Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / The Party Boy Who Gave It All Away — St. Francis of Assisi
Transcript
- : I want you to imagine you are standing in the middle of your town square, center of the city. Everyone you have ever known is watching. Your neighbors, your friends, the people you grew up with, the merchants who did business with your father, the women who knew your mother. They are all there watching you. And you take off every piece of clothing you are wearing, every single piece, and hand it to your father. And then, you walk away, naked, into the woods. Singing! Well, that is what today's did. And he was stone cold sober when he did it. Hi, my name is John O'Connor. This is Everyday Saints. So far on this show we have talked about a fisherman who failed and was restored. And a slave girl who suffered unimaginably and found peace anyway. This week we are going somewhere completely different. We are talking about a man who had everything. Wealth. Status. Good looks. Charm. The kind of guy who walked into a room and owned it. The kind of guy everyone wanted to be around. And, well, he threw it all away. On purpose. And cheerfully. His name was Francis of Assisi. And I want to be upfront with you about something before we start. Some of you already think you know who he is. The birdbath in the garden, the gentle friar in the brown robe, the patron saint of animals and people who recycle. Well, That version of Francis is about as accurate as a postcard of New York City. You know, it gets the shape right, but misses everything that makes it real. The real Francis was radical, uncomfortable, the kind of person who, if you met him today, would make you deeply uneasy, because he would look at everything you own, everything you are working toward, and gently, cheerfully, suggest that none of it matters as much as you think. And I'll tell you exactly why this episode exists. About a month ago, my wife, Sarah, and were on our honeymoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And if you've never been to Santa Fe, it is one of those places where history is just sitting right there in front of you. Adobe walls, ancient churches, the smell of pinyon smoke in the air. We spent time walking through the historic churches around the plaza area. And I want to give you a sense of what that actually means. Because These are not old churches in the way most Americans think of old churches. We are talking about structures that were built in the 1600s, some of the oldest churches in the entire United States, standing right there in the middle of a city, still in use, still full of people. One of them was the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. And I stopped. I'm standing there on my honeymoon, supposed to be completely present with my new wife. and something just settled in my mind. I need to do an episode on this guy. I need to find out who he actually was. Because I had walked past statues and paintings of Francis my entire life growing up Catholic, and standing inside that cathedral, it hit me. I couldn't tell you a single real thing about him. I mean, I knew the birdbath version. I knew the brown robe. That was it. So this episode exists because I was standing inside a very old church in Santa Fe on my honeymoon and made a mental note that said, Francis of Assisi, find out who he really was. And thank you to Sarah, my wife, for being very patient about the whole thing. This is the story of St. Francis of Assisi. And I promise you, it is not what you think. Let's time travel back to the year 1181. We are in Assisi. a small hillside town in the Umbria region of central Italy. The kind of town where everyone knows everyone, where the bells of the cathedral mark the hours, where the smell of bread and wood smoke drifts through the streets in the morning. In this town a boy is born. His father, Pietro, is a wealthy cloth merchant, one of the most successful businessmen in Assisi. And I want you to understand what that actually meant back in 1181. Pietro didn't just sell fabric. No, he delved in fine French silks. He traveled to France on buying trips. He had connections, status, money, and a reputation. He was, by the standards of time and place, a very big deal. Pietro named his son Giovanni after John the Baptist, but... But when he came home from a business trip to France and found out his wife had already had the boy baptized, he was furious and angry. So he changed the name on the spot. He called the boy Francesco, which essentially means the Frenchman, because Pietro wanted his son to grow up loving France, loving commerce, loving the life Pietro had built. And for a long time it seemed to be working. Francis grew up as a golden boy of Assisi. Picture him. 16, 17, 18 years old. He is charming and funny and generous. Always the first to pick up the tab. Always the center of the group. Always the one people followed. He throws parties. He stays out all night singing in the streets. He dresses in the finest clothes. His father's best fabrics, of course. And he moves through his world like a man who fully expects it to keep being wonderful. His biographers describe him as someone everyone loved. Not in a polite way though. In a genuine magnetic, everyone wants to be near him way. He had that quality some people just have when they walk into a room the energy just shifts. People laughed more when Francis was around. They felt more alive. He dreamed of being a great knight. of glory and adventure and honorable warfare, of being the kind of man that songs were written about. And so, at 19 years old, he went to war. In the year 1202, a battle broke out between the Sisi and the neighboring city of Perugia, which was basically a medieval grudge match between just two towns