On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  We make a quick tour of the cloister of the old friary behind the church with its intact thirteenth-century columns and the one remaining wall from the original church. Various scenes from Francis’s life are painted on the semicircular fanlights that run along the entire cloister corridor, including the de rigueur scene of him receiving the stigmata. But it is Francis’s original hermitage or Lower Shrine we’re after, and we find the cave a short distance along a passageway.

  No matter how many hermitages we have seen where Francis regularly withdrew from the world to meditate and pray, they never fail to amaze me in their starkness and complete discomfort. The hermitage at Poggio Bustone is no exception. Predating Francis and given to him and his friars by the resident Benedictine monks, the now restored hermitage is nothing but barren rock—rough rocks, big rocks, the rock of the hill behind it. No wonder Francis is said to have slept only two or three hours a night. The only luxury consists of two little windows that have since been fitted with stained glass: One shows Francis miraculously healing a child in the town of Poggio Bustone, whom legend tells us “had lived enormously swollen so that he could not even see his legs”; the other, a leper who was cured four hundred years after Francis died by washing himself in the water from a basin named after the saint farther up the mountain.

  Francis returned to Assisi from the Rieti Valley, as do we, past the extraordinarily beautiful Lake Piediluco. We linger there, in far greater comfort than did Francis, at the Hotel del Lago, from which the view of the lake, tucked into the mountains and rimmed with cypresses, evergreens, and elms in early fall foliage, is hypnotic. As we watch the luminous morning mist lift off the silver lake, it is easy to understand why Francis believed everything, including the view, was a gift from God. “He rejoiced in all the works of the hands of the Lord, and saw behind things pleasant to behold their life-giving reason and cause,” Celano writes. “In beautiful things, he saw Beauty itself; all things to him were good.”

  Francis also returned from the Rieti Valley with a great prize: Angelo Tancredi, the first knight to join his group of companions. “You have worn the belt, the sword, and the spurs of the world, long enough,” Francis evidently said to Tancredi of Rieti. “Come with me and I will arm you as Christ’s knight.” It proved to be a most fortuitous union. “Brother” Angelo would stay with Francis for the rest of his life, join Brothers Leo and Rufino in writing the Legend of the Three Companions after Francis’s death, and be buried near him in the crypt of the basilica in Assisi.

  Proof of Francis’s extraordinary charisma came shortly after his return from the Rieti Valley when four more men from Assisi left their homes, gave all their possessions to the poor, and joined the “companions” at the Porziuncola. Many believe it was the joy and camaraderie exhibited by the early companions that fostered the growth of the all-male movement. Celano describes the “spiritual love” among the “members of this pious society” in detail: “Chaste embraces, gentle feelings, a holy kiss, pleasing conversation, modest laughter, joyous looks, a single eye, a submissive spirit, a peaceable tongue, a mild answer, oneness of purpose, ready obedience, unwearied hand, all these were found in them.”

  Francis demanded three vows from his charges—obedience, poverty, chastity—vows that are exhibited to this day in the three knots each Franciscan friar ties in the cord of his habit. They built their own thatched huts of mud and wood, raised as much as they could of their own food, and begged for the rest. Going door to door in Assisi for food handouts was particularly humiliating for the new friars, who had often been the ones to offer food to the poor. Quite naturally, they were frequently met with scorn and incredulity from their neighbors. If these crazy men hadn’t given away all their property to the poor, the derision went, they wouldn’t be at the door with their begging bowls.

  But the nucleus of brothers, now eleven or twelve in number, remained steadfast, and seemingly content, in their voluntary poverty. Because they owned and wanted nothing, they had nothing to lose. “They were therefore, everywhere secure, kept in no suspense by fear; distracted by no care, they awaited the next day without solicitude,” writes Celano.

  But with the growth of Francis’s following came danger. For all the good works of the friars, they were still for the most part evangelical laymen, wandering the countryside without license and preaching the word of God. They were bound, at some point, to become visible to the Church hierarchy in Rome and thus risk being branded as heretics. The Church was already at war with various breakaway sects, like the Cathars, which lived by their own rules. The Pope had tried to negotiate with the extremist Cathars, who had taken it upon themselves to administer the sacraments and to preach against sex and food of any kind, but to no avail. In 1208, the same year Francis went to Poggio Bustone, a particularly vehement Cathar responded to the Pope’s overtures by murdering the Papal legate dispatched to talk to them.

