How much interior patience and humility
a servant of God may have cannot be known
so long as he is contented.
But when the time comes that those
who ought to please him go against him,
as much patience and humility as he then shows,
so much has he and no more.
WRITINGS OF SAINT FRANCIS
FRANCIS CAME BACK TO ACRE and was welcomed by the minister provincial, Brother Elias, Caesar of Speyer, and Peter Cathanii. With them was a young lay brother, Stephen, who had come out from Italy to find Francis, bringing much news for him. He told him of the martyrdom of the brothers whom the order had sent to Morocco. Francis had longed to die in this way himself but he felt no jealousy, only infinite gratitude to God who had allowed to his sons his highest honor of martyrdom. “Now I can truly say I have five brothers,” he said. He or they, what did it matter? The order was one. But Stephen had other news. The brothers at home who were Francis’s closest friends had sent him out to find Francis and beg him to come home and save them. He had been away too long; so long that at home they had wondered if he was dead. His disloyal sons had thought they could do what they liked now and his loyal sons had been in grief and despair. This was the beginning of a trial harder for Francis to bear than the rack or the fire and he must have known it as he quietly told Stephen to tell him all that had happened. Physically he was in poor shape now to stand up to the shock and grief of betrayal, but his spirit was steady and calm, for he had prayed beside the rock of the agony and its strength was in him.
The news could hardly have been worse. The two men to whom he had entrusted the government of the order in his absence, his two friends Matthew of Narni and Gregory of Naples, had betrayed the trust he had placed in them. They had put themselves at the head of discontented brothers, and at a chapter meeting over which they had presided they had imposed upon the order a new set of constitutions which were totally at variance with the rule that Innocent III had ratified, the rule which all the Brothers Minor had vowed to keep, the command of God which made them what they were. The loyal brothers who had refused to consider themselves bound by the new constitutions had been persecuted by the two vicars-general. Some of them had been driven out of the order altogether and Stephen had had to escape from Italy secretly without the knowledge of the vicars.
The new constitutions were admirably devised for preparing the knights of God to forsake the Lady Poverty and play a distinguished part in the affairs of the Church. The Franciscan missionaries were no longer to go out carrying their lives in their hands, objects of ridicule and potential martyrs, they were to carry with them letters of protection from the pope and the order was to do no work that had not received legal sanction. The small families of brothers that Francis had favored, as fostering brotherly love and holiness, were to be superseded by much larger communities of men, living not in small hermitages and rustic “places” but in well-built convents. These convents were to possess libraries so that the Brothers Minor might become the equals of the other religious orders in learning and scholarship. Discipline was to be enforced by a bewildering number of rules and regulations, replacing the few simple precepts of love that had been based upon the gospel of Christ.
When Francis was told of it all, many memories must have passed through his mind, memories of his Lord and master and of the old happy days of the order. No legal sanctions had protected Christ and his apostles from martyrdom and no stone walls had housed them, keeping out wind and rain and beggars. Christ could have been the greatest scholar the world has ever known, but he said goodbye to the scribes in the temple at Jerusalem and went home to Nazareth with his parents and was subject unto them. He could have been a great man among the princes of the world but he chose his friends among the outcast and the poor. Francis remembered the sunshine of the spring day when Bernard had given away all his wealth to the poor. There would not have been such joy in the square if he had been building a library with it. He remembered Pacifico crying out to him, “Take me away from the world and give me back to God,” and he had been able to do it in a matter of minutes, not after a year’s novitiate. He remembered nights sleeping out under the stars and the friendliness of the birds and the flowers and the creatures; the friendliness of a poor man when you shared your last crust with him, both of you huddled together on the leeward side of a haystack on a cold night. No doubt the new constitutions were full of wisdom and common sense, and rules much like them regulated the lives of the other orders. But the Brothers Minor were not other orders. They had been called by God to embrace the poverty and suffering of Jesus Christ their Lord, for the salvation of sinners for whom he died.
Perhaps Francis said little at first to the anxious brothers, but later, when they were seated at table for their meal, and the parchment bearing the new constitutions was put into his hands, his eyes lighted upon the sentences regulating what the Brothers Minor were to eat, or not eat, upon this day or that. He read that the brothers were not to quest for meat even on days which were not fast days, and that they were to fast on Mondays as well as on the days prescribed in the rule. There was meat on the table now. Francis looked at it and then he looked at his old friend Peter. “Messer Peter, what shall we do?” he asked.
