Confessor Francis

In Western martyrologies and older liturgical books the designation Francis, Confessor customarily refers to Francis of Assisi, founder of the Order of Friars Minor. He was born in Assisi in Umbria in the late twelfth century, most often dated to 1181 or 1182; no single year is established beyond dispute. Baptized Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, he was later called Francesco, a nickname the early lives connect with his father Pietro’s cloth trade with France or with the young man’s taste for French song and manners. His mother is named Pica in the sources. He belonged to the prosperous commercial class of a communal Italian city and in youth took part in its festivities and in the fighting between Assisi and Perugia. After the defeat at Collestrada he spent a period as a prisoner in Perugia and later fell seriously ill. Early biographers, beginning with Thomas of Celano, present a cluster of subsequent experiences—the encounter with a leper, the voice he believed he heard from the crucifix at the ruined church of San Damiano telling him to repair God’s house, and a public renunciation of his inheritance before Bishop Guido of Assisi—as the turning from a mercantile career to evangelical poverty.

From about the middle of the first decade of the thirteenth century he lived by repairing churches, serving lepers, and begging, then gathered companions, among them Bernard of Quintavalle. In 1209 or 1210 the small fraternity obtained from Pope Innocent III permission to live according to a brief form of life drawn from the Gospel, the act later treated as the founding of the Friars Minor. Francis insisted on minority, itinerant preaching of penance, manual work, and the refusal of money and fixed property. Clare of Assisi received a religious habit from him in 1212 and began the community of Poor Ladies at San Damiano. A way of life for lay penitents associated with his preaching developed into what became the Third Order. The brotherhood spread rapidly through Italy and across the Alps, which soon produced tension between Francis’s ideal of unstable poverty and the practical needs of an international order for houses, studies, and papal privileges.

Francis preached in the towns and countryside of central Italy and sought missions beyond it. In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, he went to Egypt and was received by the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Kamil near Damietta; the meeting is attested in near-contemporary sources, though later narratives added legendary details. A revised rule was confirmed by Pope Honorius III in 1223. In 1224, while at the hermitage of La Verna in Tuscany, he is reported by Celano and later by Bonaventure to have received the stigmata. In his last years, nearly blind and otherwise infirm, he composed or dictated the Canticle of the Creatures in the Umbrian vernacular, praising God through sun, moon, wind, water, fire, earth, and bodily death.

He died at the Portiuncula, in the plain below Assisi, on 3 October 1226 and was first buried at San Giorgio in the city. Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia had been protector of the order, canonized him on 16 July 1228. In 1230 the body was translated into the new basilica built in his honor, where it remains. His principal feast is 4 October. Twentieth-century papal acts named him patron of Italy (1939) and of ecology (1979), in addition to a long-standing popular association with animals and with Assisi itself. Historians distinguish the figure recoverable from the earliest documents from later theological and legendary elaboration, but his role as a merchant’s son turned preacher of poverty and as founder of a major mendicant order in thirteenth-century central Italy is well established.