  Francis’s regimen for himself and his friars was also considered extreme by Assisi’s clergy. Bishop Guido had urged him to ease his dedication to ultimate poverty, but Francis refused. The rule Francis followed, after all, was from Jesus himself in the Gospels. He had no intention of adopting one of the rules of the already established orders: the Benedictines, for example, owned vast amounts of property and were cloistered for the most part, and the Augustinians concentrated on apostolic activity in the churches and universities.

  Francis was determined that he and his followers remain pilgrims for the Lord, carrying their message of peace and repentance to ordinary people in the smallest villages and most remote forests. But he also wanted recognition from the Church. So one morning, in the spring of 1209, the cheeky Francis gathered his friars together and announced they were going on a trip: they were leaving immediately for Rome to see the Lord Pope.

  10

  The Pope Has a Dream

  ROME, where the Pope first thinks Francis a swineherd but then remembers a nightmare

  Francis and his disheveled brothers arrived unannounced at the splendid Lateran Palace on the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, a district in Rome. The ancient and imposing palace, with its front hall that boasted eleven apses, was the official residence of the Pope and had been for nine hundred years by the time Francis arrived. The gift of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, to Pope Melchiades in 311, the palace sat next to Christendom’s first cathedral, the equally splendid St. John, which Constantine had constructed over a razed horse-guard barracks.

  Francis was not intimidated in the least by the opulent palace, which the poet Dante would later describe as being beyond human achievement. Francis had come to Rome not to challenge the Church, after all, but to offer himself to the Pope as a humble messenger for its teachings. The challenge was how to get to the Pope.

  How he accomplished that is depicted in one of his most endearing legends. As recounted by Omer Englebert in his biography, St. Francis of Assisi, Francis and his ragged companions were walking through the corridors of the Lateran Palace one day when they chanced upon the Pope, then Innocent III. Seizing the opportunity, Francis pressed the Pope to sanction their preaching but was instantly rebuffed by the Pontiff, who mistook the wild-haired, smelly bunch for swineherds.

  “Go find your pigs,” Innocent reportedly said to Francis. “You can preach all the sermons you want to them.” Ever obedient, Francis went out to the nearest pigsty, preached to the occupants, and presented himself again to the Pope. In this version of the legend, Innocent was so embarrassed he had treated Francis so badly that he told him he would grant him an audience—after he had cleaned himself up.

  The more logical rendition of how Francis met the Pope is the age-old dynamic of who-you-know. Assisi’s Bishop Guido happened to be in Rome at the same time and was quite naturally startled to see Francis there. When Francis told him he wanted the Pope to sanction a rule he had written for his followers, a delighted Bishop Guido introduced him to Cardinal John of St. Paul, the bishop of Santa Sabina in Rome, who was the Pope’s confessor an
d one of his most respected right-hand men. The cardinal, in turn, questioned Francis closely about his intentions and like some before—and many afterward—urged Francis either to adopt an already approved rule or to soften the Rule he had brought to present to the Pope. “Fearful that the holy man might fail in such a lofty proposal, he pointed out smoother paths,” Celano writes. But Francis refused.

  He was wedded to the Rule that Jesus had written for his disciples, which Francis had adopted for his first few followers the year before in Assisi: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven”; “Take nothing for your journey”; and “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself.”

  Francis surely based the written Rule he had brought to Rome on those biblical directives of extreme poverty and humility, though the original text has never been found. Franciscan scholars more or less agree that the Rule must also have included allegiance to the Pope and the Church of Rome as well as specific directives for his friars, among them the minimal dress of one tunic, hood, and cord; the practice of chastity, obedience, charity, harmony, prayer, preaching, and work for which they were forbidden to accept money. “Their greatest joy shall be to mingle with victims of leprosy, beggars and other wretches,” Englebert suggests was in the Rule.

