For when you own too much and it owns you. A cloth merchant's son who went to war, came home strange, kissed a leper, stripped naked in the bishop's square to give his father back his clothes, and spent the next twenty years happier than anyone in Italy.
O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory, honour, and all blessing! Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and who brings us the light.
Saint Francis, pray for us.
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, called Francesco, born at Assisi about 1181 to the richest cloth merchant in town, and raised to enjoy it. He went to war against Perugia at twenty, was captured, and spent a year in a prison cell; he came home ill and did not return to the parties. He met a leper on the road and, against every instinct he had, got down and embraced him. In the ruined chapel of San Damiano he heard the crucifix tell him to rebuild the church, and took it literally: he sold a bale of his father's cloth to pay for stone.
His father sued him. In 1206, before the bishop and the town, Francis took off every stitch his father had paid for, laid the clothes at his feet, and said that from now on he would say Our Father who art in heaven and not father Pietro. He rebuilt three churches with his own hands. In 1208, at Mass, he heard the Gospel where Christ sends the disciples out with nothing, and said: this is what I want. Others came. Within a year there were twelve; within ten, thousands. He went to Egypt in 1219 and walked into the Sultan's camp to talk. He set up the first crèche at Greccio in 1223. On La Verna in 1224 the wounds of Christ opened in his hands and feet and side, and stayed.
He gave up leading the order because it had outgrown what he could bear to see it become. He wrote the Canticle nearly blind. He died on the third of October 1226 at the Portiuncula, on the bare ground, at his own request.
His own account of the turn is short, and he wrote it in the last months of his life, in the Testament: when he was in sin, it seemed too bitter to him even to look at lepers; the Lord led him among them, and he showed them mercy; and when he left them, what had been bitter was turned into sweetness of soul and body. Everything after follows from that sentence. The poverty was not a discipline. It was what happened to a man for whom the bitter things had become sweet.
The Canticle shows the end of it. He wrote it in 1225 in a hut in the garden at San Damiano, in constant pain, unable to bear daylight, and it praises the sun. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire. When they told him he was dying he added a verse: praised be my Lord for our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape. He had it sung to him at the end.
He was not gentle by nature. Thomas of Celano, who knew him, records the temper and the vanity of the young man, and the friars' own accounts have him furious more than once. What it made of him was not a temperament. It was a man who had decided what everything was for and had stopped arguing with the decision.
He was canonized two years after his death, in 1228, by a pope who had been his friend. The Franciscans became the largest order in the Church and immediately began the fight over what he had meant that Bonaventure had to settle. The Poor Clares, from his friend Clare. The Third Order for people who stayed in their houses. Every Christmas crèche in the world. Giotto painted his life on the walls of the basilica, and painting has not been the same since. In 1979 he was named patron of ecology, seven and a half centuries after the Canticle.
His body was hidden under the basilica at his death and found in 1818; the tomb in the lower church is where it was. San Damiano and the Portiuncula are as they were, the second now standing inside a much larger church built around it. La Verna has the chapel of the stigmata. Greccio has the cave. The Peace Prayer, which most people know him by, first appeared in a Paris magazine in 1912; the site's page on it says why that does not spoil it.