Dear friends,
Francis of Assisi died eight hundred years ago, lying on the bare ground of a chapel not much bigger than a two-car garage.
Today’s readings (a vineyard whose tenants try to steal and Paul’s plea from a prison cell to think about “whatever is lovely”) suit him so well that I couldn’t write about anything else.
We’ll also go back to the evening in 2013 when a Brazilian cardinal hugged a newly elected pope and handed him his name.
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“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes.” — Matthew 21:42
Francis of Assisi died sometime after dark on October 3, 1226, on the floor of the Porziuncola, the tiny chapel down in the valley below Assisi where the whole movement had started.
He had asked the brothers to take off his habit and lay him on the bare ground. (Thomas of Celano, who wrote the first life of Francis a couple of years later, says he was praying Psalm 142 near the end and wanted the friars to sing his Canticle of the Creatures, the one with the late verse welcoming “Sister Death.”) He was forty-four.
So last night made it eight hundred years.
The friars in Assisi asked churches everywhere to ring their bells at 11:59, and I’d like to more than a few parishes obliged. His feast got bumped this year because October 4 fell on a Sunday, so most of us heard the readings for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time this morning.
Read them with Francis in mind, though, and they sound a lot like his biography.
It’s the third week in a row that Jesus has put us in a vineyard.
Two weeks ago it was the day laborers hired at five o’clock, and last week the son who said no and went anyway.
This week Matthew gives us a landowner who leases the place out and leaves town, along with tenants who beat and kill the servants he sends back for his share of the grapes. Finally he sends his son. “This is the heir,” the tenants say. “Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance” (Matthew 21:38).
They already had the grapes, of course. What they were after was the deed to the land.
Francis knew a thing or two about inheritances. He was baptized Giovanni, but his father, Pietro di Bernardone, a cloth merchant who did a lot of business in France, called him Francesco, and everyone assumed the boy would take over the shop.
Around 1206 Francis sold off a load of his father’s cloth (and the horse that carried it) to pay for repairs at the half-ruined church of San Damiano, and Pietro dragged him in front of Bishop Guido to get the money back.
Francis returned the money. Then he handed back the clothes he was wearing, too, piling them at his father’s feet in front of a crowd, and said that from then on he would say only “Our Father who art in heaven.”
The bishop threw his own cloak over him.
Pope Francis made a point of going to that same room in the bishop’s residence on his first October 4 as pope, in 2013, and he told the poor who had gathered there that the Church had some stripping of its own to do. “Spiritual worldliness kills!” he said.
He had already explained the name, seven months earlier, to a hall full of reporters.
During the conclave, he was sitting next to his old friend Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of Brazil, the retired archbishop of São Paulo, and when the count passed two-thirds, Hummes gave him a hug and a kiss and said, “Don’t forget the poor!”
Francis told the journalists on March 16, 2013, what went through his head: “And those words came to me: the poor, the poor. Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi.”
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched this clip in the past thirteen years.
In that same audience he let a wish slip out (“How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!”), and he called the saint “the man who loves and protects creation.”
