Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
13 facts about St. Francis of Assisi: Samuel Gregg
13 facts about St. Francis of Assisi: Samuel Gregg
Aug 30, 2025 12:14 AM

The Roman Catholic Church observes October 4 as the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. The beloved saint has often been portrayed as a proto-environmentalist, a borderline pantheist, or a holy man who used his religious vocation to munism.”

This image could not be more baseless, writes Samuel Gregg, Ph.D., director of research at the Acton Institute. Gregg shared 13 facts about the historical Francis of Assisi on Twitter on Friday morning.

He wrote:

1. The Peace Prayer of Saint Francis can’t be traced further back than a French magazine published in 1912.

2. Saint Francis articulated no legal or social reform program whatsoever. Such projects were “alien” to him.

3. Saint Francis believed that his followers should engage in manual labor to procure necessities. Begging was seen as a secondary alternative.

4. Saint Francis believed one’s most direct contact with God was in the Mass, not in serving in the poor or in the natural world.

5. Saint Francis was “fiercely orthodox” on faith and morals: he thought that friars guilty of liturgical abuses or heresy should be remanded to higher church authorities.

6. Saint Francis told the Muslim Sultan al-Kamil he was there to explicate the truth of the Christian faith and save the sultan’s soul. He was about as far removed from a modern interfaith “dialoguer” as you can get.

7. Saint Francis rejected abstinence from meat and wasn’t a vegetarian.

8. Saint Francis loved animals but regarded vermin and mice as the devil’s agents.

9. Saint Francis believed the Mass required careful preparation, use of the finest sacred vessels, and proper vestments.

10. Saint Francis’s final words to his followers were concerned with proper reverence for the Eucharist, not poverty.

11. “Francis was a 13th century orthodox Catholic, not a modern spiritual individualist . . .”

12.There was “not a hint trace of pantheism in Francis’s approach to nature”. Francis’s references and allusions to nature in his writings, preaching, and instruction were overwhelmingly drawn from the Scriptures rather than the environment itself.

13. Francis regarded the beauty in nature and the animal world as something that should lead to worship and praise of God—but not things to be invested with god-like qualities.

Gregg drew all of these facts from the 2012 book Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by the Dominican historian Augustine Thompson, OP, of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, located in Berkeley. Gregg expounded on this topic in a 2015 article for Crisis magazine.

For more on how the mendicant bined their unique vocation and charism with work, see Lindsay Wilbur’s outstanding article for Religion & Liberty Transatlantic titled, “Even monks have to eat: Enterprise meets the vow of poverty.”

Francis of Assisi is pictured in a mural featuring the urban blight of modern Philadelphia. Jim McIntosh. CC BY 2.0.)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Christmas and the Cross
Two of Eric Shansberg’s recent PowerBlog posts got me thinking of some other things I had run across in the last couple weeks during the run-up to Christmas Day. The first item, “Santa and the ultimate Fairy Tale,” quotes Tony Woodlief to the effect that “fairy tales and Santa Claus do prepare us to embrace the ultimate Fairy Tale.” Schansberg’s (and Woodlief’s) take on this question is pelling and worth considering, even though I’m not quite convinced of the value...
Wilken on Islam
One of the most thought-provoking articles I’ve read lately is Robert Louis Wilken’s “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,” in the January 2009 issue of First Things. It’s accessible online only to subscribers, but you can find the publication at academic and high-quality municipal libraries and it will be freely available online in a month or two. Wilken makes so many interesting and informed observations that I don’t know where to start. Among the points to ponder: “In the long...
Why We Give — Liberal and Conservative
Nicholas Kristof’s Dec. 21 New York Times column was, he says, “a transparent attempt this holiday season to shame liberals into being more charitable.” He quotes Arthur Brooks’ “Who Really Cares” book which shows that conservatives give more to charity than liberals. The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children. “When I started doing research...
Economic Justice for All Revisited
Catching up on “Revisiting the 1986 economic pastoral”, an article from October in the National Catholic Reporter: The bishops’ point “that Catholics’ moral life cannot be separated entirely from their economic life has relevance for what we’re going through now,” said Kevin Schmiesing, research fellow for the Acton Institute, a proponent of free markets. “Unless you believe there is no ponent to this, that there’s no failure of responsibility, that there’s no greed at work, that those kinds of moral...
Merry Christmas everyone
I felt inspired by a fellow Hoosier’s blog post this morning. Doug Masson wrote: Merry Christmas everyone. Like I’ve said probably too many times, I’m not a religious guy. But, it’s tough to argue with the message — peace to everyone, love your family. Love each other. Sounds easy enough. Looking at the world, apparently it’s harder than it sounds. Still, this is a nice reminder each year. I’m not particularly religious either, but in a different sense than Doug...
Santa and the ultimate Fairy Tale
Of course, Santa is based on a historical character. And in many (but certainly not all!) ways, he points forward to Jesus Christ. But in a broader sense, God has created a mystical, mythical, and magical world– that can be overdone or mis-imagined. That said, the mon error is to under-do or under-imagine– out of our “modern” heritage and tainted worldview. I’ve blogged on this quite a few times– and three times in the past month, in noting the 100th...
O Holy Night
O Holy night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth. Long lay the world in sin and error pining, Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth. A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices, For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices! Oh night divine! Oh night when Christ was born! Oh night divine! Oh night! Oh night divine! Chains shall he...
Soul Searching at Yeshiva U.
In “Betrayed by Madoff, Yeshiva U. Adds a Lesson,” the New York Times interviews students and teachers at the New York University which was closely linked to Bernard Madoff, the financier who has been charged by federal prosecutors with orchestrating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme fraud. In Intermediate Accounting I, undergraduates analyzed how he seemingly tap-danced around the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Rabbi Benjamin Blech’s philosophy of Jewish law course, students pondered whether Jewish values had been distorted to...
(one reason) why more than abortion matters…
Among those on the so-called Religious Right, it mon to reduce political interests to “life” issues– most notably, abortion. But in recent months, in the midst of the financial crisis and an economic recession, I’ve gotten many letters and emails about fund-raising problems within Christian organizations. Although such concerns don’t rise to the level of abortion, they– and thus, economics and the politics that affect those economics– are non-trivial as well. Beyond that, there are many issues which speak to...
Acton Commentary: Selfless Giving and Tempered Trading
In this season of giving, Kevin Schmiesing looks at another form of exchange — trade. He observes that mercial activity “is not an exercise in selfishness, but the practice of properly ordered self-interest, which is of necessity tempered by the wants and needs of others.” Read mentary over at the Acton website and e back to share ments. ...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved