second is poverty as a form of love. His renunciation was aimed at conformity to the poor Christ and at freedom to serve. The Catechism teaches that God blesses those who come to the aid of the poor and rebukes those who turn away from them, and it treats voluntary poverty and the works of mercy as an expression of that.

The third is the sacramental reading of creation. Francis calls the sun, water and fire brother and sister because they come from the same Father, and the created order for him is a text of praise. This is Catholic doctrine rather than pantheism. The Catechism recalls the gentleness with which saints like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Philip Neri treated animals (CCC 2416), and it teaches that animals are God's creatures owed kindness while the human person remains the one creature God willed for his own sake.

The fourth is his loyalty to the Church. Francis lived at a time of movements that preached poverty and ended outside the Church. He went to Rome for approval, honoured priests whatever their lives, and wrote in his Testament of his reverence for priests and for the Body of the Lord in their hands. The reform he brought about happened inside the institution.

10. Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

His feast is 4 October, an obligatory memorial. The Transitus, the commemoration of his death on the evening of 3 October, is kept in Franciscan houses and many parishes.

He is patron of Italy, named with St. Catherine of Siena by Pius XII in 1939, and patron of animals and of ecologists, the latter declared by John Paul II in 1979. He is also invoked by merchants, from his father's trade. The blessing of animals on or near his feast is the best known custom attached to him, and it takes place in parishes worldwide.

Other devotions: the Christmas crib, which begins with Greccio in 1223; the Portiuncula indulgence attached to the chapel at Santa Maria degli Angeli; the Franciscan Crown rosary of the seven joys of Mary; and membership in the Secular Franciscan Order for lay people who want a rule of life. His body lies in the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi, one of the pilgrimage sites of Assisi.

11. What to Take From Francis of Assisi

Do one Gospel sentence literally. Pick the passage that has been bothering you and act on it this week without softening it into a general principle.

Touch what repels you. Francis dates his conversion to going among lepers. The equivalent is specific and you probably already know what it is.

Start with the masonry. He was told to rebuild the Church and he began by carrying stones to a ruined chapel. Concrete work in front of you beats a large intention.

Own less on purpose. Complete destitution is his vocation rather than yours, and the direction is transferable: fewer possessions, less debt, more given away.

Stay inside the Church while you reform anything. His movement lasted where similar movements broke off and vanished, and his own Testament is the reason we know he chose that deliberately.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Francis of Assisi?

St. Francis of Assisi was an Italian friar who lived from about 1181 to 1226. The son of a cloth merchant, he renounced his inheritance, founded the Order of Friars Minor on a rule of literal Gospel poverty, preached in Italy and in Egypt, received the stigmata in 1224 and wrote the Canticle of the Creatures. He was canonized in 1228.

What is the stigmata of St. Francis?

In September 1224, on Mount La Verna, Francis received the marks of the wounds of Christ in his hands, feet and side after a vision of a seraph with a crucified figure. It is the first recorded case of the stigmata in Christian history. Brother Elias announced it in a letter immediately after Francis died in 1226, and Thomas of Celano described it in a life written within a few years of the death.

Did St. Francis write the Peace Prayer?

No. The prayer beginning "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace" first appeared anonymously in French in a small devotional magazine in 1912, and Francis's name became attached to it during the First World War.

Did St. Francis say to preach the Gospel and use words if necessary?

There is no such sentence in his writings or in the early lives of him. Francis preached in words constantly, and his Rule sets out who among the brothers may preach and under what conditions.

Why is St. Francis the patron saint of animals?

He called the sun, the wind, water and fire brother and sister in the Canticle of the Creatures, and the early lives record his preaching to the birds. Pope John Paul II named him patron of ecologists in 1979, and parishes bless animals on or near his feast.

What happened when St. Francis met the Sultan?

In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the lines at Damietta in Egypt and was brought before the sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, who received him, spoke with him and sent him back unharmed. Several sources report the meeting, including Jacques de Vitry, who was in Egypt at the time. What was said is not reliably recorded, and the story of an offered trial by fire comes from later Franciscan tradition.

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