Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Some myths and facts about Saint Francis of Assisi
Some myths and facts about Saint Francis of Assisi
May 9, 2025 9:49 AM

October 4th is the Feast Day of Francis of Assisi. He is surely one of the most famous Christian saints. A sense of his impact upon the world can be gauged by the fact that Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX just two years after his death in 1226. In 1979, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Francis in his Bula Inter Sanctos as the Patron Saint of Ecology.

Francis is rightly characterized as highly influential in shaping Christianity through the West. The numerous Franciscan religious orders inspired by his life and works are ample testament to this.

Unfortunately, numerous myths have also been propagated about Francis. Some of this reflects the innocent passing-on of legends. In other instances, such efforts have primarily been about trying to advance particular ideological agendas inside and outside the Christian church. The Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, for example, presented Saint Francis in his book Francis of Assisi: A Model of Human Liberation (1982) as someone capable for propelling society away from cultures dominated by “the bourgeois class that has directed our history for the past five hundred years.” That, frankly, is Marxist ideological claptrap.

Truth, however, is the polar opposite of ideology. And you won’t find a better outline of the truth about Francis of Assisi than Augustine Thompson O.P’s well-researched Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (2012). Among other things, it sifts out the legend from the facts, some of which may surprise some readers but also disconcert those who have tried to coopt Francis for various contemporary causes.

Here are some of the more pertinent facts stated in Thompson’s book and the relevant page numbers:

• The “Peace Prayer of Saint Francis”—which many of us grew up hearing sung endlessly (and) badly in churches in the 1980s—can’t be traced further back than the pages of a French magazine, La Clochette, published in 1912 (p. ix). “Noble as its sentiments are,” Thompson states, “Francis would not have written such a piece, focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me,’ the words ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ never appearing once” (p. ix).

• Francis sought radical detachment from the world. Yet he also believed that he and his followers should engage in manual labor to procure necessities like food. Begging was always a secondary alternative or “when those who had hired the brothers refused them payment” (p. 29).

• Francis thought that the Church’s sacramental life required careful preparation, use of the finest equipment (p. 32), and proper vestments (p. 62). This was consistent with Francis’s conviction that one’s most direct contact with God was in the Mass and the Eucharist, “not in nature or even in service to the poor” (p. 61).

• Francis is rightly called a peacemaker and someone who loved the poor. At the same time, Thompson stresses the saint’s “absolute lack of any program of legal or social reforms” (p. 37). The word “poverty” itself appears rarely in Francis’s own writings (p. 246). Instead, “What he harps on, much to modern readers’ annoyance, is Eucharistic devotion, proper vestments, clear altar lines, and suitable chalices for Mass” (p. 246).

• Francis was no proto-dissenter when it came to Catholic dogmas and doctrines. He was “fiercely orthodox” (41). In later life, he even insisted that friars mitted liturgical abuses or transgressed dogmatic deviations” should be remanded to higher church authorities (pp. 135-136).

• Francis’s famous conversation in Egypt in 1219 with Sultan al-Kamil and his advisors wasn’t an exercise in interfaith pleasantries. Francis certainly did not mock Islam and he “never spoke ill of Muhammad, just as he never spoke ill of anyone” (p. 60). Nonetheless during his audience with al-Kamil, Francis “immediately got to the point. He was the ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ and e for the salvation of the sultan’s soul” (p. 68).

• Francis’s affinity with nature and animals was underscored by those who knew him. The killing of animals or seeing them suffer upset him deeply (p. 56). Unlike many other medieval religious reformers, however, Francis rejected religious abstinence from meat (p. 56) and “he was emphatically not a vegetarian” (p. 56).

• There was “not a hint trace of pantheism in Francis’s approach to nature” (p. 56). Francis’s references and allusions to nature in his writings, preaching, and instruction were overwhelmingly drawn from the Scriptures rather than the environment itself (p. 56).

• Francis regarded the beauty in nature and the animal world as something that should lead to worship and praise of God (p. 58)—but not things to be invested with god-like qualities (p. 56). The saint’s relationship to nature, Thompson underscores, shouldn’t be romanticized. He viewed, for example, mice and vermin as “agents of the devil” (p. 225) and “even considered a gluttonous bird that drowned as cursed” (p. 225).