“Ah Messer Francis,” replied Peter with a touch of fire, “do as you think well, for authority is yours.”
“Then we will eat what is set before us according to the gospel,” said Francis. And they ate meat.
As soon as it was possible, probably in the following September, Francis sailed for Italy and with him were Peter Cathanii, Caesar of Speyer, and Elias, to help him and uphold him in his need. He trusted Elias and there is no doubt that that extremely able man was a great comfort to him at this time.
They reached Venice and stayed there for a few days, for Francis was not well, and when they set out for home he was too weak to walk and they had to find a donkey for him to ride. The brother who tramped beside the donkey was Leonard, who had set sail with Francis and now was home with him again, and today he showed himself not quite worthy of the donkey brotherhood. If they had been in danger he would have been worthy, but the trouble today was not wolves or brigands but sore feet and hurt pride. He had been a great man in the world, with horses and servants at his command. He uttered no word of complaint but his aristocratic temper was fretted by stones in the road and the remembrance of past glory. “In the world,” he thought to himself, “my people would not walk beside the Bernadone, and here am I compelled to trudge behind his son whilst he rides.” He had forgotten that saints can read thoughts. Francis stopped the donkey, dismounted and said courteously, “Take my place, brother; truly it is not becoming that I should ride whilst thou, who art of noble stock, should have to walk on foot.”
Leonard, overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, knelt down at Francis’s feet.
They went on to Bologna and here the storm broke. The minister provincial of Lombardy, Peter Stacia, was a doctor of law of the University of Bologna. When he had joined the order he had sacrificed his academic fame for the love of Christ, but deep in his heart learning had remained his first love. When Francis disappeared in the East, and the changes began to take place in the order, the old love flamed up again. The Dominicans had opened a school at Bologna and why should not the Brothers Minor do the same? He collected money and built a House of Study which he proclaimed to be the property of the order. Franciscan scholars flocked into it, and in his eagerness he forgot that years before Bernard of Quintavalle had been sent here to witness to the humility and poverty of Christ in the midst of the intellectual pride and intolerance of Bologna, that he had been stoned in Bologna’s marketplace, and later had fled because the people did him too much honor. Probably in the thrill of it all he scarcely realized that he had broken the rule of the order, to which he had promised obedience as to God, three times over. He had collected money, which no Franciscan might touch, he was holding property in the name of the order, and the life which he and the brothers were living within the convent was no longer the life of evangelical poverty and simplicity to which they were vowed.
Francis, arriving at Bologna ill and anxious, was faced with this thing, and became for a short while a man whom it is difficult to recognize as Francis, a man fierce, intolerant, and even pitiless. All the gentleness and humor of that “Messer Peter, what shall we do?” that seems to us the true Francis, was lost as the harsh streak that was in him burst out like the pent fires of a volcano. Yet that harshness was Francis too. The serenity and gentleness of the saints is not necessarily something they are born with, but the fruit of struggle. Robert Bridges says of them, “Their apparent grace is won by discipline of deadly strife.” The control is hardly held and can break when a man is tested beyond his strength. Francis was confronted with the disloyalty of his own sons to the ideal to which he had given his life, at a time when he was physically exhausted, and it was too much for him. It is a comfort to think that even the saints can at times be betrayed by the weakness of the body.
Francis cursed Peter Stacia with that father’s curse of which every Italian of the Middle Ages lived in dread, and of which he himself had been so terrified. He ordered the brothers who were living in the convent to leave instantly. Some of them were ill but though he was usually so gentle with the sick he had no mercy on them. They had to get out of bed and go. He himself would not enter the place but took refuge with the Dominicans, and it was left to a Dominican to plead with him to be merciful and to tell him that the brothers were grieved and sorry, and willing to make any reparation that he demanded. The fierce anger began to leave Francis and he demanded no penance from them except that of not going back to the convent.
