I’m the last person you should probably ask about the intricacies of Catholicism (a truly intricate faith). After all, I was raised a Lutheran, which is about as “opposite” to a Catholic as you can get.
However, taking all that into account, there is definitely one person I have a lot of time for amongst all the apostles, angels, saints, popes and famous priests in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church.
The reason is simple. From what I can gather it’s said this person came as close as anyone to doing the things it’s reported Jesus said we should do (rather than all the other stuff that became the religion using his name).
If you haven’t already guessed, our hero in question is none other than Saint Francis. And get this – today he’s even honoured in the Lutheran Church!
It’s been years since I’ve even thought of Saint Francis, although he was once an important source of inspiration back in the days of Flower Power. However, his life, especially as it was portrayed in the early 70’s movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, came back to me when we decided to visit his home town of Assisi, high up a hill in Umbria.
Assisi has a truly wonderful collection of buildings pre-dating the Renaissance. And it’s as cleaned and scrubbed and well-presented as any of the other famous places we’ve visited in Italy. But it also has an added dimension.
In addition to all the package tourists, the streets are filled with children from Catholic schools all over Europe (and farther); priests from around the world taking their parishioners on a guided tour of the crypts and basilicas; nuns in the wide array of habits that set them apart in their particular orders; and monks, particularly from the Franciscans, which of course Saint Francis founded back in the 13th century.
It makes for a heady mix, that’s for sure, and you find yourself checking out all the varieties, mostly I guess because in other circumstances (apart from somewhere like the Vatican) you’d never see so many different ‘makes and models’ all in one place.
For instance, there’s an order of nuns, from what looks like Asia, that wear the neatest tiny belts on their heads, running in four directions, to hold down their black habits. And I now also know that it’s quite acceptable for monks (who wear sandals, to show their oneness with the poor) to sport Birkenstocks.
When you’re in Assisi you also can’t help but learn a little bit more about Francis’s life, and especially what came after it. Francis was born into a wealthy merchant’s family, and as a young man lived the high life in this important city state.
But he also went off to war on behalf of Assisi, and came back from one mission a very changed soul. Today we’d probably say he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I personally prefer that biblical favourite – he had an epiphany.
He denounced his family privilege, and took on the clothes that beggars wore. His father, who made his fortune in the garment trade, was most definitely not impressed, and first beat and chained Francis in the cellar of the family house, and then disowned him.
And here’s where the first link with the Flower Power generation comes in. Instead of giving in to his father’s wishes, going back to war, and becoming a prosperous member of Assisi’s upper crust, Francis hung out in the streets with his mates (including a local girl named Clare – St. Clare/Claire/Clair), communed with nature, and gave sermons to the birds. If you didn’t know better (and maybe if you did), you’d probably call him a hippie!
Francis also preached the very challenging notion that the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden was a sin against God and nature, and that when man acts as a despoiler of the environment, he is committing a mortal sin. It took another seven centuries, and despoiling on a world-destroying scale, but in 1979 Francis was named the patron saint of ecology.
The real miracle in all this, though, again taking a cue from the Sixties, is that Francis didn’t eventually cut his hair and get a job. Instead, he petitioned the hoi polloi at the Vatican to let he and his mates become a Catholic order, and lo and behold the Pope agreed.
For me, Saint Francis did what very few people either before or since have ever done – he read the Bible and took Jesus precisely at his word. We all know the story about the selfishly rich man having as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel does of passing through the eye of a needle. But I think the history of Christianity as an organised religion has emphatically proved that most adherents long ago decided to take that story, and many others, with a grain (or is that a pillar?) of salt.
Francis, on the other hand, gave all his worldly belongings away, wore the crude woven cloth of the poor (and their sandals), and tried as much as he was able to treat everyone with dignity, humility and respect.
It certainly doesn’t seem like a recipe that would fit well with modern life, and especially anything approaching the miracles that are supposed to emanate from the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Francis instead was arguably the first to preach what’s often described as the “social gospel”. Thankfully, although few and far between, he was definitely not the last.
I think it goes without saying that Francis’s lifestyle and teaching were hugely revolutionary for the time (and they still are, for that matter). But what gave it a real push must have been its acceptance as an “approved lifestyle” at the time by the powers-that-be. He really must have struck a chord, and people began to flock to him for direction, advice and to join his order.
In fact by the time he died, you would have to say that he had become the centre of a very large cult. That term seems to have developed bad connotations in our own era, but for me it’s simply a word that explains a basic part of our natures.
We humans just seem to have something deep inside our beings, probably from very early in our existence as a species, that is prone to this sort of thing. There have been too many instances, in too many cultures, over too long a time, for that not to be the case.
And so it was with Francis. Assisi boomed after his death. Within less than two years he was declared a saint (talk about fast-tracking!). Then in the space of another two years his worshippers had built a monumental crypt to hold his remains. And just a few years after that, above the crypt, on a spot with amazing views of rural Perugia, they built an even more massive basilica.
And here’s where another earth-shattering thing happened. The artist chosen to paint frescoes on the walls of the basilica depicting scenes from Francis’s already mythologised life was a painter named Giotto, who was, let’s just say, a little “unconventional”.
Maybe it was because Francis and his followers were “so out there”, but still had the approval of the Pope. Who knows? The important thing is that what Giotto did on the walls of the basilica (and in many other famous works) had never been allowed in art before.
Up to that time, art was all religious, of course, but more than that, the portrayal of the human form (most often the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary) was strictly two dimensional. The face was completely flat, like a simple cartoon.
All Giotto did was make a subtle change. He painted Francis, his friends, and all the apostles, angels, Jesus and Mary, with a bit of shading. A rounding here, a turn of the brush there, and…presto…you’ve got three dimensions.
As an art history professor of mine once said, Giotto started a revolution in western art, one that has continued in provocative steps right through to today.
Giotto’s paintings are like a graphic novel depicting the life of Francis, although to the illiterate people who would mostly have visited the basilica for hundreds of years after, unless they had been told the stories they would have had a hard time (just as we did) trying to figure everything out.
But even to our quite untrained and definitely more secular eyes, a certain painting (along, of course, with the famous one of Francis preaching to the birds) stood out. I’m talking about the story of Francis going to the Holy Lands, at the time of one of the many bloody Crusades, and meeting the Sultan of Egypt.
You won’t find a copy of this painting in the rack of post cards in the basilica souvenir store, and when I asked the monk behind the counter where I could get one he gave me a disgruntled look. I don’t know whether you can read anything into that, but suffice to say the story has several different interpretations, especially if you search out Saint Francis on the Internet. One view suggests that Francis was preaching to the Muslims, and you can probably take from that the idea that he was trying to convert them.
The other, more radical theory (and the one I like, given the little I know of what Francis professed) was that he was trying to reach a rapprochement with the Sultan, in order to create a peace based on the understanding and acceptance of two different, but closely linked, views of our purpose on this earth.
Whatever the real story, it is worth noting that as a result of the time Francis spent meeting with “the other side”, his order (the Franciscans) was given a license by the Sultan to be keepers of Christian holy places in the Middle East, an agreement that has continued through to our present day.
~originally composed in September, 2011~