On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  Standing there in the courtyard, I realize I envy the people flocking to Santa Maria degli Angeli—like the Russian Orthodox choir and the nun praying for hours in the Porziuncola, and our new friend Francesco—who are not at all put off by the contradictions of the basilica but can see beyond it to embrace the spirit of Francis. And there are many, many like them, of every faith and national origin.

  The basilica’s bookstore is a blueprint of Francis’s global appeal. There are aisles and aisles of books about Francis and some about Clare, in Italian, English, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Serbian, Croatian, Spanish, and Portuguese. This multitude of languages is mirrored in the basilica’s gift shop. The souvenir bins, observed by security cameras, offer tau and San Damiano crosses in every size, crucifixes, pictures of Francis, multilingual videos and copies of the Canticle to Brother Sun, on and on, all of which customers can buy in the language of their choice, the selections being posted by each cash register. Even confession is global. Each confessional booth inside the basilica has the padre’s language abilities posted outside: Italian-English, Italian-French-German, and so on.

  However grandiose and contrived Santa Maria degli Angeli may seem, there is no doubt that the basilica is central to the religious legacy of Francis. While Francis is buried in Assisi, his basilica there is really more an unparalleled Renaissance art gallery than it is his spiritual heart. He was never physically at the basilica in Assisi, after all, but he was certainly at the Porziuncola, the tiny chapel in the woods near Assisi, where on a winter morning in 1208, his life changed forever.

  8

  Francis Gets His Marching Orders

  THE PORZIUNCOLA, where Francis receives his calling · ASSISI, where he converts his first companions · RIVO TORTO, where he teaches his friars to follow his vision

  Francis was praying in the little Porziuncola on the Feast of St. Matthias, and a priest from the Benedictine convent higher up on the mountain had come to say mass for him. The priest chose to read the Mass of the Apostles, which contains the Mission of Christ to His Disciples. Francis, who still thought he was fulfilling Jesus’ command from the cross at San Damiano by rebuilding San Damiano and the Porziuncola, suddenly saw the bigger picture.

  After the mass, which had been in Latin, Francis asked the priest to explain more fully Jesus’ instructions, presumably in his own Umbrian dialect. The priest summed up Jesus’ orders to his apostles from St. Matthew’s Gospel: They were to preach as they went, spreading the message that the Kingdom of God was at hand. They were not to take anything with them on their journey—no gold or silver or copper or a bag or two tunics or shoes or a staff. They should trust in God to supply their needs and wish peace on any house that was worthy.

  The impact on Francis was immediate. Taking the message of the Gospels to be his own, new instructions, and embracing them with “inconceivable joy,” St. Bonaventure writes, Francis “cast off the shoes from his feet, laid aside the staff which he bore, and throwing away his purse and all that he possessed, he clad himself in a single tunic and, instead of the belt which he wore, he girded himself with a cord.”

  Barefoot, wearing a “poor and mean tunic,” which Francis designed with the arms extended to look like a cross, he set out from the Porziuncola to Assisi on his new mission to preach penance and redemption. But his was an uplifting message, not one of fire and brimstone. “God give you peace and well-being,” he would say to every startled bystander he passed, a salutation that no one in that violent time had presumably heard before and that today is reproduced on flags and ceramic tiles and key chains all over Assisi, both in Latin—Pax et Bonum—and in Italian—Pace e Bene.

  At first the people of Assisi regarded this latest version of Francis with skepticism and, often, scorn. But there was something about the fervor with which he spoke, the joy he apparently felt in his poverty, the care he had taken of the lepers that made the people wonder whether he really was some sort of prophet. And he was always cheerful, smiling and singing and preaching to whomever would listen to him.

  Slowly Francis began to make an impression on those who were willing to suspend disbelief and at least consider that he had honestly converted to a life of poverty and spiritual service. The priest at his parish church of San Giorgio, where Francis had received his rudimentary schooling, even invited him to preach there. Celano writes that Francis began by “wishing peace to the congregation, speaking without affectation but with such enthusiasm that all were carried away by his words.”