Then he left Bologna. During all the sorrows of the few years of life still left to him, though he would yield not one inch of ground and kept his personal integrity intact until the end, he never again lost his temper or tried to bludgeon his sons into obedience. It would seem that the harshness in him was purged by the sorrow and shame he endured after he left Bologna. The depth of his penitence is seen in the humility of what he did next. He did not go home but set out on the donkey through the wintry weather for Rome. He had had a dream which expressed his thoughts at this time, and seemed to give him guidance for the future. The three companions tell us of it. In his dream “he beheld as it were a little hen that was black and had feathered legs with feet like a tame dove, and she had so many chicks that she was not able to gather them under her own wings, but they went about in a circle round the hen, beyond her wings. Then, waking from sleep, he began to think about this vision, and forthwith perceived by the Holy Spirit that he himself was intended under the parable of the hen. And he saith: ‘I am that hen, small of stature, and by nature black, and ought to be simple as a dove, and on winged affection of the virtues to fly toward heaven. And unto me the Lord of his mercy hath given and will yet give many sons, whom I shall not be able in mine own strength to protect. Whence behooveth me to commend them unto Holy Church, the which under the shadow of her wings shall protect and govern them.’”
The outbreak at Bologna, and his penitence after it, had made him see himself as a greater sinner than ever, by nature black. He ought to have been gentle as a dove with his erring sons and he had been angry and intolerant. He was not fit to look after them anymore, and there were so many of them now, so strong and self-willed, that he could no longer control them. When he had had only a few sons he had been able to gather them all under his wings, now he could not, for “they went about in a circle round the hen, beyond her wings.” Stronger, broader wings than his must cover them now. It is one of the mercies of God that true penitence after sin can bring a man even nearer to him than he was before he sinned, and so Francis on this humble, heartbroken journey would have felt very close to his Lord, and remembered his cry, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Christ too had known this sorrow of having the children circling beyond the wings.
If when he reached Rome Francis followed his usual custom, he went first to Saint Peter’s tomb and prayed there, his mind full of memories of the days when he had brought the first little company of the Brothers Minor to see the pope. Now he was once more going to see the pope, but because he had too many sons he had to go alone. He was too ashamed, too humble, to ask for an audience and be received with the honor that would have been accorded to the head of the Order of the Brothers Minor, but went to the corridor outside the pope’s room to wait until he should come out. He was too tired to stand so he sat down on the ground. At last the door opened and the pope came out, and Francis greeted him with the words, “Father Pope, God give thee peace!”
The old and holy Honorius III, who loved Francis, replied gently, “God bless thee, my son,” and waited to hear about the trouble. Francis explained his need. The pope, he said, was so busy and so great that the poor could not always have access to him. He wanted Honorius to appoint some wise man who would be a father to him and the order in the pope’s place, and to whom he could turn for counsel and guidance. “Whom do you wish that I should give thee, my son?” asked the pope, and Francis replied, “Give me the Lord Cardinal of Ostia.” And so Cardinal Ugolino, as the representative of the pope and the Church, took the Brothers Minor under his wing and became Protector of the Order.
Francis could have asked for no better protector, for by his very nature the cardinal was well fitted to do what could be done to heal the differences between Francis and the rebellious brothers. He understood both sides, for they represented the two sides of his own character. He was scholar and diplomat and able administrator, but he was also a humble man of God. As a scholar he sympathized with those brothers who demanded that they should be allowed to study and use their minds for God. He thought it was a legitimate demand. If a man of intellect does not use it he wastes the gift of God, and scholars must have books. As an administrator he realized that an order numbering thousands of men could not live at the table of the Lord in quite the old manner without becoming a burden on the lay fraternity, and that the sick and old of a perpetually growing company of men would increase in number too and would have to have adequate care. He could see no way out of it except the raising of money to build convents that should include libraries and infirmaries. And the larger the number of men the stricter must be the discipline and the more careful the novitiate. In the nature of things it seemed to him that the changes had to come and that his task was to try and help the order to preserve through them all, as far as was possible, the Franciscan spirit of simplicity and humility and love. And as well, he had to try and protect Francis from too much suffering, for with all his heart he loved him and sympathized with him. If there would be many in the days to come who would not understand the attitude of Francis to inevitable change he would not be one of them. His own humble devotion to his God would enable him to realize that Francis was quite unable to separate Jesus Christ, the poor man crucified, either from his poverty or his crucifixion, and that from this fundamental inability grew his conviction that men called of God to follow Christ in the way of the gospel could not be separated from them either. A Brother Minor must be utterly poor and utterly crucified or he was not a Brother Minor. In the worldly nature of things there had to be compromise but in the heavenly nature of things Francis could not accept it and remain Francis. That was the dilemma, the old tormenting dilemma of how to live in two worlds at once.