that did not get along. Francis suited up, he grabbed his sword, and rode out to fight with the best of them. It was a disaster. Assisi lost badly. And Francis, the merchant's son, the party boy, the dreamer of nightly glory, was captured, taken prisoner, and thrown into a dungeon in Perugia. I want you to sit in that cell with him for a moment. Picture the transition. A few weeks ago, he was sleeping in a soft bed in his father's fine house, eating well, laughing with friends. wearing beautiful clothing. Now, he is in a stone cell in enemy territory with no idea how long he will be there, dependent on when his father pays the ransom. He sat in that dungeon for a year, a full year. Now, there seems to be some historical debate about what exactly happened to Francis in that cell. The sources suggest he had visions or something like that. A growing sense that the life he had been living, the parties, the ambitions, the pursuit of glory and wealth, was somehow hollow. That there was something else he was supposed to be doing with his time on earth. He couldn't name it yet, but something shifted in that dark cold cell that would not shift back. When his father finally came and paid the ransom and Francis went home, the people who knew him noticed immediately that he was different. Not broken. He was still charming, still generous, still recognizably himself. But quieter, more interior, less interested in the parties and the plans and the pursuit of a brilliant career. His friends assumed it was the trauma of imprisonment. Give it time, they said. He will snap out of it. He didn't snap out of it. A few years after his return from Francis is out riding through the countryside outside of Assisi and he comes across a leper. Now I need to stop here and explain something because without this context the next part of the story loses its full weight. In medieval Italy, leprosy was one of the most feared diseases in existence. Lepers were required by law to ring a bell or a clapper whenever they approached so that people could get out of the way. They were forced to live outside the town walls. They were considered by practically everyone, not just the callous, to be ritually unclean. Dangerous. Something to be avoided at all costs. Francis had always been repulsed by lepers. He wrote about it himself later in life with complete honesty. When he encountered a leper, His instinct was to turn and ride the other way, not out of cruelty, but out of visceral, physical revulsion. So on this particular day, riding through the countryside, Francis sees a leper approaching on the road, and something happens in him that he could not explain and had never felt before. Instead of turning away, he gets off his horse. He walks to the leper. He takes the man's hand. And he embraces him. He gives him money. And he kisses his hand. When Francis turned to look back down the road, the leper was gone. Now make of that what you will. From that day forward, Francis began visiting the leper colonies outside Assisi. Washing feet, giving money, sitting with people that the rest of the world had decided weren't worth sitting with. This was not a small thing. This was not the Francis of the Birdbath. This was a rich, well-dressed, socially prominent young man voluntarily spending his time in the company of the most despised and rejected people in his society. Shortly after that, he wandered into a small, crumbling, half-abandoned chapel called San Damiano on the outskirts of Assisi. He now before a painted crucifix on the wall, and he heard or felt or somehow received words. Rebuild my church. Francis looked around at the crumbling walls, the broken stones, the weeds growing through the floor, and he took the instruction literally. He started picking up rocks. Now, here's where things got complicated. Because rebuilding a church Even a small and forgotten one cost money, Mullah. And Francis, well, he didn't have any of his own. So he did what any reasonable person would do, right? He went into his father's warehouse, helped himself to two big boxes of the finest fabric, rode to a nearby village, sold the fabric and his horse, and brought the money to the priest at San Damiano. Let me just pause here and acknowledge, yes. that was stealing. Francis knew it, the priest at San Damiano knew it, and he actually refused to take the money. But Francis' logic was simple to the point of being almost childlike. The church needed rebuilding. The money was available, God had told him to do it, and the details would sort themselves out. They did not sort themselves out. Pietro came home from his business trip to find the fabric missing, the horse gone, and his son living in a tiny ruined chapel on the edge of town. Now, he was furious. The kind of fury that only a man who has spent his entire life building something can feel when he watches his son casually dismantle it. He tracked Francis down, dragged him home, beat him, locked him in a room, and demanded that Francis either come back to his senses or renounce his inheritance completely and pay back every coin. Francis said he would pay back the money, but the money belonged to God and the poor and he wasn't going back to his old life. Pietro at his wits end did the only thing he could think of left. He marched his son to the Bishop of Assisi, the highest local authority, and demanded a public judgment. He wanted Francis officially declared to be what Pietro believed he was. A thief and a madman. The bishop summoned Francis. The case was heard in the town square. In public with everyone watching. And Francis, who had by this point been through a year of prison, a mystical encounter with a leper, a voice from a crucifix, and a running battle with his father, looked at the bishop looked at his father, looked