On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  The legend holds that Francis’s host in Alessandria, where he had come to preach, was so thrilled to have Francis at his table that he ordered the ultimate delicacy—a seven-year-old capon—to be served for the meal. A wicked man, posing as a beggar, came to the door during dinner and received as alms a piece of the capon from Francis. But he did not eat it. Instead, the next day, hoping to expose the humble Francis as a closet hedonist, the wicked man (described as a “son of Belial” by Celano) waved the incriminating capon to a crowd gathered to hear Francis preach so the people could “see what kind of man this Francis is.” But his scheme backfired when the capon in his hand turned miraculously into an everyday fish.

  It was that documented story of Francis in Alessandria that had brought us to the city, but to Father Tonino, as to many other friars we talk to all over Italy, it is the spiritual legacy of Francis and the very real work they are doing now that identifies their faith, not medieval capons turning into fish.

  Father Tonino, for example, an attractive man of fifty with close-cropped hair and cheerful brown eyes, was a missionary in Zaire until his mission was burned, rebuilt, and then bombed. He now feeds upward of thirty poor people a night in Alessandria with the help of volunteers and five resident friars. The cloister of his quite modern church is not reserved for contemplative prayer but has been turned into a miniature soccer field for local children. And a sunny, new meeting room, next to the church’s massive library under reconstruction, sports a colorful painting by a group of ten-year-olds, which includes not only St. Francis asleep in St. Clare’s arms but also a portrait of the Italian author and native Alessandrian Umberto Eco.

  Like the people he serves, Father Tonino lives very much in the here and now. “Excuse me, I must go to work now,” he says as a young man enters the church and steps into the confessional.

  I understand the impatience and even embarrassment of today’s friars toward the miracles, but I think they are instructive. They are filled with the mystery and often the superstitions of the medieval age—seven-year-old capons, for example, were believed to have precious stones in their entrails, while eight-year-old capons were reserved for a king. The miracles also speak to the very real fears and dangers of the time: predatory wild animals, life-snuffing diseases, crippling injuries, poverty, drought, floods, famine, and violence, always violence. Because medieval doctors had very little ability to cure anything, injury or illness, people naturally turned to the healing powers of the godly—and hoped for a miracle.

  One of my favorites, also recorded by Celano, occurred in Gubbio. A woman whose hands were “so crippled that she could do no work at all with them” hurried to Francis during one of his visits to the town and begged him to touch them. “Moved to pity,” he did so, and presto, her hands were cured. What makes this miracle so beguiling is that she did not fall on her knees to praise God or instantly become a Franciscan convert but instead ran home to make a cheese cake for Francis “with her own hands.”

  Francis must have recovered his physical strength in Gubbio, thanks to the generosity of the Spadalonga family. And he did not waver from his search for spiritual strength. The brigands who set upon him in the forest and the Benedictine monks who did not succor him merely reinforced his conviction in his new calling. In the spirit of “the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content,” he spent his time taking care of the lepers at a nearby leprosarium before setting out again for Assisi.

  Francis left the lepers in Gubbio in the summer of 1206 to return to restoring the little ruined church of San Damiano. He still took the mission from Christ to rebuild his church literally. Collecting stones for the project was in order, but Francis soon realized it would take many more stones than he could glean from the surrounding land. So he decided, for the first time, to beg.

  “Whoever gives me a stone will get a reward from the Lord,” he evidently called out to the citizens of Assisi. “Whoever gives me two stones will get two rewards.” And so on. When that did not work, he would break into song, singing the praises of the Lord, in French.

  One can only imagine the stupefaction of the Assisians who for years had heard Francis singing heroic ballads and love songs and now found him singing to the Lord and dressed in a hermit’s tunic on the back of which he had etched a cross with a brick. Perhaps the stones he started lugging back to San Damiano were given to him out of pity or just to get rid of him, but he eventually had enough to start rebuilding the church.

  It was hard work, too hard for Francis. He had never been a particularly strong person, and he had never really recovered his health from his imprisonment in Perugia. The old priest at San Damiano was worried about him and started giving Francis larger portions and choicer selections of whatever food he had, but Francis soon caught on to the priest’s sacrifice. And another moment in the legend was solidified: Francis decided to go door to door in Assisi and beg for his food.

