Saint Francis of Assisi, a man and his revolution for Peace

Published: Tuesday, 04 October 2022 – Fabrizio Giusti



IT HAPPENED TODAY – October 4th, the anniversary celebrated all over the world

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His ” revolution ” of the spirit is still today, in an age of secularization, wars and fears, one of the brightest examples for humanity.

The work of St. Francis of Assisi towards the least, the poor, the marginalized, the sick and the other ‘, found in its complex and difficult time a dimension that today, after eight centuries, is still at the center of the deepest issues of our society.

If all this was possible, it is precisely because his person was able to challenge the conventions, the ordinary, the vision of his time, hatred, abuse, conflict and slavery of body and soul. Through humility he won the dominance of the stronger man and committed himself to those who were left behind, to those who could not even afford bread, opening a different vision of coexistence.

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The arguments for which the Saint made his choice, abandoning comfort for absolute poverty, are still highly topical. For this reason, that July 16, 1228, when Pope Gregory IX canonized him just two years after his death, remains one of the fundamental steps to understand how much loved his identity as a man was.

Francis was loved by many: atheists or religious, tyrants and liberals. This is because the size of him was enormous even though he was not a complex man. He never wanted to take the place of anyone on a political level. The poverty of him, and that of those who gathered around him, did not consist exclusively in the renunciation of wealth and did not contemplate criticism towards those who possessed money. His was an exclusive renunciation of power, of the will to impose himself on others. He never took sides against the Church, he just behaved differently in words and deeds.

He had been a boy in arms, he had fought, he wanted to become a knight, he aspired to nobility from the middle class, he was addicted to food and entertainment. He was a bright young man, who loved parties, liked women. Then, at 25, he took another path. Indeed, the other way. A choice of change that divided him in two. Thus the sight of the lepers, which first horrified him, radically transformed his soul to the point of later writing of the “sweetness” of being together with beggars and the suffering.

Francesco knew how to love his neighbor, he loved nature, he wrote and spoke differently. From him a faith, a vision of the world and a language were born that saved and created another image of the Church (which needed to be strengthened, as symbolically happened in San Damiano) and even of literature.

A saint, first of all, should be considered as a model of life. Everything that comes from his personality and from his works is of little use if his legacy is not understood. For this reason it is fundamental, without rhetoric, to consider Francis as a man above all else. He was beyond his time and has often been literally transfigured, making him a little too much like the model of films (some of which are very beautiful) but far from the real and what he really was.

This is due to the problem of sources, texts and the ‘mythization’ that has been created around his name. Tommaso da Celano, his first biographer, told just two years after his death, when the memory of him and that of those who had known him were still alive, a different Francis from that of a few years later. As is well known, all these writings were then officially replaced by the Major Legend of San Bonaventura di Bagnoregio, until the total destruction of everything that had been narrated before. Very few manuscripts escaped annihilation and were only found during the 19th and 20th centuries.

This short circuit was due to the fact that after the death of Francis the Friars became thousands, they had changed their habits, they also lived in strong contrasts. The transformation of the religious Order, in substance, had also changed the needs of remembrance and practice.

Francis invited everyone to work with their own hands and the Order had become a beggar, Francis asked to live in huts of branches because he believed that possession would lead to a defense of what he had conquered (and therefore could be a cause of conflict ). Francis did not want to make use of culture so as not to fall into pride. Instead, over the years, those who arrived after him lived in beautiful convents and were equipped with large libraries. There was therefore a ‘variation’ of the original theme – obviously physiological – which must be contemplated in order to better understand the mutation of times and ways.

That Francis who had gradually become a saint had essentially become a figure to be admired, but not to be imitated.

The greatness of Francis, and this is what makes him modern, was to understand the problem of others by thinking about peace and excluding what divided people and communities.. When he goes to Damietta and meets the sultan of Egypt Malik al Kamile, in full Fifth Crusade in June 1219, he is struck by the dignity of the Muslims and by how he was received. The event took place in the truce of arms between August and September, in the port of the city, where Saladin’s nephew welcomed the friars with great courtesy, offering them gifts that were refused in homage to the vow of poverty.

An important moment, especially on the Christian side, so much so that on his return Francis wrote in the “non-stamped” Rule of 1221 that the friars had to live among Muslims, avoid quarrels and violence, confess that they were Christians and subjected to every creature. After carrying out this fundamental task, if it pleased the Lord, that is, if mutual respect was born, the confreres could talk about Christ. Otherwise, and this is a concept of extraordinary grandeur, they should only have set a good example.

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A call for dialogue and faith, spirituality and prayer that we find in Greccio, where he asks to prepare a cave with hay, an ox and a donkey. This is because the Ox and donkey, in the apocryphal gospels, were interpreted as a symbol of the Jews and pagans. The snout of the animals inside the hay of the stable, in the philosophy of the message, would have symbolically recalled the great wish of brotherhood. A revolutionary and courageous message in times when the Crusaders were killing to go to the Holy Sepulcher and heretics were being massacred. Francis himself knew the meaning of this reality, since as a young man, before getting off his horse and kissing a leper, he had taken up arms against Perugia.

In Greccio’s testimony, therefore, there is the disavowal of the crusade, of the violence of his years. That is: we are not forced to go to the Holy Land, kill or regain primacy when faith can be everywhere and in harmony.

Alda Merini, in her Canto delle Creature, wrote: “I am now the lute of God / and I will sing his love songs. / Despite not knowing the music, / my hands will play for him / all the ghosts of joy. / God is light: I will sing for him / all the colors of the earth “.

It was just like that. Francesco is still strong today, steadfast in his land. A colossal enterprise in the century of globalization, individualism, economic primacy, wars and technology. An image that stands out in contradiction and in the same way as a powerful and necessary presence. His joy and his humility are still teaching.

Beyond the purely religious aspect, and emerging from the uniqueness of his existential path, his name coincides with a high and joyful cultural and freedom structure that serves to understand, to think, to reflect in the era in which one thinks or reflects less and less. About us, others and what grows or lives next to us.

Saint Francis of Assisi, a man and his revolution for Peace