Saint Francis of Assisi

Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone was born in Assisi in 1181 or 1182, the son of a rich cloth merchant. They called him Francesco because his father traded with France. He lived the life a rich man’s son could live in a city at war: parties, spending, and the battle of Collestrada against Perugia, where he was taken prisoner and spent a year in a cell. He came out of it sick and changed. The break with his father took place in the town square, before the bishop: Francis stripped and gave him back even his clothes, saying that from that moment on he would call father only the one who is in heaven. He was twenty-five. What came next changed Europe. He didn’t found an order for the sake of founding one: he began living in a certain way, and people followed him. In 1209 he went to Rome with eleven companions and obtained from Innocent III oral approval of a rule that fit in a few lines of the Gospel. He went to Egypt, in the middle of a crusade, to speak with the sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, and came back alive and respected: it’s one of the most extraordinary episodes of the Middle Ages. In 1224, on La Verna, he received the stigmata. He composed the Canticle of the Creatures, the first poetic text of Italian literature. He died in Assisi on the evening of October 3, 1226. He was declared a saint two years later, and he is the patron saint of Italy. If your name is Francis or Frances, today is your name day.