at the crowd of people who had known him his entire life, and then, slowly and deliberately, he took off every piece of clothing he was wearing. Every single piece, if you catch my drift. He folded them neatly and set them on the ground in front of his father. He stood in the middle of the public square of Assisi, in front of the people who he had known his entire life since he was a child, completely but naked. He said, Pietro is no longer my father. From now on I can say with complete freedom, our father who art in heaven. The bishop, reportedly in tears, stepped forward and wrapped his cloak around Francis' shoulders. Francis walked out of that square with nothing but the bishop's cloak on his back. He walked into the woods and he was singing. Now, Here's where most people's mental image of Francis kicks in. The gentle friar in the brown robe. And while that's not exactly wrong, I want to make sure you understand what his life actually looked like in those early years. Because it was not gentle, it was not comfortable, it was not the stuff of garden ornaments. Francis was homeless. But by choice. He slept outside. He begged for food. And when the food people gave him was disgusting, he made himself eat it anyway, because he believed his revulsion at poor food was just his pride talking. He rebuilt churches with his bare hands, actual physical labor, hauling stones, mixing mortar, getting his hands raw. People mocked him on the streets. His old friends thought he had lost his mind. His father. who had once been proud of his charming popular son, now crossed the street to avoid him. The boy who had been the most beloved young man in Assisi was now the town eccentric who begged for rocks and slept in ditches. And he was apparently, get this, the happiest he had ever been in his entire life. That is the detail that gets me every time that I think about Francis. Not the poverty itself, Plenty of people throughout history have been forced into poverty and found it miserable. Francis had chosen it. Actively, deliberately, joyfully chosen it. He described poverty as his lady, his bride, the love of his life. He would preach to birds when no humans would listen. He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. And he sang constantly even when robbers stripped him of his clothes and threw him into a ditch, he climbed out still singing. You can dismiss that as the behavior of someone who had come loose from reality, I get it. Some people did, even at the time. Or you can look at it as evidence of something rarer and more unsettling. A man who had genuinely found the thing he was looking for and it turned out to require giving up everything that he had thought he needed. Francis did not set out to start a religious order. He set out to live the way he believed Jesus actually lived. Owning nothing, going wherever he was needed, caring for the people everyone else had written off. But something happened that he didn't expect. People started following him. First one man, then another, then a handful, and then more. These weren't desperate people either. with nowhere else to go. Some of them were wealthy, educated, prominent, a lawyer, a nobleman, men who by every measure had good lives waiting for them and chose instead to give it all away and follow a barefoot beggar who preached to of all things birds. Within a few years, Francis had a movement on his hands. He traveled to Rome to get official approval from the Pope, Pope Innocent III. for what would become the Franciscan Order. Now, you gotta picture that meeting for a moment. The most powerful man in the Christian world, surrounded by cardinals and bishops in their fine robes, in the most magnificent palace in Rome. And then through the doors comes Francis, barefoot, wearing a rough brown robe, probably smelling like the road he had just walked in on. The Pope reportedly almost dismissed him immediately. These men were dirty and poor and did not look like the representatives of a serious religious movement. But then Pope Innocent III had a dream. In the dream, a great basilica, the later in the Mother Church of Rome, was tilting and about to fall. And a small, poor man in a simple brown robe walked up to it and held it on his shoulders. In 1209, the Pope gave his blessing to the Franciscan Order. Toward the end of his life, Francis was in his early 40s, though his body was much older from years of poverty and physical hardship. He retreated to a mountain called Mount Laverna for a period of prayer and fasting. It was September of 1224. Francis had been spending more and more time in solitude, prayer, and contemplation. His eyesight was failing, his body was worn out. He had given everything he had, his comfort, his health, his family relationships, his future, to the life he had chosen. On the mountain he had a vision, a seraph, an angel, appearing in the form of a crucified man. Francis described it as both terrifying and beautiful at the same time. And when the vision was over, Francis looked down at his hands. There were wounds there, on his hands and his feet and his side, wounds that corresponded exactly to the wounds of the crucification. Not symbolic wounds, physical ones that actually bled. This is called the stigmata, from the Latin word for marks or brands. Francis was the first person in recorded history to receive them. His companions who cared for him in his final years saw these wounds with their own eyes. Dozens of people saw them after his death. I am not going to tell you what to make of that. But I do find it one of the most extraordinary documented claims in the history of the Christian faith and I will leave it there. But I will say this for a man who had spent his entire adult life trying to imitate the life of Jesus, completely, radically, and