  Assisians were well used to beggars, but to have young Francis Bernadone, the party animal who had always lavished money on food and drink for his friends, come to the door with a begging bowl was beyond comprehension. Some of them must have filled his bowl, because Francis did not starve to death, but the quality of what they gave him was questionable if not insulting. “When he saw his bowl full of all kinds of scraps, he was struck with horror,” writes Celano, “but mindful of God and conquering himself, he ate the food with joy of spirit.”

  A particularly awkward transaction took place when Francis, who had also taken to begging for oil to light San Damiano’s lamps, arrived at one house to discover his former fellow revelers partying inside. In one of the more human moments recorded by his biographers, Francis was struck with “bashfulness and retraced his steps.” He then “rebuked” himself and, after passing “judgment on himself,” returned to the scene of his humiliation and successfully begged for the oil “in a kind of spiritual intoxication.”

  His father and brother were evidently embarrassed beyond measure by Francis’s antics. And understandably so. The snickering in Assisi about the fancy man-about-town transformed into a tattered, French-spouting beggar for God must have been mortifying. There is no further mention of Francis’s mother in the early biographies, but his brother, Angelo, merits at least one venomous story. Seeing Francis shivering with cold one day and struggling to carry a load of stones, Angelo turned to a friend and said, “Tell Francis to sell you a pennysworth of sweat,” to which Francis cheerfully and predictably replied, “Indeed, I will sell my sweat more dearly to my Lord.”

  Pietro di Bernadone remains the same, particularly unpleasant, character in the early biographies. Every time the status-seeking merchant saw his former son on the streets of Assisi, according to Celano, he “would lash out at him with curses.” To protect himself from his father, who must still have frightened him, Francis persuaded a local outcast, with whom he shared his alms, to stand in for his father. Every time Pietro di Bernadone cursed him, Francis would ask—and receive—a paternal blessing from the ragged father figure.

  But it was the restoration of San Damiano that Francis cared about the most. And slowly, with the masonry skills he had presumably learned as a teenager from building the defensive walls around Assisi, he finished. It was the spring of 1208, almost exactly two years after he stripped naked outside the bishop’s residence and traded in Pietro di Bernadone for a heavenly father.

  His biographers claim that others helped Francis rebuild San Damiano, drawn perhaps by his joy and good humor, not to mention his melodious singing voice. And perhaps that is true. Or perhaps they were drawn by his grandiose and quite outrageous prophecy, delivered loudly in French, of course, that San Damiano was no mere church but would someday be a monastery, as Celano puts it, for “the holy virgins of Christ.” In other words—for women.

  6

  Clare’s Prison”

  SAN DAMIANO, where Francis will install Clare; she will be cloistered here for forty-one years

  F
ather Antonio is struggling to maintain his composure. The attractive, young, English-speaking friar is in charge of San Damiano, and his cell phone never stops ringing. There’s a tour bus about to arrive and a group of nuns from Africa and cars pulling into the parking lot and people arriving by foot along the walkway from Assisi. And there are Harvey and me, with our cameras and notebooks.

  He sincerely wants to show us around San Damiano, and in between arrivals he hurries us along the covered entrance portico. “San Damiano was once a hospital for lepers, and because of that, no one ever came here,” he says, telling us a bit of information, albeit somewhat breathlessly, that we did not know before.

  What we do know is that Francis’s prophecy for San Damiano came true. In 1212, four years after he finished the restoration, Francis installed Clare, his most recent and illustrious convert, in San Damiano, with the consent of the bishop of Assisi. We’ll get to the details of that story later, but it was here, inside San Damiano’s small cluster of old stone buildings, that Clare would be cloistered for an incredible forty-one years.

  We hurtle along behind Father Antonio through the door leading toward the sisters’ dormitory. Some fifty women would join Clare at San Damiano in the Franciscan Order of Poor Ladies, the second order founded by Francis; among them were the daughters and sisters of Assisi’s noble families and Clare’s own mother and sister. They filled their days caring for the sick, growing their own vegetables and grains, doing chores around the convent, and engaging in contemplation and prayer, eight times a day. They ate very little, being in a state of constant fast, except for Christmas Day, when they were allowed two meals.