The cardinal was in Rome during the winter of 1220 and he and Francis met and talked together of the difficulties, and from their discussions grew two decisions of the cardinal’s that well illustrate his double sympathies. Peter Cathanii, Francis’s faithful friend and loyal son, was to take the place of Matthew of Narni as vicar at the Portiuncula, so that Francis should have the comfort and support of his presence there, but before the next Whitsun chapter the cardinal wished Francis to revise the rule of the order and bring it more into line with the inevitable changes that the passing years had brought. Then they said goodbye and Francis journeyed home to the Portiuncula, and as the news of his return spread quickly from one mountain hermitage to another, where the sons who had been faithful to him had hidden themselves from persecution, joy leapt up like the flames of spring. Their father was not dead. He was alive and he was home again and now all would be well. Spring was coming and up in the mountains under the melting snow the grass was green.
But the spring brought sorrow to Francis, for on the 10th of March Peter Cathanii died. For his old friend he would have rejoiced, for Peter had lived long enough to come back from the crusades and for the last time see the Portiuncula in the spring, but not long enough to grieve for the sorrows that were coming. For himself it was irreparable loss. Never again would he be able to say, “Messer Peter, what shall we do?”
PERHAPS IT WAS SOME COMFORT TO FRANCIS that Peter Cathanii’s successor as vicar at the Portiuncula was the able Elias, for Elias was a man who knew how to keep his own counsel when it was expedient to do so, and Francis did not know yet that the sympathies of the man whom he had chosen to bring home with him from the East, to help him, were with the enemy. Elias has been called the Judas of this story, but that is surely to blacken him too much. His chief likeness to Judas seems to be in the puzzle which he presents, for his complex baffling character has produced many divergent judgments from those who have studied his extraordinary career.
Elias Bombarone was born at Beviglia, a small village about three miles to the northeast of Assisi. His mother was a woman of Assisi, his father a mattress maker. They were very poor and it is said that Elias had the wizened little body of a man who in childhood has gone hungry, but in compensation he had great force of character, a keen intellect, and an ambition that was perhaps a result of the bitterness of that early poverty and deformity. Like Francis he had his dreams, but when Francis was dreaming of knightly chivalry Elias was dreaming of power. He wanted power and he was a man to get what he wanted, for he was willing to toil and sweat for it. Apprenticed to his father he made mattresses by day and studied by night, to such purpose that while still only a boy he had moved to Assisi and was teaching in one of the schools there. Judging by his later character, he was gracious and charming to the boys who did what he wanted and brutal to those who opposed him; but there would have been few of these, so great was his power over others. Whether he met Francis at this time we do not know, but he was not in Assisi for long. Somehow, by some means, poor as he was, he managed to get to Bologna and studied in the famous schools, where he did brilliantly. He became a notary but he also studied the arts and it is said that he experimented in alchemy. His interest in science, and his skill in it, brought him to the notice of the Emperor Frederick II and they became friends.
In the year 1211, when Elias and Francis were both twenty-nine years old, they met at Cortona. It is a beautiful city on a mountaintop, girdled by Etruscan walls. Far down below is Lake Trasimene and from the city to the lake a stream tumbles down a great gorge, densely wooded with lime trees, chestnuts, oak, and ilex, with caves in the cliff rather like the caves of the Carceri. In these scenes of beauty, in the springtime, the two men met, and Elias became a Franciscan. At first sight that is the most extraordinary thing about him, for the lowliness of the Brothers Minor was something that cut right across his ambition, alien to the sort of man that he was. The explanation would seem to lie in Francis himself. Before he met Elias he had been spending the forty days of Lent on an island in Lake Trasimene. It is said that he took with him two loaves and ate half of one of them. He would have liked to have eaten nothing, like his Lord in the wilderness, but in his humility he did not dare to presume upon equality with Christ. He spent those forty days of suffering and prayer alone with God and from this tremendous experience he went to Cortona worn and exhausted but fulfilled with the joy of his Lord, his face shining with it, the breath of heaven’s peace about him, and met Elias. And Elias loved him. Possibly he had never loved anyone before, and never did again. It was a case of “thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Elias was a religious man and naturally ascetic, so to those who did not know him well it would have seemed that there was nothing to prevent him from following Francis all the way. The obstacle lay in his love of power, that was curled like a snake about the roots of his being. His gifts were rooted in it, his great intellect, his fine powers of drive and imagination, the affectionate pleasure he took in managing the lives of others. He could relinquish such worldly goods as he had with no trouble at all, but he could not uncover his snake that Christ might slay it for him, for he loved it more than Christ. He could not do the one thing needful. And so in the end his pride wrecked his life and, worse still, it caused incalculable suffering to Francis whom he loved. That was his tragedy.
