Saint Francis of Assisi: From Bitterness to Joy

Francis grew up in Assisi as the son of a wealthy family. His father was a cloth merchant. His adolescence and youth were carefree, and he cultivated the chivalrous ideals admired in his time. At the age of 20, he took part in a military campaign.

Instead, he was taken prisoner, fell ill, and was then freed. After he returned to Assisi, his life did not change in an instant. His conversion was gradual. Little by little, he abandoned the worldly lifestyle he had been living until then.

The deepest change came through his encounter with people with leprosy. In the last months of his life, Francis compiled his Testament. As Pope Benedict XVI explains, there he recalled that the sight of them had once seemed bitter to him, and he regarded roughly the first 25 years of his life as a time spent in sin. Yet he testified that the Lord himself led him among them. What had been bitter was changed into sweetness for his soul and body.

A famous story from that period, handed down by the tradition about his life, tells how Francis dismounted from his horse and gave the kiss of peace to a person with leprosy. Benedict XVI stresses that serving them was not merely a social kindness. It was a true experience of faith, moved by the initiative of God's grace and love. The people he had once avoided he now recognized as brothers to love.

During that same period of conversion, according to the tradition recounted by Church sources, Francis prayed before the cross in the small church of San Damiano and experienced Christ's call to repair his Church. He responded by working with his own hands to repair the building of that small church. Later this call came to be understood as a deeper invitation: to renew Christ's own Church.

His generosity to the poor led his father, Bernardone, to reproach him. Before the Bishop of Assisi, Francis stripped off his clothes as a sign that he was renouncing his father's inheritance. According to the Vita Prima, cited by Pope Francis, Bishop Guido understood this act, immediately embraced him, covered him with his cloak, and from then on became his helper and protector.

Pope Francis interprets that event as a choice to be poor. In his view, it was not an ideological choice but a choice to be like Jesus and to follow him to the end.

After living for a time as a hermit, in 1208 Francis heard the passage of the Gospel of Matthew about Jesus sending out the apostles. He felt called to live in poverty and to preach. Several companions joined him. In 1209 he went to Rome to propose to Pope Innocent III the plan for a new form of Christian life. He always acted in full communion with the authorities of the Church.

From his love for Christ came love for others and for all of God's creatures; this sense of brotherhood inspired the famous Canticle of Creatures. Benedict XVI describes him as a joyful saint: his simplicity, humility, faith, love for Christ and goodness toward every person brought him gladness in every circumstance.

Francis died on the evening of October 3, 1226, at the Portiuncula. After blessing his spiritual children, he died lying on the earthen floor. Two years later, Pope Gregory IX entered him in the roll of saints.

Birth

Assisi, late 1181 or early 1182, into a wealthy cloth-merchant family

San Damiano Cross

According to tradition, probably in 1205

Meeting with the Pope

1209, with Pope Innocent III in Rome

Death

Evening of October 3, 1226, at the Portiuncula

Church status

Saint; entered in the roll of saints by Pope Gregory IX two years after his death