  That may very well be an exaggeration, but there is no doubt he was having an impact. What set Francis apart from the clergy of the time is that he delivered his simple, direct message in the language of the people, not in Latin. He also faced the people, unlike the priests, whose practice was to turn their backs to the congregation. And he soon began to win his first supporters.

  We are standing in front of the house just off the Via San Gregorio in Assisi where Francis received his first convert. The inscription in the stone arch over the front door identifies the house as having belonged to Assisi’s rich and well-born Bernardo di Quintavalle, a law graduate from the University of Bologna, and it was in this house, during a long night in 1208, that Bernardo tested Francis’s devotional authenticity.

  Bernardo, who had known Francis as a flamboyant youth, had watched him labor to restore the churches, care for the lepers, and live happily in poverty. Intrigued, he often invited his friend to spend the night in his house. Legend has it that Bernardo once feigned sleep so as to observe Francis, and after seeing him “praying all night long, sleeping rarely, praising God and the glorious Virgin, His Mother,” concluded that Francis “truly is from God” and decided to join him.

  The legend immediately continues back in the Piazza del Comune, at what is now the post office but in 1208 was the church of San Nicolo. Francis was puzzled at first about what he was supposed to do with Bernardo. “After the Lord gave me brothers, no one showed me what I had to do,” he would write in his Testament. So Bernardo and Francis, accompanied by Peter of Catania, a canon at San Rufino who would become another early convert, went to San Nicolo to seek guidance on what God expected them to do. According to the Legend of the Three Companions, Francis randomly opened the book of the Gospels to find this passage from Matthew: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven.” Wanting “a threefold confirmation of the words,” Francis opened the book of the Gospels two more times. “Take nothing for your journey,” he read from Luke. And again from Matthew: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself.”

  These three passages became the absolute Rules for what would become the Franciscan Order of the Friars Minor. On April 16, 1208, Bernardo gave away all his possessions and money to the poor, followed by Peter, who had far less wealth, and the two men went to live with Francis at the Porziuncola. “Having sold everything, these two took the habit of poverty which blessed Francis had already adopted,” the Legend of the Three Companions continues, “and from then on, he and they lived according to the precept of the holy Gospel as the Lord had shown them.”

  Within a week, eighteen-year-old Egidio, or Giles, of Assisi also joined them. Others would follow over the next year or so, among them a monk nicknamed Philip the Tall; Rufino, Clare’s cousin from Assisi; Masseo, a lay brother who would be buried with Francis; Leo, a priest in Assisi; Silvester, another priest from Assisi; Juniper, a lay follower from Assisi; and Angelo Tancredi, the first knight to join Francis, from the city of Rieti.

  There was only one bad apple among the early brothers, a man from Assisi named Giovanni di Capella. According to the Little Flowers of St. Francis, Francis had to scold Brother Giovanni several times for abusing his strict rule of poverty. Giovanni would break ranks several years later to found a new but unapproved order of lepers. He later hung himself after contracting leprosy.

  At some point the early brothers moved temporarily to a farm
shed near Assisi known as Rivo Torto. The few years they spent there are well documented in the early biographies. “Blessed Francis betook himself with the rest of his brothers to a place near Assisi called Rivo Torto,” Celano writes. “In that place there was a certain abandoned hovel.” The shed at Rivo Torto, which became known as the Sacred Hovel, may not have the ongoing historical weight of San Damiano and the Porziuncola, but it is an important part of the legend—and another recreated shrine on the Francis trail around Assisi.

  Like the little Porziuncola encased within the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the Sacred Hovel is encased inside the church of Santa Maria di Rivotorto, three miles below Assisi. The big stone sanctuary is not half so massive or ornate as that of Santa Maria degli Angeli, but still, the nineteenth-century building makes quite a presence in the town that has grown up around it, also named Rivo Torto. A modern, life-size, and quite graphic sculpture of Francis washing a leper with rotted fingers stands near the entrance to the church. Another sculpture in the entrance courtyard is more cheerful, depicting birds flocking to Francis while children dance around him.

