On a sunny morning in 1206, a young man named Giovanni Francesco Bernardone (c. 1181–1226) was walking near his home in the nearby city of Assisi. The road passed a decrepit hilltop church called San Damiano, where the young man stopped to pray.
Then, suddenly, Bernardone heard a voice that he believed was that of Jesus Christ. It delivered a message that would change the young man’s life: “Rebuild my church.”
Saint Francis of Assisi—as the young man would later be known—was born into a wealthy family but received little formal education. Instead, he worked in his father’s textile shop and spent his profits on partying and expensive clothes. He enlisted in Assisi’s army in 1201, fought against Perugia, and in 1203 was captured and spent almost a year in a dungeon as a prisoner of war.
The revelation on the hilltop, however, inspired the twenty-five-year-old to give up his material riches and dedicate his life to religion. He sold some of his father’s cloth, found the elderly priest who maintained the church and offered him all of his profits. (The priest declined, and the bishop eventually forced Francis to give the money back to his father.) From that day on, Francis embraced a life of poverty.
Returning to Assisi, he traded his fancy clothes for rags. He started a small religious group, the Franciscans, whose members took vows of poverty and spent their days caring for lepers and society’s other outcasts. His goal was to rebuild the church, both literally—he gathered stones to repair San Damiano—and metaphorically, by reinvigorating the church as a whole.
Initially, the Franciscans were met with suspicion by religious authorities, and Francis was never formally ordained a priest. But his group was recognized by Pope Innocent III (c. 1161–1216) in 1209, giving the order the official right to preach. In addition to his simple lifestyle, Francis was known for his love of animals and supposed ability to communicate with them. In one tale, he purportedly convinced a wolf to stop terrorizing an Italian village.
With his ranks of followers growing, Francis joined the Fifth Crusade. He was captured by the Egyptian sultan in 1219, but eventually released. He later returned to Assisi, where he died at age forty-five.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Canonized in 1228, only two years after his death, Francis is the patron saint of animals, the nation of Italy, and ecology.
- Francis was also a poet; dozens of his poems have survived, and his religious song “Canticle of the Sun” is still performed.
- A sister organization to the Franciscans, the Poor Clares, was founded by Saint Clare of Assisi (1194–1253), the daughter of a local nobleman, in 1212.