Naturally he climbed swiftly in the little world of the Brothers Minor, as he would have done in any world. He was only about thirty-five when he was made minister provincial of Syria. From being vicar of the Portiuncula in place of Peter Cathanii it was only a short step to becoming minister general of the order in place of Francis, and from the point of view of organization and discipline he was an extremely fine minister general. After the death of Francis the order split into two, like a river dividing into two great streams, the friars of the Strict Observance remaining loyal to the ideals of Francis and living the old life of poverty in the hermitages and humble “places,” and the rest, the Conventual friars who were Elias’s men, carrying on in their convents, schools and hospitals the great works of learning and of mercy which his energy inaugurated.
But after the death of Francis there was a change in Elias. His love for Francis had sweetened and softened him, but when the gentle influence was gone he was, in his own words, “left in the very midst of night,” and a cruel despotism grew out of his pride. He scourged and imprisoned the friars who opposed him, even those whom Francis had loved the best, even Leo; though if it is true that Leo in a rage smashed the urn in which Elias was collecting offerings of money for the building of San Francesco, then Leo was not blameless. Even his own men had to suffer from his violent temper and his despotism, and the men of learning and ability whom he had attracted into the order were not of the gentle temper of the early Franciscans. Francis’s recipe for perfect joy would not have appealed to them at all. At last they could stand Elias no longer and they cast him out. He resigned and Pope Gregory IX, who had once been Cardinal Ugolino and his friend, but who had by this time suffered much from him, accepted his resignation.
He went straight to his old friend the Emperor Frederick, the pope’s enemy, and entered his service, and Gregory IX retaliated by excommunicating the emperor and Elias with him. Elias worked for the emperor until Frederick died, and was his trusted ambassador, but all the while, defiantly declaring himself still a Franciscan, excommunicate or no, he wore his habit and cord. After the emperor’s death he went back to Cortona, where he had first met Francis, and high up in the clouds at the summit of the city he built a convent and church which he called San Francesco. Here he lived proudly, called the Lord Elias by the Ghibelline burghers of Cortona and a band of friars who had thrown in their lot with him, and here at last he died.
But the defiance and the pride were not the whole of Elias; there was another man in him besides the despot, the gentle and tender man who had loved Francis and had been loved by him. We see a glimpse of the other Elias in a story of Agnes in the early days of the order. When she was sent to the Abbess of Monticelli at the age of twenty-two, and was sick with grief at parting with Clare, she wrote, “Beg Brother Elias come to comfort me in Jesus Christ often, very often.” Father Cuthbert points to two buildings which Elias created as representative of the two men in him. They are San Francesco at Assisi and the Celle of Cortona. San Francesco, comprising the two churches, the papal palace built for Gregory IX and the great convent, oppress by their scope and grandeur, but the Celle, the little hermitage that Elias built in the wooded ravine above the stream, where he must often have walked with Francis, is simple as his gentleness to a homesick girl, and as humble as his first love for Francis.
Is it not possible to see in San Francesco at Assisi not only a monument to the pride of Elias but to his remorse too? His cruelty to Francis during the last years of his life was something of which he was perhaps scarcely conscious at the time, for though he was trampling on all that Francis stood for he was also caring very tenderly for his bodily welfare. But when Francis died he would have seen it for what it was, and there is no misery like knowing too late how cruel you have been to those you love. Elias spared neither labor, money, strength, nor imagination in the rearing up of that great monument to the memory of the man he had loved, but still it was too late and the place seems to reflect something of the coldness of his grief. But the little Celle reflects the happiness that he had with Francis in the days when they were young together at Cortona.
The letter that Elias wrote to the order in the first flood of his grief when Francis died is, like the Celle, the best in him and the cadence of pure poetry is in its opening sentences. “The thing I feared has come to pass, for me and for you. Far from us has gone the consoler, and he who carried us like lambs in his arms has set forth a pilgrim into a far country. . . . The beloved of God and men has entered the mansions of exceeding light.” And the letter is signed, “Elias, sinner.”