In the introduction to his book, Thompson writes that “In years of teaching, I have often been astounded at how unhappy students can be when they encounter a different Francis from the one they expect” (p. ix). Facts that explode myths or highlight the falsities of any ideology have a way of doing that. But the disappointment presumably illustrates just how far legends about Francis of Assisi have penetrated the thought, practice and priorities of many Christians of all confessions. All the more reason, I’d argue, to refute them. After all, it’s the truth – not ideologies or romantic fables – which set us free.

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
State Department releases 2017 Trafficking in Persons report
This week the State Department released the 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report, a congressionally mandated report that looks at the governments around the world (including the U.S.) and what they are doing bat trafficking in persons – modern slavery – through the lens of the 3P paradigm of prevention, protection, and prosecution. “Human trafficking is one of the most tragic human rights issues of our time. It splinters families, distorts global markets, undermines the rule of law, and spurs other...
Chief Justice John Roberts tells kids they need to eat a little dirt
There’s an old proverb that says, “We must eat a peck of dirt before we die.” What this means is that just as no one can escape eating a certain amount of dirt on their food, everyone must endure a number of unpleasant things in his or her lifetime. A peck is about two gallons, which would be a lot of dirt if you had to eat it all at once. But over a lifetime the few grains of soil...
Unemployment as economic-spiritual indicator — June 2017 report
Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...
What the pastor taught the professor about social justice
I’m a middle-aged professor who regularly does a presentation on social justice. As a dedicated believer in the power of free markets, I tend to focus on social justice as distributive justice. In other words, what are the arguments we have about how we slice the economic pie? What kind of a statement is being made by Occupy Wall Street when they posture class conflict as a battle between “the 1%” and “the 99%?” Those are the sorts of things...
How ‘economic development’ funds harm economic development
Entrepreneurs face a daunting task anywhere in the world. But in the European Union, a unique obstacle blocks the path toincreasing production and furthering human flourishing. “EU funding is closing European businesses,” writes Marcin Rzegocki in a new essay forReligion & Liberty Transatlantic. The EU Structural Funds program redistributes funds from wealthier nations to poorer EU member states. The program isintended to spur economic growth and dynamism by giving entrepreneurs start-up money and expertise. Instead,the good intentions of the EU...
New Yorkers can fix the subway – if we let them
Just last week, two New York City subway cars derailed, causing dozens of injuries.The situation did not improve on the next day when repairs caused delays and confusing schedule changes. In response, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency and pledged $1 billion dollars to update the subway system. This is hardly the first problem the subway system has recently faced. “The power failures that have been going on,” Cuomo began in a recent address, “that have...
Can health care be left to the free market?
In one of the worst opinion pieces published in the New York Times in recent memory, Farzon A. Nahvi, an emergency medicine physician, argues the free market cannot provide health care because some patients arrive at the hospital unconscious: As an emergency medicine physician in a busy urban hospital, I have patients brought to me unconscious several times a day. Often, they are found down in the street by a good Samaritan who called 911 on their behalf. We are...
Dorothy Sayers, school choice, and long run student success
Today’s Wall Street Journal article on education choice, “New Evidence on School Vouchers,” might look oddly familiar for those of us who have read Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning. The WSJ piece refers to two new studies that investigated student performance in states with voucher programs: Louisiana and Indiana. In Louisiana, a state with a program that allows for vouchers for private schools, 7,100 students attend private or religious schools. Meanwhile, over 34,000 students utilize Indiana’s statewide voucher...
Opening the American city: Toward a new urban agenda
In the mid-20th-century, American cities suffered a wave of violent crime and poverty, due in part to shifts in the economy and public policy, as well as mass suburbanization. Yet in recent decades, those same cities are experiencing somewhat of a renewal. Crime rates are falling. Prosperity is on the rise. And new opportunities for growth, diversity, and innovation abound. “We are at the dawn of the urban century,” writes Michael Hendrix in a new report from AEI’s Values &...
The West was built on faith, family, and free markets: Trump
During a remarkable speech this morning in Warsaw, President Trump did something that many believed impossible: He spoke clearly – eloquently, even – as he passionately defined and defended transatlantic values. Unlike so many of those who parrot the phrase, he began by describing what those values are. Standing at the site of the Warsaw Uprising, he said that Western civilization is embodied in faith, family, economic vitality, limited government, national sovereignty, intellectual freedom, and the pursuit of excellence. Those...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved