The feast of St. Francis is approaching, I thought of reading a text that I had in my library for a few years and that deserved to be read and presented, it is about “Saint Francis. One of the most deformed figures in history ”, by Cristina Siccardi, SugarcoEdizioni (2019, e.23). A peremptory presentation on the back cover: “This book returns St. Francis of Assisi (1181 / 1182-1226), that of Franciscan sourceswith the direct testimonies of those who lived by his side, and here is that the cheesy, liberal, pacifist, progressive, interreligious, environmentalist, animal rights friar … praised and modeled, automatically leaves the scene to give space to the real protagonist: the free Knight, the Catholic European, the Mystic.
800 years (1219-2019) after his trip to Egypt to announce Faith in Christ to Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, his real portrait is proposed to understand who this character who has now become unpublished really was […]”.
Siccardi’s text was prefaced by Father Serafino Tognetti who wishes to show the true face of St. Francis that is not “That dull and false Francis of an ecologist, pacifist, relativist, do-gooder, naturalist, but rather the image of a Franciscan knight, penitent, reformer, mystic”. The father asks himself some fundamental questions about the saint of Assisi: why he was mystified and made a flag of generic values good for all spiritualities. Again he wonders why other saints such as St Bernard, St Thomas or St Catherine, did not suffer the same fate?
St. Francis was a true reformer of the Church: “Go and repair my Church”, the Lord said to him. And he did it both materially and spiritually. “Francis reformed the Church in an authentic, absolute way, and he did it alone, with the power of faith alone“. In doing this he did it as a “knight” medieval, basically Francis simply changed masters, from the world he had passed to serve God, “With the same vigor, dedication and spirituality as the soldier”. Not for nothing did Francis define himself as “The herald of the great King”. And Francis was like the herald who runs and announces the progress of the battle, who shouts victory or defeat to everyone. Francis revives the Risen One in our midst, with his joy, his face, his perfect joy. According to Father Serafino, Francis is characterized by the beatitude that emanates from his person. “When men saw Francis, they saw the kingdom of God on earth. When men saw him, they knew God “. Therefore for Siccardi, “Living the Gospel, for St. Francis, means speaking like the Gospel, without personal interpretations, but according to Christ and, therefore, the Tradition of the Church, oral and written”.
It was the joy of the first Christians of the first martyrs for the faith, who transformed the Greco-Roman civilization. Everyone was amazed not so much by the new doctrine, but by the joy these men and women manifested in living it. The same thing happened a thousand years later with Francis in Assisi, not because of the testimony of thousands of martyrs, but of one man alone.
In a certain sense, Francis renewed the society of the time which had become “old”.
And here we need to make a very useful reflection for us too. Attention, the world often does not want to be renewed.
“Francis annihilated the world with his own presence. He did not have as his work program that of transforming worldly structures, but rather of letting the presence of the crucified and risen Christ live in fullness in him “.
The world tries to destroy it, if it cannot do it physically, it does it by transforming it, “Putting on him a mask that deforms him”. In fact for Father Serafino, “It is not possible to eliminate Francis materially, because history cannot be rewritten, but it can be re-interprettrying to change his image, make him return to the world from which he came after all, having been, before his conversion, a rich and perhaps a little spoiled young man of the rich society of Assisi “.
This is a worldliness that not only the enemies of the Catholic Church have done, through novels or films that present an “other” Francis, but also by those who profess their faith, even as religious. However, the Franciscan order in its long history has had many saints who have continued the work of their holy founder. Two names for everyone, two giants in chronological order: “St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe And St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. Very different from each other and also different from Francesco, but also like him, driving crowds “.
Father Tognetti praises Cristina Siccardi who had the merit of documenting the life of St. Francis, having read carefully the Franciscan sources (a text of thousands of pages), juggling with great competence between the writings and biographies of the saint. I remind my readers to have read and reviewed an excellent book published by Faith & Culture of Verona, “San Francesco anti-modern”by Guido Vignelli.
Returning to the work of the Turin scholar, in the 6th chapter, she specifies that Francis physically restored three churches, which symbolically represent the three Orders he founded: the Friars Minorthe Poor Mr.and the Third Order. “Tali Ordini – writes Siccardi – restored the Church. We are talking about an immense population that has spanned centuries and generations “. The Franciscan Third Order while remaining in the world and continuing its activities, men and women became penitents under the wing of St. Francis.
Tognetti is keen to clarify that we do not want to make Francis a new flag, perhaps an ideological one. Saint Francis belongs to everyone, indeed he belongs to Christ, and this text by Siccardi wants to have precisely this purpose, to give Francis back to Christ, to his Catholic Church. It can annoy those who do not want to give up the saint of Assisi as the flag of ecology and rainbow pacifism. Siccardi’s book simply wants to make known the true figure and true face of Francis.
DOMENICO BONVEGNA
dbonvegna@gmail.com