On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  In his book The Little Flowers of St. Clare, Piero Bargellini paints a moving portrait of Clare’s yearning for the Papal guarantee on her deathbed: “For this reason, she gazed lovingly at the hands of the Cardinals and Bishops who came to visit her; then, not seeing this roll of parchment with the leaden bull, the seal hanging from it, she would sigh again, turn her head away, close her eyes and repeat her silent prayer.” She entreated Francis’s original companions who visited her to pray “that she would not die before that Papal Bull arrived at San Damiano.”

  She succeeded—but just. On August 10, 1253, the sealed bull arrived, just one day after the Pope had signed it in Assisi. It reads, in part: “No one is permitted to destroy this page of our confirmation or to oppose it recklessly. If anyone shall have presumed to attempt this, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of his holy Apostles, Peter and Paul.”

  Clare died the next day, at the age of sixty. The spot is roped off on the stone floor at the end of the dormitory, lit by two naked lightbulbs, and identified by a wooden cross on the wall and the inevitable fresh flowers.

  It is with some relief, on my part anyway, that we leave Clare’s dormitory and follow Father Antonio down a passage to the courtyard outside. He apologizes that he cannot show us the sisters’ second-floor infirmary; the small building, formerly the residence of San Damiano’s priest, had been structurally damaged in the 1997 earthquake and is closed to visitors. So is the ground-floor refectory where the Poor Ladies ate their meager meals in silence, listening to the Bible. Clearly visible through the open door, however, are the smoke-blackened walls and frescoes, the jumbled stone floor, and the sisters’ original dark, heavy wood tables and benches. The scene is so authentic that we fully expect to see Clare take her place under the wooden cross that marked the abbess’s place. Further enhancing the medieval mood is the sound of psalms being sung quite beautifully by a group of German pilgrims at San Damiano’s entrance.

  Father Antonio has to leave us in the courtyard to hurry back to his post, and we thank him profusely for his time. “Please take these as a gift,” he says, thrusting several prayer and history cards of San Damiano into our hands. “God bless you.”

  I am happy to linger in front of the refectory, with all its memories of Clare. What an extraordinary woman she was. Though her legend may very well have been exaggerated, she was a person of steadfast determination and dedication. When she heard of the martyrdom of five Franciscan friars in Morocco in 1220, she chafed at being unable to go to the Muslim country herself to emulate their sacrifice. She stood up to Popes and cardinals, looked after her sisters, and not only embraced what I would consider a horrible cloistered life but shared her passion for it with other Poor Clares.

  “What you do, may you always do and never abandon,” she wrote to Agnes of Prague, whom she addressed as the “daughter of the King of Kings,” in 1235. “But with swift pace, light step and unswerving feet, so that even your steps stir up no dust, go forward securely, joyfully and swiftly, on the path of prudent happiness.”

  Clare was also very human. Mindful perhaps of her own extreme penance, which would advance her ill health and leave her an invalid for almost thirty years, she cautioned Agnes in a later letter about the rules for fasting and abstinence. “But our flesh is not bronze nor is our strength that of stone,” she wrote in 1238. “No, we are frail and inclined to every bodily weakness! I beg you, therefore, dearly beloved, to refrain wisely and prudently from an indiscreet and impossible austerity in the fasting that I know you have undertaken. And I beg you … to offer to the Lord your reasonable service and your sacrifice always seasoned with salt.”

  I am reluctant to leave San Damiano. Though its historical emphasis is on Francis and the replica of the talking cross that hangs over the altar in the convent’s old, smoke-blackened church, the soul of San Damiano is Clare. In 2003 there were twenty thousand members of the Poor Clares worldwide, either cloistered as she was or working with the needy in their communities. The Poor Clares have a multitude of websites, including www.poorclares.org for the sisters in Canton, Ohio, where they still live by her hard-fought Rule.