  Conversation was forbidden in the dormitory, in the church, and during meals. Even the act of confession to a priest was tempered. “And they shall take care not to introduce other talk unless it pertains to the confession and the salvation of souls,” Clare wrote in her Rule for the Poor Ladies. The ensuing devotional silence was so profound that an early biographer of Francis and Clare claimed that several sisters had difficulty remembering “how to form words as they should.”

  We are moving so fast in Father Antonio’s wake that it is difficult to contemplate what it must have been like to be a cloistered Poor Lady. But then again, it probably would have been just as difficult had our pace been more leisurely. Father Antonio leads us through the morgue or sepolcreto, where the early sisters, including Clare’s mother, Ortolana, and her sister, Agnes, were buried until their remains were moved to Clare’s basilica in Assisi. We look into the adjoining sisters’ choir, with its primitive, pitted wooden stalls and a fifteenth-century frescoed wall that had unfortunately replaced the grille, now in St. Clare’s basilica, through which the sisters, ever chaste, heard mass and received communion from a male priest. It was through that grille that Clare and the other Poor Ladies are thought to have viewed Francis’s body for the last time as it was being carried to Assisi by his friars. That final farewell, which Giotto portrayed with artistic license as being outside San Damiano, is part of his fresco cycle in St. Francis’s basilica in Assisi.

  The full impact of Clare’s life within the walls becomes depressingly clear when we follow Father Antonio up a flight of old stairs, past her tiny, walled giardinetto, or garden, and into her dormitory. It was here, on the stone floor of the austere rectangular room and under a wood-beamed roof, that Clare lived with her sisters. The only sources of light are two small windows, which frame what must have been a tantalizing view of the spires of Assisi. There doesn’t appear to be any source of heat until Father Antonio tells us that there had been a fireplace but it had to be covered over “because of the tourists.”

  This one, bleak room was for years Clare’s only world. “She had arthritis and had difficulty with the stairs,” Father Antonio explains. Here Clare lived, ate, slept, sewed and embroidered altar cloths for poor churches (an example of which is among the relics in her basilica in Assisi), and as abbess, ministered to the other Poor Ladies, later known as Poor Clares. She prayed in the small adjoining oratorio. The grille still there in the chapel floor provided access for communion to be passed up to her from below, Father Antonio tells us, and some say it was through this grille, not the one downstairs, that she looked at the dead body of Francis.

  Clare’s life, too, was documented by Thomas of Celano, in The Life of St. Clare Virgin, begun in 1255, soon after her canonization. Numerous other books have been written about her, some in English or in English translations, including a comic book for children we bought in Assisi titled Clare of Assisi, The Little Flowers of Saint Clare by the contemporary Italian author Piero Bargellini and a narrative written by the prodigious Franciscan author and friar Murray Bodo titled Clare: A Light in the Garden.

  All of Clare’s biographers stress her devotion to “Blessed Francis” and her ardent embrace of poverty, but Celano supplies excruciating details. Clare reportedly went barefoot year-round on those cold, stone floors and during Lent fasted completely three days a week and lived on bread and water alone the other days. Francis and the bishop of Assisi intervened when they were alerted to her self-imposed food deprivation and ordered Clare “not to let a day go by without eating at least an ounce and a half of bread.”

  She “mortified” her body in penance, according to Celano, by wearing a hair shirt, and not just any hair shirt; Clare chose secretly to wear the skin of a pig with the bristle side inward under her already patched and inadequate clothing. As if that weren’t excruciating enough, she is said to have alternated the bristly pig hide with “a stiff hair shirt woven with horsehair with knots all over it,” which she cinched tightly to her body with rough cords. A comfortable bed was out of the question. Clare slept on vine branches with her head on a piece of wood until her health began to give out. She moved to a mat on the floor with straw for a pillow until finally, at Francis’s order during the onset of her “prolonged illness” with arthritis at the age of thirty-one, she began sleeping on a bag stuffed with straw.