  The cardinal was evidently charmed by Francis, regardless of his reservations about the Rule, and soon arranged for the Assisian to be invited back to the Lateran Palace for a proper audience with the Pope. What a scene it must have been—Francis and his friars, barefoot and in rags, prostrating themselves in front of the Pope and his council of cardinals, satined and jeweled and gilded from toe to miter. The contrast would prove irresistible to generations of artists, including Giotto, who memorialized it on the frescoed walls of the basilica in Assisi.

  This time it was Innocent himself who questioned Francis, and he, too, was evidently moved by Francis’s devotion and candor. It was the harshness of the Rule that concerned the Pope. He and many of his opulently dressed cardinals questioned whether it was humanly possible to live the literal interpretation of the Gospel. And how could a religious order sustain itself without property or income? Add to that the humiliating thought of a priest actually begging for alms and a groundswell of disapproval began among the mitered mighty.

  “My dear young sons, your life seems to us exceptionally hard and severe,” the Pope said to Francis. He took note of their “great zeal,” according to the Legend of the Three Companions, but cautioned: “We must take into consideration those who will come after you lest this way of life seem too burdensome.”

  But then the Pope remembered a disquieting dream he had had a few nights before Francis arrived. The Cathedral of St. John was teetering on its edge and would have collapsed were it not for a small and shabby man supporting its weight on his shoulder. “When he awoke, stunned and shaken, as a discerning and wise man, he pondered what this vision meant to tell him,” recounts the Legend of the Three Companions. The answer to the dream, which Giotto also painted in the basilica in Assisi, was suddenly before the Pontiff, in all his smallness, shabbiness, and zeal.

  So Francis, against all odds, achieved his ultimate goal: a blessing from the Pope and permission to preach penance. It never occurred to him that the Pope’s reservations about the Rule’s severity were prophetic and eventually and inevitably would cause a rupture in his order. Nor did it occur to him that becoming a legitimate arm of the Church bore within it the seeds of the destruction of his passionate dream.

  Instead, on bended knee, an ecstatic Francis pledged obedience and reverence to the Pope, and his friars, in turn, pledged the same to Francis. The new Order of Friars Minor, as Francis named them, spent the next few days in Rome, having their heads tonsured as befitted clerics and praying at the various churches, including St. Peter’s, where four years before Francis had first donned the clothes of a beggar, and Rome’s first cathedral, St. John in Lateran.

  We are standing in the piazza in front of St. John, looking up at the colossal marble sculptures of Jesus, his apostles, and assorted saints rimming the top of the eighteenth-century façade. Constantine had dedicated his fourth-century version of this cathedral to Jesus the Savior, and the oversize statues would have projected a clear Christian challenge to the pagan gods of Rome.

  We enter the oldest Christian church in the world, now one of the four major basilicas in Rome, where we are reminded of the cathedral’s historical significance. “Mater et caput omnium ecclesiarum urbis et orbis,” the inscription reads on a pillar: “Mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world.” In keeping with its status, the cathedral boasts incomparable relics, including the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, and a portion of the wooden altar from which St. Peter supposedly celebrated mass.

  The cathedral has changed dramatically since Francis and his friars prayed here in 1209. One Pope after another felt compelled to leave his architectural mark on the structure, enclosing the ancient stone columns in massive pilasters and destroying some Giotto frescoes in the process. The cathedral complex, which included the old Lateran Palace, was also periodically sacked, almost entirely destroyed by a ninth-century earthquake, and badly damaged by fires fifty years apart in the fourteenth century.

  The fate of this first Papal complex was sealed in the early 1300s, when the unrest in Rome forced the French-born Pope, Clement V, to relocate to France. The headquarters of the Catholic Church was set up in Avignon, and for the next sixty-eight years nine Popes held sway from there. When the Popes returned to Rome in 1378, the Lateran Palace and the Cathedral of St. John were in ruins. The decision was then made to relocate the residence of the Popes and the seat of the Holy See to the current—and more easily defended—Vatican complex across town, elevating St. Peter’s Basilica, then a pilgrimage church, to the focal point of the Catholic presence in Rome.