without compromise, The idea that his body ended up bearing the marks of Jesus' death is either one of the history's greatest coincidences or something that takes you to the edge of what you think is possible. Francis died on the evening of October 3rd, 1226. He was 44 or 45 years old. His body was exhausted. Years of poverty, illness, and the physical demands of the life he had chosen had worn him down. long before his time. In the days before he died, he asked to be laid on the bare ground, no bed, no cushion, just the earth. He wanted to die the way he had lived, with nothing between himself and the world. He asked his brothers to sing to him, and as they sang, Francis joined in. Singing the Canticle of the Sun, the great poem he had written praising God for a brother's son and sister, Moon, and Sister Water and Brother Wind, praising God for Sister Death herself, who was now very close. He was declared a saint less than two years after his death. His order, which he had founded with a handful of barefoot followers, had by then grown to include thousands of friars across Europe. The wealthy merchant's son, who had walked naked out of the town square of Assisi, became one of the most beloved figures in the history of the human race. All right, now we're back on the porch. I have been sitting with Francis' story for about two weeks now, a little less, and I wanna share the thing that has stayed with me most. It is not the poverty, it is not even the stigmata, extraordinary as that is. It is oddly the singing. Now, Francis sang when he walked out of the town square with nothing. He sang when Roberts beat him and threw him into a ditch. He sang on his deathbed. Not performance, not even forced cheerfulness. Something that people who were there described as completely genuine and a little unnerving. Like a man who had access to a source of joy that had nothing to do with his circumstances. So what does that make me do? Well, I think about my own life. What does it mean around that? about the things I am convinced I need in order to be okay. The job security, the recognition, the plans working out exactly to a T the way I planned them, the comfort and predictability and control. And I think about a man who just stripped all that away deliberately and found that what was left was more than enough. Now, I am not suggesting you sell your house and give everything to the poor. am not suggesting that. me be clear. Francis himself didn't expect everyone to do what he did. He created a third order specifically for people who wanted to live out his principles while keeping their regular lives and jobs and families. He understood that not everyone is called to the same radical expression as he. I think he is asking all of us a question. And the question is this. What are you holding onto that you are afraid to let go of? What are the things that you are convinced you cannot be happy without? I'm not speaking of your family and your faith. The other things. The status, the image, the plans. What about the security blanket you've been dragging around since you were 25? Francis would look at those things with that unsettling cheerful gentleness of his and say, you might be surprised what's on the other side of letting those go. So the practical challenge for this week, identify one thing you are holding on to too tightly. Now, not to give it up necessarily, just to hold on to it maybe a little more loosely, to remind yourself that it is not the source of your joy. To practice. even briefly, the freedom Francis found. And now it is time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Francis. Thank you for a man who made the rest of us deeply uncomfortable in the best possible way. Thank you that you can take a charming, party-loving rich kid and turn him into someone who held up the church on his shoulders. For everyone listening right now who is gripping something too tightly. A plan, an identity, a version of their life they are afraid to let go of. Give them just a little of Francis' courage, not necessarily to strip everything away, just to hold it more loosely. To remember that the source of their joy is not the thing they are afraid to lose. And maybe, just maybe, to sing a little more. We love you, even when your instructions make no sense to us. Amen. One more thing before we go. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals, ecology, and the environment, which is fitting for a man who called the sun his brother and preached to birds. Let's be honest. He is also the patron saint of Italy of merchants, which is a little ironic given his history with his father's business and of the Franciscan order, which today numbers in the hundreds of thousands worldwide. His feast day is October 4th. On that day, Catholic churches around the world hold what is called the blessing of the animals. People bring their pets to be blessed in Francis's memory. Dogs, cats, rabbits, and apparently the occasional confused looking reptile. Francis would have loved every single one of them. The merchant's son, who gave everything away, became the patron of the earth and every creature in it. That's episode three of Everyday Saints. If Francis's story challenged you, Good, that means it worked. Share it with someone you think might need a little challenge this week. Leave a review if you have a minute, it genuinely helps more people find the show. Next week, we have a man who was kidnapped as a child, became a soldier, lost his faith completely, and then had a very public breakdown, and then was beaten in an asylum. And somehow, out of all of that, built something that is still saving lives in 53 countries today. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the porch with me and I will see you next week.