  A large contingent of nuns is praying inside the church on the afternoon we are there. One of them, Sister Dorothy from Zambia, explains that she and her sisters from all over the world are attending a weeklong meeting in Assisi. I eye the one-page history of Rivotorto in English she is holding, and she presses it into my hands. “God bless you,” she says.

  Inside the sanctuary, the centerpiece is the tiny, stone-block replica of the Sacred Hovel where Francis and his companions lived in extreme discomfort. “The place was so cramped that they could hardly sit or lie down to sleep,” records the Legend of the Three Companions. Francis evidently wrote the names of the individual friars on the beams in the hut “so that each one, when he wished to sit or pray, should know his own place, and that no unnecessary noise due to the close quarters should disturb the brothers’ quiet of mind.”

  Standing in Rivo Torto’s two impossibly small, low-ceilinged rooms and imagining them filled with men makes me feel as if I am in a medieval submarine—without a mess room. “Very often for lack of bread their only food was turnips, for which, in their poverty, they begged here and there,” the Legend of the Three Companions continues. The communal austerity finally caused one companion to break down.

  “I’m dying,” a very hungry brother is said to have cried out in the middle of a night. According to the Legend of Perugia, a thoughtful Francis ordered a meal made not only for him but for all the other brothers, so that the starving one would not “blush from eating alone.” And he gave the brothers a lecture on fasting very much like the advice Clare gave to St. Agnes of Prague. Do not overdo, he told them. Know your own constitution. “If one of you can do with less food than another, it is not my wish that he who needs to eat more should try to imitate the first,” he said. Warning the brothers that he would not order up another midnight meal, Francis told them that it was his “desire and command that each and every one, while respecting our poverty, give his body what it needs.”

  One friar at Rivo Torto evidently took advantage of Francis’s compassion and paid the price. Not only did the unidentified man pray little, do no work, and never go begging, “for he was ashamed,” according to the Legend of Perugia, but he committed the cardinal sin of eating too much. “Go your way, Brother Fly,” Francis said to the gluttonous friar, “for you wish to eat the fruit of the labor of your brothers, while you remain idle in the vineyard of God.” Brother Fly evidently left without further ado, with Francis’s damning words ringing in his ears. “You resemble Brother Drone who gathers nothing, does no work, but eats the fruit of the activity of the working bees.”

  Whatever standard Francis held for his friars, he was very hard on himself. He fought human appetite, according to Thomas of Celano, by rarely eating cooked foods, and when he did, “he either mixed them with ashes or destroyed their flavor with cold water.” He fought the “temptation of the flesh,” as exhibited in the thornless rose garden at the Porziuncola, by throwing his naked body either into brambles or “into a ditch full of ice, when it was winter”; there he remained “until every vestige of anything carnal had departed.” He fought the comfort of a good night’s sleep by either sleeping on the bare ground or sleeping sitting up, using a piece of wood or a stone as a pillow. And he fought vanity by ordering his brothers to rebuke him. “And when that brother, though unwilling, would say he was a boor, a hired servant, a worthless being, Francis, smiling and applauding very much, would reply: ‘May the Lord bless you, for you have spoken more truly; it is becoming that the son of Peter of Bernadone should hear such things.’”

  Francis’s strategy at what was essentially a boot camp for friars was to instruct his brothers by his example, and by every account he succeeded. Like Francis, the early brothers threw themselves into thornbushes, went without shoes and food, worked as laborers for no pay, and cared for lepers. They deepened their spiritual life by fighting sleep to add prayer time, roping themselves erect, or wearing wooden girdles; they spoke only when necessary, walked with downcast eyes so they could cling to “heaven with their minds,” and lived, communally, in quiet thanksgiving. “These were the teachings of their beloved father, by which he formed his new sons, not by words alone and tongue, but above all in deeds and in truth,” writes Celano.

