Saint Francis of Assisi

His life in a few dates

His conversion

Nothing about his start pointed to poverty. His father, Pietro di Bernardone, was a wealthy cloth merchant who bought his fabric and made his fortune in France, at the great fairs of Champagne. His mother, Pica, is said to have come from Provence. Pietro was away in France when his son was born and baptized Giovanni. When he came home, out of fondness for the country that had made him rich, he called the boy Francesco, which in medieval Italian meant “the Frenchman.” The name stuck. As a young man, Francesco was the life of the party in Assisi: fine clothes, celebrations, and dreams of becoming a knight. A year as a prisoner in Perugia, then a long illness, took away his taste for that life.

His biographers tell three moments that changed everything. One day, he gets off his horse to kiss a man with leprosy, even though the disease had always horrified him. In the crumbling chapel of San Damiano, he hears the crucifix speak to him: “Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin.” He takes it literally and starts rebuilding chapels with his own hands. Finally, his father drags him before the bishop of Assisi to get back the money Francis had given away. Francis hands back everything, even his clothes, and says that from now on he has only one Father, the one in heaven.

In Italy he’s still lovingly called il Poverello, “the little poor man,” because he chose to be the least of all.

The friars, Clare and poverty

Others join him. They want to live the Gospel just as it’s written: no money, no house of their own, working with their hands or begging, and bringing peace from town to town. Francis calls them the Friars Minor, the “lesser brothers.” In 1209, he goes to Rome with them and gets verbal approval from Pope Innocent III. Their home base is a small chapel on the plain below Assisi: Saint Mary of the Angels, known as the Portiuncula.

In 1212, Clare, a young noblewoman of Assisi, slips away from home on the night of Palm Sunday to follow him. She founds the community of the Poor Ladies, later called the Poor Clares, at San Damiano, and stays his closest ally to the end. Later, a Third Order was founded for lay people who can’t leave everything behind. Pope Honorius III approved the friars’ final Rule on November 29, 1223, a month before Greccio.

Francis didn’t choose poverty because he looked down on the world. He chose it to follow Christ, who “became poor”: poor in the manger, poor on the cross. That’s exactly what he went looking for in the manger at Greccio.

Brother Sun: animals and creation

It’s the picture everyone knows: Francis and the birds. Thomas of Celano tells how one day, near Bevagna, he stopped to preach to a flock of birds, and they listened without flying away. The Little Flowers (Fioretti), a collection from the 14th century, adds the wolf of Gubbio, which terrified the town until Francis made peace with it. It’s also said that he picked up earthworms from the road so they wouldn’t be stepped on.

Behind these stories is one belief: every creature comes from God, so all creatures are brothers and sisters. In 1225, sick and nearly blind, at San Damiano, he wrote the Canticle of the Creatures (also called the Canticle of the Sun) in the local Umbrian dialect. It’s one of the earliest works of Italian literature:

In 1979, Pope John Paul II named him patron saint of ecology. On October 4, parishes all over the United States hold a blessing of the animals, and it’s also World Animal Day. In the nativity scene, he’s the one who made the ox and the donkey a permanent part of it.

Peace: the sultan at Damietta

In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis joined the Christian army besieging Damietta, in Egypt. With just one companion, he crossed the battle lines and asked to be taken to the sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil. The sources don’t agree on what was said, but they all say the sultan listened to him and sent him back unharmed. Eight centuries later, that meeting is still held up as an example of dialogue.

The stigmata and his death

In September 1224, while praying alone on Mount La Verna, in Tuscany, Francis received the wounds of Christ’s Passion in his own body: the stigmata. It’s the first well-documented case in the history of the Church. His last two years were full of suffering, and still he called his pains his “sisters.”

Knowing the end was near, he asked to be carried to the Portiuncula. He asked to be laid on the bare ground, had the Gospel of the Passion read and Psalm 142 sung, and added a last verse to the Canticle: “Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death.” He died on the evening of October 3, 1226, at about 44. Every year on the evening of October 3, Franciscans remember his passing in a service called the Transitus. The Church celebrates his feast the next day, October 4.

Pope Gregory IX declared him a saint on July 16, 1228. In 1230 his body was moved to the basilica built for him in Assisi, where he still rests.

What he left us

First, the Franciscan family: Friars Minor, Capuchins, Conventuals, Poor Clares, and thousands of lay people. Century after century, they brought the nativity scene into churches and then into homes, as far as Provence and, with the missions, to the Americas. In 1939, Pope Pius XII made Francis patron saint of Italy, together with Catherine of Siena.

Closer to our time, in 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio became the first pope to take the name Francis. His 2015 encyclical on care for creation takes its title from the Canticle’s opening words: Laudato si’. And on December 1, 2019, he went to Greccio to sign a letter entirely about the nativity scene, Admirabile signum, encouraging every family to set one up at home.

His name, around the world

Few saints have left their name on so many maps. Wherever the Franciscans went, they often named places after their founder, or after people and places dear to him.

• San Francisco. On October 9, 1776, two Franciscans, Francisco Palóu and Pedro Benito Cambón, founded the mission San Francisco de Asís in California. The neighboring village, Yerba Buena, took the name San Francisco in 1847. The mission chapel, also known as Mission Dolores, is the oldest building still standing in the city.
• Los Angeles. In August 1769, the Franciscan Juan Crespí named a river after Our Lady Queen of the Angels of the Porciúncula, in memory of the little chapel in Assisi where the order was born and where Francis died. The city founded on its banks in 1781 kept the name.
• All of California is dotted with Franciscan missions, twenty-one in all, including Santa Clara, named for Saint Clare. Santa Fe, New Mexico, has its own Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.
• The São Francisco River, in Brazil, one of the longest in South America: Amerigo Vespucci’s expedition reached its mouth on October 4, 1501, his feast day, and named it after him.

Add to that thousands of churches, schools, hospitals and first names: Francis, Frances, Francesco, Francisco, Franz. Assisi and its basilica have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. In 1986, John Paul II gathered leaders of the world’s religions there to pray for peace, and people have talked about “the spirit of Assisi” ever since.

Artists have never stopped coming back to him: Cimabue and Giotto painted him on the walls of his basilica, Liszt set his sermon to the birds to music, Messiaen wrote an opera about him, and Rossellini made a film, The Flowers of St. Francis, in 1950. And the Franciscan greeting is still the same: Pax et bonum, “peace and all good.”

2026, the 800th anniversary

From 2023 to 2026, Franciscans have marked a string of 800th anniversaries: the Rule and Greccio in 2023, the stigmata in 2024, the Canticle in 2025. The last and most important is his death.

• Pope Leo XIV opened a Franciscan Jubilee Year, from January 10, 2026, to January 10, 2027.
• From February 22 to March 22, 2026, the saint’s remains were shown to the public for the first time, in the lower basilica of Assisi.
• In Italy, October 4 becomes a national holiday again starting in 2026; it hadn’t been one since 1977.
• In Assisi, the celebrations peak on the evening of October 3, with the commemoration of his death at the Portiuncula, and on October 4, his feast day.

For us, writing about nativity scenes, this anniversary means a lot: every nativity scene on this site carries something of that night at Greccio.

Praying with Saint Francis

At the nativity scene, you can simply do what he did: look for a long while, and wonder at a God who chose to be so small. You’ll find a few ways to do that in praying before the nativity.

A note on a very famous prayer: Francis didn’t write “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” It first appeared in 1912, unsigned, in a small French magazine in Normandy, and was credited to him only later. It fits his spirit well, but his own words are the ones in the Canticle.

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