  But there wouldn’t, of course, have been a Clare at all without Francis. It was his stunning influence and ascetic way of life that had influenced her and so many others in the Middle Ages. I struggle to comprehend how one man could cause so many to give away all their earthly possessions to the poor, often over the furious objections of their would-have-been heirs, and enter, with joy, into lives of abject deprivation. But thousands did.

  I wander into the little church at San Damiano that had started the whole sequence of events and study the replica of the original cross. It is huge, some six feet high and four feet wide, and painted on cloth in bright, cheerful colors. The Christ is not the traditional Christ in agony, with blood dripping from the crown of thorns on his head and the wounds in his hands, feet, and side, but a peaceful Christ, whose wounds don’t seem to hurt. The San Damiano Christ is not dead but alive. His eyes are open, his arms outstretched in rebirth. There are the requisite details depicting the story of his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, and the usual cast of characters—the Virgin Mary, John, Mary Magdalene, the Roman soldiers who crucified him, and others—but it is the Christ figure that dominates. He is strong, even healthy looking, and bathed in light.

  Sitting quietly there in the church, I can see how that figure transfixed Francis. The San Damiano cross does not speak out loud to me, of course, as it did to Francis, but as much as the icon projects sadness and loss, it also speaks of hope. That must have been a powerful message in the Middle Ages, when there was so much despair and uncertainty.

  In my reverie about the cross, I almost miss the windowsill to the right of the entrance where Francis hurled the sack of money to restore San Damiano after the priest refused to accept it. Amazingly, the fenestra del dinaro is still there, framed by two fourteenth-century commemorative frescoes, one showing Francis being dragged away from San Damiano by his furious father in front of the terrified priest, the other depicting Francis praying before the cross.

  That San Damiano remains so authentic is due largely to the faith—and charity—of one British family. Lord Ripon, a British statesman, former viceroy of India and dedicated convert to Catholicism, bought San Damiano some 150 years ago, just as the secular government of Camillo Cavour was poised to nationalize it and expel its friars. By buying San Damiano and holding it in his name, Lord Ripon was able to give use of his private property to the Franciscans, who were not, of course, allowed to own any property themselves. Lord Ripon also restored the convent at his expense, an extraordinary act recorded in Latin on a wall outside the convent.

  The ownership of San Damiano was passed down through the family until 1983, when its then heir returned San Damiano officially to the Franciscans—but with conditions. The Franciscans were enjoined to keep the medieval convent of Francis and Clare unchanged forever and to preserve its spiritual purpose by welcoming worshipers to prayers with the friars in the old church and limiting tourist hours.

  The result is the jewel of Assisi’s shrines to Francis and Clare. Set in terraced olive groves, rimmed with cypresses, and nestled on the slope of Mount Subasio, little San Damiano speaks more of the saints it honors than any of the other, more tarted-up Franciscan sites around Assisi, especially Santa Maria degli Angeli, or the Porziuncola, the second church Francis restored—which is virtually unrecognizable.

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  Peace March in Santa Maria degli Angeli

  The tiny PORZIUNCOLA inside Santa Maria degli Angeli, where Francis finds a spiritual home and the Franciscan movement is born

  The Patriarchal Basilica de Santa Maria degli Angeli looms over the valley at the foot of Mount Subasio, just a mile and a half from Assisi. The basilica’s enormous size and neo-Baroque architecture, with all its attendant swirls and curls (not to mention the recorded organ music broadcast outdoors over loudspeakers), prompts adje
ctives like “kitsch” or “grotesque.” Even the official Assisi tourist map describes the basilica as “grandiose,” while the less politic Rough Guide declares it a “majestically uninspiring pile.”

  Steeped as we are in the message of poverty and simplicity that Francis both preached and lived, we find it almost impossible to comprehend how such an overblown edifice could have been built to shelter the little Porziuncola, the second, and most important, church Francis restored. The domed basilica is visible for miles by day and is just as prominent at night: the three-story-high gilded bronze replica of the Virgin Mary on its façade is crowned with a halo of bright electric lightbulbs.