  And she cried, a lot, for Christ’s suffering, though it’s hard to believe it didn’t include her own. Celano writes about the “rivers of tears” bursting from her eyes after the last prayer of the night, setting off similar tears among the other women in the dormitory. Clare’s weeping even brought the devil to her one night in the form of a dark child. “Don’t weep so much or you’ll go blind,” the devil-child said to her, to which Clare replied, “Anyone who shall see God will not be blinded.” The devil-child tried another tack. “Don’t cry so much or your brain will dissolve and run down your nostrils and then your nose will be crooked.” But Clare drove him off for good by retorting, “No crookedness is suffered by those who serve the Lord.”

  Clare performed a multitude of miracles at San Damiano, several of which had to do with food. At one point, when the larder was almost bare, she multiplied a single loaf of bread into enough to amply feed both the fifty Poor Ladies and the friars assigned to look after them. Another time, during a visit by Pope Innocent IV, crosses miraculously appeared on loaves of bread after Clare blessed them.

  Others of Clare’s miracles at San Damiano would change the course of history. The best known is her stand against the mercenary army of Saracens and Tartars raised by Emperor Frederick II against Rome. In the ongoing battle between Church and State, the emperor unleashed his forces on the Christian towns of the Spoleto Valley. On a Friday in September 1240, the mercenary hordes arrived at the gates of San Damiano, scaled the walls, and streamed into the cloister. The Poor Ladies, quite naturally, were terrified, but the bedridden Clare saved the day. Ordering her sisters to carry her to the front door of the convent, or into the refectory as some claim, she prostrated herself in prayer before the ciborium, the box that held the bread for communion, and called on Jesus to save San Damiano and Assisi. He evidently answered her call. The marauders inexplicably withdrew from San Damiano as quickly as they had entered, and Assisi, though damaged, was not overrun.

  But it is a miraculous event that occurred
toward the end of her life that lives on to this day. Clare was very ill and unable to attend a Christmas service being celebrated in the church of St. Francis five miles away in Assisi, yet she both heard the music and the prayers and saw the crèche of Jesus. That miracle would move Pope Pius XII, in 1958, to bestow the title of Patron Saint of Television on Clare for having seen the first live broadcast on the thirteenth-century wall of her cell. As a reminder, the late ABC News anchor, Peter Jennings, kept a statue of St. Clare on his desk.

  For all of Clare’s poor health, she would outlive Francis by twenty-seven years. Her final illness culminated in a personal victory. For years she had been pleading with the various cardinals and Popes in Rome to approve the Privilege of Poverty that she and her order resolutely followed, but one after another had refused. The sticking point was her absolute refusal for the order, or any sister within the order, to own any property, an unheard-of concept then for nuns or sisters. The Popes felt that women of the Church should be financially protected and, like the Benedictines, at least own communal property so they would not have to depend completely on alms for food and housing.

  But Clare was determined, especially after Francis died and some of his friars began to bend his strict rules against owning property in order to live more comfortably. In defiance, she wrote her own Rule of Life as a legacy for her order; it states emphatically that no sister can receive or have “possession or ownership either of themselves or through an intermediary, or even anything that might reasonably be called property.” The only exception she allowed was the land “as necessity” around a convent for the sisters’ “proper seclusion” and its cultivated use as a garden “for the needs of the sisters.”

  As Clare lay dying, one church official after another came from Rome to visit her, including Pope Innocent IV—twice. Her influence had spread far beyond the walls of San Damiano. By then some 150 convents were associated with the Poor Ladies, not only in Italy but in France, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, Moravia, and the most famous, Prague, established by Princess Agnes, daughter of the king of Bohemia. (Agnes of Prague forswore marriage to the Emperor Frederick II as well as to King Henry III of England to become a Poor Clare. And Isabelle, sister of Louis IX of France, founded her own Poor Clare convent at Longchamp rather than marry Frederick II’s son.) But Clare still did not have what she wanted most. Though one cardinal had approved her Rule, she wanted the ultimate guarantee: a Papal bull on parchment with all its attendant seals and ribbons ensuring the right of her sisters everywhere to live in extreme, communal poverty.