At the end the humility of Francis conquered. Through all the years of his passion and pride as minister general, at the imperial court, as the Lord Elias of Cortona, the pure flame of his love for Francis must have burned on hidden within him. When he was old and ill and could no longer stride abroad on his great enterprises, and perhaps was too weak to dominate those about him as he had done, his pride began to crumble. In the convent high up above the Etruscan ramparts of Cortona, cloud-shadowed, the world fallen away, he would sit alone, and when the great winds were still he could hear the ripple of the water in the ravine far down below. The Celle was there and the air was fragrant about it. He would be for a while back in the past, living in the days when he had been a beloved son of Francis, one of the cheerful and gallant brotherhood. He would be once again kneeling with them in Santa Maria degli Angeli, joining in the chanting of the deep voices all about him, or walking with them up the steep path to Assisi, where all the bells were ringing on a feast day. Or he would take some trouble of his to Francis the consoler, and they would go together “into the wood” to pray about it. Suddenly a harsh sound would disturb him, the banging of a shutter in the rising wind, and he would be back in the desolate convent of Cortona. It was cold and he was alone. Such of his true brethren who still lived did not speak of him now, for he was excommunicate.
The thought of his excommunication weighed upon him intolerably and he would sit for hours at a time beating his breast, murmuring the same words over and over again. “Alas, how great a sinner I have been and am, and how vainglorious! Spare me, O Lord, and enter not into judgment with thy servant. Spare me, O Lord, spare me!” The days of his bitter penitence went on and on until at last there was no more pride left in him. And then, shriven and at peace, he died. His grave is still to be seen at Cortona, but no one seems to disturb its loneliness.
BUT ALL THIS was far in the future on that day of the opening of the Whitsun chapter of 1221. On that day Elias, as the vicar of the Portiuncula, welcomed the brethren to this happiest of meetings with all the graciousness and charm that made him so popular with so many. For to all the three thousand men tramping in to the Portiuncula this was a truly joyous occasion. Francis was alive. They had feared their father was dead and now here he was, older and frailer, but alive. Those who had been persecuted in his absence, and had felt like mariners riding out some frightening storm, felt now that it was all over and they were safe in the harbor of the Portiuncula. They crowded around Francis with joy and thanksgiving. Even those who disagreed with him thanked God for his safety. For now and through all the coming troubles there was never a man who wanted to get rid of Francis. They loved him far too well. What they wanted was that he should be amenable to progress. And if there were a very few who did not love him they still wanted him as the figurehead. They were well aware that his enormous prestige was of incalculable value to the order.
Cardinal Ugolino could not be present at this chapter, but another cardinal presided and a bishop sang the mass on the opening day, Francis assisting as deacon. Then he preached. At the Chapter of Mats his text had been a minstrel’s song, but now it was not a hand swept over the harpstrings that set the tone for this chapter but the blast of a trumpet. His text was the first verse of Psalm 143, “Blessed be the Lord my God, who teacheth my hands to fight,” and ill as he was his voice rang out as strongly as ever. As they listened to his sermon the hearts of the reformers must have sunk heavily, for it was not the sermon of a man who intends to allow himself to be used as a figurehead. Francis had appeared among them once more not to acquiesce in progress but to lay the old foundation stones all over again.
The chapter awaited the reading of the rewritten rule with trepidation. The young Caesar of Speyer had helped Francis with the work of revision but considering his record that was only an added reason for anxiety. The rule was read and the worst fears of the reformers were realized. Nothing was changed, only emphasized. They were still grounded on the strict gospel observance, still rooted in evangelical poverty. Two new regulations had been added to the rule. Francis had said no harsh words at the chapter on the subject of the persecution suffered by the loyal brothers in his absence, or about the building of the convent at Bologna, but the new regulations were a worse blow to the reformers than if he had lost his temper all over again, for they made sure that such things should not be repeated with his permission. No brother, said the first regulation, was bound to obey a minister who laid upon him a command “contrary to our life or against his soul . . . because that is not obedience in which a fault or sin is committed.” The second regulation forbade the collection of money for houses or “places.”