  Some vestiges remain of the original St. John in which Francis and his friars prayed. High in the apse are the fourth-century mosaics that miraculously escaped being destroyed during a nineteenth-century enlargement of the apse and were reinstalled in the new, bigger one just as they were in the original. I always feel a certain frisson when I see with my eyes what Francis saw with his, and looking up at the mosaic figure of Jesus surrounded by the mosaics of nine angels brings on the familiar tingle.

  I have the same feeling in the beautiful medieval cloister, once part of a Benedictine monastery, adjoining the cathedral. Francis surely found refuge from the brawling city in this serene space and admired, as I do, its graceful spiral columns of inlaid marble and its thirteenth-century mosaics. St. John in Lateran is in fact nicknamed after the Benedictines, who dedicated their monastery to St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist and officiated at the cathedral’s services. The official and cumbersome name of the church is Patriarchal Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior in the Lateran.

  There are no traces of Francis or his meeting with the Pope across the piazza in the Lateran Palace. The original palace was destroyed in the fourteenth-century fires and rebuilt far more simply in the 1600s. The current, hulking, three-story palace now houses a branch of the Vatican Museum on the ground floor and the offices of the cardinal vicar of Rome upstairs.

  But there are other treasures dotted around the Piazza San Giovanni that predate Francis and were certainly there when he was. One of them is the ancient baptistry, which Constantine also built, next to the cathedral. How could Francis not have been in the baptistry and seen the seventh-and fifth-century mosaics in the oratories or the sunken, green basalt baptismal basin in which Constantine himself may have been baptized?

  I see Francis as well in the Sancta Sanctorum, the medieval Popes’ private chapel and the lone survivor of the fourteenth-century fires that ravaged the Lateran Palace. Inexplicably moved in the sixteenth century to what is now a noisy traffic island just off the piazza, the chapel is reached by twenty-eight marble steps known as the Scala Santa. Legend h
as it that these are the “holy” marble steps Jesus mounted to Pontius Pilate’s house in Jerusalem and that were brought back from the Holy Land by Emperor Constantine’s Christian mother, St. Helena. Modern pilgrims mount these steps on their knees, and I imagine Francis did, too.

  It is not clear where Francis and his friars stayed on this triumphal trip to Rome. On subsequent visits Francis often stayed at a hospice attached to a Benedictine church and monastery in Trastevere, the Soho of Rome. His cell is still there in the red church that was given to the Franciscans after Francis’s death and renamed San Francesco a Ripa, so that is where we go after leaving St. John in Lateran.

  Our visit to San Francesco a Ripa on the small Piazza San Francesco d’Assisi turns out to be somewhat fraught. Mercifully, we are in good humor after a delicious outdoor lunch with friends at Sabatini, a nearby restaurant, because the custodian we encounter at San Francesco a Ripa definitely is not. He is frantically setting up extra chairs for some sort of ceremony and has little interest in unlocking the door to the left of the altar that will lead us to Francis’s cell.

  Grumbling, he finally relents and leads us up a flight of stairs to another locked door guarding the smoke-blackened cell, or stanza di San Francesco. Inside, he hovers impatiently while we admire a copy of a fourteenth-century portrait of Francis and an ornately carved and painted altar and silk altar cloth, which tradition says was sewed by Clare. There used to be a gold crucifix on the altar, but it has been moved to Assisi. The stone Francis used for a pillow, however, remains. “Sasso dove pasava ii capo il serafico padre San Francesco,” reads a sign in the cell. “The rock where rested the head of the seraphic father San Francesco.”

  The altar is said to contain a thousand relics from various saints, but not the heart of St. Charles of Sezze, which was pierced by a ray of light during prayer. The heart, which had been housed upstairs, was stolen years ago. More recently, the offering left in Francis’s cell was also stolen, which explains all the locked doors between the church and the cell and the obligatory presence of the agitated custodian in a white lab coat. “Hurry! Hurry!” he keeps saying. “You finish.” We succumb to his anxiety and leave both cell and church after taking in Bernini’s orgasmic seventeenth-century sculpture of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, a Franciscan tertiary, in one of the church’s chapels.