  They also finished restoring another little church, San Pietro della Spina. Located vaguely by St. Bonaventure “a little farther from the city,” it has since been identified more accurately by Francis’s contemporary biographers as a chapel a mile or so from San Damiano. But we never find it.

  The expensive, English-speaking guide we hire in Assisi takes us to quite a different San Pietro and insists it is this rather massive San Pietro that Francis restored. But perhaps it is just as well. San Pietro della Spina has evidently returned to the same derelict condition it was in when Francis and his friars started to repair it. Owned by a farming family, the little chapel is evidently used now as a storage barn for hay and farm equipment.

  I leave the Sacred Hovel at Rivo Torto somewhat puzzled by the sculpted prone figure of a sleeping Francis in one of the cells when my mind’s eye has him sleeping sitting up, to look at the sanctuary’s stained glass windows. All are of scenes from Francis’s life—Francis touching a leper, Francis listening to the San Damiano cross, Francis receiving the stigmata, et cetera, but I do not see, though I may be mistaken, an event that took place at Rivo Torto and was reproduced by Giotto in the basilica in Assisi.

  As recounted by St. Bonaventure, a “chariot of fire, of marvelous splendor” entered the hovel in the middle of the night and moved “hither and thither” three times, leaving the brothers “amazed” and “affrighted.” Some even saw Francis, who was away at the time, riding in the chariot toward heaven, mirroring the ascension made by the prophet Elijah, who had guided the Jews. When Francis returned to Rivo Torto the next day, he interpreted the friars’ vision as a friendly prediction from on high that the first few friars would grow “into a multitude.” Francis’s words both soothed and reassured the friars that “they would be most assuredly safe and blessed in following his life and teaching.”

  It isn’t until we leave the church that I realize why I hadn’t seen that part of the legend in the stained glass windows: The episode is portrayed in a colorful mosaic on the façade—Elijah ascending toward the heavens in his chariot of fire. A second mosaic tells another famous Rivo Torto story: the passage nearby of the emperor Otto IV in 1209 to be crowned in Rome by Pope Innocent III.

  The story is quintessential Francis. As Thomas of Celano tells it, the friars were living right “next to the very parade route” and must have wanted mightily to see Otto’s procession with all its “clamor and pomp,” but Francis wouldn’t let them. Nothing represented more the evil and material ways of the world that Francis and his friars had rejected than the emperor and his gaudy procession. Instead, Francis instructed his brothers to remain inside the
Sacred Hovel and immerse themselves in their far better spiritual world of contemplation and prayer.

  But Francis always had a knack for the dramatic. He excused one of his friars from his prayers and dispatched him to penetrate the procession, get as close to the emperor as possible, and continuously call out that “his glory would last but a short time.” The unfortunate friar presumably returned to Rivo Torto with at least a bloodied nose, but Francis had made his point. “The apostolic authority was strong in him,” Celano writes, “and he therefore refused entirely to offer flattery to kings and princes.”

  The brothers’ idyll at Rivo Torto came to an abrupt end one day when a peasant burst through the door with his donkey and claimed the building for himself. Francis was evidently annoyed that the intruder had disturbed his companions’ silent prayer and quickly decided that rather than share the already inadequate space, it was time for the brothers to move on. “I know that God has not called me to entertain a donkey,” he said to them, as quoted in the Legend of the Three Companions. It was then that Francis and his first followers moved to the Porziuncola, where succeeding generations of friars remain to this day.

  But Francis and his early companions were already well on their way in spreading the word about their particular vision of heaven on earth. From the beginning, when they numbered only four, they had set out to preach Francis’s message of peace, goodwill, and penance. Taking his cue from the Gospels, Francis sent them on their journeys, like Jesus’ disciples, two by two. And he went, too.