  Inside this architectural sand castle run amok is a replica of the tiny, decrepit chapel Francis chanced on in the forest soon after restoring San Damiano. He was captivated by what Celano describes as a “church of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God that had been built in ancient times, but was now deserted and cared for by no one.” Francis set to rebuilding the church, which measured just ten feet by twenty-three feet and was nicknamed the Porziuncola either for the “little piece” of land it sat on owned by the local Benedictines or, as others suggest, for the “little piece” of stone from the site of the Virgin Mary’s assumption into heaven brought back there by pilgrims from the Holy Land.

  Whatever the source of the Porziuncola’s nickname, the derelict church and its spiritual aura resonated with Francis. Not only did he revere the Virgin Mary but while he was restoring “her” church, he was visited often by the angels inherent in the church’s formal name. The combination led to his decision to live at the Porziuncola. “He decided to stay there permanently out of reverence for the angels and love for the Mother of Christ,” writes St. Bonaventure. “He loved this spot more than any other in the world.”

  Eight hundred years later, no other church, including his own basilica in Assisi, is so closely associated with Francis and his legend. It was at the Porziuncola that Franciscanism took hold; that Francis welcomed the runaway Clare; that Francis lived for eighteen years with his friars; that in 1219 his order gathered, some five thousand strong; that Francis resigned as head of the order in 1220, and that, six years later, he died.

  The humble church where it all began quickly became an international shrine. To accommodate the crowds, a huge basilica was erected over the tiny chapel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rebuilt after an earthquake in the nineteenth century, and restored again after the earthquake of 1997. A town quickly grew around the basilica, both named Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the old forests were felled and replaced with grids of paved streets. Hotels, restaurants, and coffee bars followed, as did shops and street bazaars featuring sweatshirts with the logo “Assisi.”

  Nonetheless, the power of that original, simple chapel extended worldwide, including America. A Franciscan friar exploring California in 1769 named a river, in Spanish, Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Porciuncula, and the settlement established later along its bank came to be known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula, or the Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Little Portion. The name of that settlement would, in time, be shortened to Los Angeles.

  The town of Santa Maria degli Angeli is a madhouse during one of our visits there in the fall of 2004. The streets are being overrun by Italians, waving placards and banners and flags and marching in a Manifestazióne di pace. It is that once-a-year day when more than one hundred thousand Italians march for peace from Perugia to Assisi via Santa Maria degli Angeli, and we find ourselves, accidentally, among them. It seems entirely fitting that Francis, a medieval monument for peace, would have brought all these people to the town named after his little church and on to his hometown in the midst of the war with Iraq. “Pace,” the tie-dyed banners read. Peace.

  Francis would have loved the foot-weary peace pilgrims sprawled on their backpacks in the gigantic piazza in front of the equally gigantic church. But he would have been stunned to see what had happened to his simple little church, which used to stand along a narrow path in the woods below Assisi.

  The Porziuncola now sits on acres of marble floor inside the triple-nave basilica, dwarfed by massive columns and the basilica’s skyscraping dome. It looks more like a gaily painted doll’s house than the simple home of the Franciscan Order. The only authentic feeling of Francis is in the chapel’s rough stone interior and the excavated fragments of the original church under the altar. The fourteenth-century frescoes depicting scenes from his life help somewhat, but I can’t avoid the sensation I am in some sort of theme park named Francis World.

  Still, the chapel evokes deep feelings among many of its visitors. On this crazy day of the peace march in 2004, people stand patiently in snaking lines to move quietly through it; a nun finds a seat inside the chapel to say her prayers and, an hour later, is still there. On a quieter day the year before, we had seen a group of young Franciscan sisters leaving the chapel, some in tears. They had celebrated mass inside the Porziuncola, led by a Franciscan priest, and were obviously deeply moved.