When the reading was over the disappointed ministers tried to talk it over with Francis. One minister was particularly distressed because his books, he told Francis, were valued at fifty pounds, and what was he to do? Francis cried out passionately, “O you brethren who wish to be called Friars Minor by the people and to appear to be observers of the gospel and yet in fact would have your treasure chests! But I am not going to lose the book of the gospel for the sake of your books. Do as you will; but never shall my permission be made a snare to the brethren.”
This now was to be his standpoint through the months that were coming. If they would not listen to him, would not obey him as they had promised the pope that they would do, he was not going to coerce them. “I am not minded to become an executioner to punish and scourge them like the magistrates of this world,” he said later. “My office is spiritual only, namely to overcome their vices and spiritually to correct them by my words and example.” But he was not going to condone what they did, he was not going to allow them the hypocrisy of appearing to live as his obedient sons in the eyes of the world when they were no such thing. If they would not obey then they must go their way and he would go his. For himself, he would follow Christ in the way of the gospel until he died.
The majority of the three thousand men present at the chapter probably remained unaware of the tension between Francis and the ministers until the time came to commission the brothers for their missionary work. Then they saw the change in him. He was so tired that he could not speak to them. Elias spoke to them in his place and Francis sat on the ground beside Elias, and when there was something he especially wanted Elias to say he tugged humbly at his habit, and Elias bent down and he whispered to him, for during all the heartbreaking arguments he had lost his voice as well as his strength. But not his passion for souls. He had been concerned about Germany ever since the Franciscan mission there had been such a failure. He thought they ought to try again. Sometimes he had seen bands of German pilgrims traveling to Rome, and the sight of them had deeply touched him. Tugging at Elias’s habit he whispered to him about them. Elias, who had been bending down to him, straightened himself and spoke to the assembled friars. “Brothers, our brother says there is a certain country, Germany, where dwell devout Christians, who as you know often pass through our country, with long staves in their hands and wearing great boots; and they sing the praises of God and the saints as they go along, perspiring in the heat, to visit the tombs of the apostles. But because when the brethren were sent to them once before they were treated badly, our brother does not wish to compel any brother to go thither again. Yet if any inspired by zeal for God and souls, be willing to go, he will give them a like obedience, nay, a more willing obedience, than he gives to those who go to the infidels beyond the seas. Let those who are willing stand up and draw apart.”
Francis did not appeal in vain and the difficult chapter ended in a sudden blazing up of the old authentic Franciscan spirit. The assembled brothers regarded a second mission to Germany as certain death, so fearful were the stories that the first missionaries had brought back with them, and at this chapter many of them had heard for the first time of the torturing and beheading of the Moroccan martyrs. Nevertheless ninety men immediately offered themselves with joy to die for Christ in Germany. The old courage was still there, unchanged, and sent a thrill of delight and pride through the whole packed assembly.
And then came a twist of the familiar comedy, like a quirk to the tale of the grave and anxious proceedings. There was one man, an Umbrian named Giordano da Giano, who had no desire whatever to be a martyr, or even a missionary, but who like so many of us liked to associate himself with courage so long as it involved no personal commitment. He strolled over to the brave ninety and moved among them, chatting affably, asking this man and that man his name and birthplace so that he might boast in years to come that so-and-so and so-and-so had been friends of his, and he had been almost the last man at the chapter to speak to them alive. But retribution awaited him, for his questioning brought him to the side of a brother with a singularly penetrating eye. “Your name, brother?” he asked innocently. “Palmerio,” replied the other, “and since you are here you too are one of us and must go with us.” And then he grabbed hold of Giordano and would not let him go. In vain the poor man protested, Palmerio held on, and at last Giordano said miserably that he would ask Elias what he should do. Elias, appealed to, asked him if he wanted to go? And here Giordano showed that he was a true Franciscan after all. He had been trained to obedience and selflessness and the words “I don’t want to” were words that he never spoke. He said instead, “I wish neither to go nor not to go.” Elias said, “Then you had better go.” And Giordano went.
Only twenty-five of the ninety who had volunteered were chosen for the German mission. They were led by Caesar of Speyer and were a notable band of men, courageous and merry. Thomas of Celano was one of them and also an adventurous brother who was later in his life to explore Tartary. The second mission to Germany was a success and no one was martyred. Giordano da Giano lived safely through it all, came home and wrote a book about it. He was exactly the type that thoroughly enjoys putting pen to paper.