  So I fight my critical self and move on across the marble floor from the Porziuncola to the Cappella del Transito or Chapel of the Transitus, a replica of the friars’ infirmary where Francis died. A huge nineteenth-century painting on the chapel’s exterior wall shows Francis in the midst of his friars being welcomed into heaven by angels and broadcasts the chapel’s significance, though it would have been more poignant if the “infirmary” had been made of wood and thatch, not brick.

  Far more touching, inside the chapel is a simply beautiful white-enameled terra-cotta sculpture of Francis by the fifteenth-century genius Andrea Della Robbia. The barefoot figure holding a gold cross positively glows, and the gentle expression on his face fits comfortably my mental image of Francis. The seeming confusion about the date of his death—October 4, 1226, on the outside of the chapel, October 3 on the inside—is explained by a passing friar. Dusk, not midnight, marked the beginning of a new day in the Middle Ages, and Francis died at night.

  Many of the legends about Francis took place at the Porziuncola, and we follow the sign to the Cappella delle Rose or Chapel of the Roses. Along the way is a glassed-in garden that sets the scene for one of Francis’s most human moments. Distracted one night in his prayers by feelings of earthly yearning—that is, lust—Francis threw himself into a thicket of brambles. Miraculously, the briars did not pierce his flesh but instead were transformed into a bush of thornless roses. The still-thornless roses in the current garden, supposedly descendants of the benign medieval bushes, still bloom every May, followed by the immediate shedding of their leaves, seemingly stained with blood.

  The recreated garden is a welcome relief from the basilica’s massive marble interior. Goldfish swim in a fountain. White pigeons and doves feast on birdseed around a garden sculpture of Francis holding a basket for alms. A second garden sculpture of him, this one with a lamb, suggests another legend at the Porziuncola. Francis was given a lamb as a gift, and wanting to keep it, he instructed the lamb to praise God and not to bother the other friars. The lamb evidently took his instructions to heart. Not only did it go regularly into the church, kneel at the altar, and bleat its praises to the Virgin Mary but it took communion equally piously as well.

  The garden honors another charming animal legend in a little niche in the wall. This one involves a cricket in a fig tree outside Francis’s cell that he tamed. “Come, Sister Cricket,” Francis would say, according to the Legend of Perugia. “Sing, Sister Cricket.” The cricket sat on Francis’s finger and serenaded him an hour a day for eight days, until he gave it permission to leave. “Blessed Francis found so much joy in creatures for love of the Creator that the Lord tamed the wild beasts to console the body and soul of his servant,” explains the Legend of Perugia.

  The sunken, thirteenth-century Chapel of the Roses is farther down the corridor from the thornless rose garden. Constructed originally by St. Bonaventure around Francis’s favorite cell and enla
rged by St. Bernardino of Siena in the fifteenth century, it is said to have been a place Francis passed entire nights in prayer. It was presumably from this now subterranean grotto that Francis tamed Sister Cricket and that his straying thoughts prompted his plunge into the nearby brambles. A sixteenth-century fresco of the Miracle of the Roses adorns the chapel wall, along with frescoes of Francis with his first companions and the granting of the indulgence at the Porziuncola.

  I’m on my hands and knees peering through a grate into the underground chapel when the narrow corridor is suddenly filled with singing. I pull myself to my feet to hear the beautiful voices of a visiting choir of Russian Orthodox women, standing right behind me, singing a Laud in close harmony. They have come a long way to celebrate the spirit of Francis here, and once again I am reminded of the impact he continues to have on the spiritual lives of so many.

  I am struck further by an Italian couple we meet in the basilica’s courtyard who had driven two and a half hours from Brescia to march in the peace demonstration. The man’s name is Francesco, he tells us. His father named him after the saint because he was born prematurely and had to spend the first two months of his life in an oxygen-rich incubator. There was fear that he might be blind as a result, and his father had come to Assisi every day to pray for him. “I’m now a heart surgeon,” Francesco says proudly, then asks my husband to take a picture of him and his wife holding a “Pace” banner in front of a statue of his namesake and patron saint.