52. St. Francis of Assisi: The Catholic Saint Behind the Sentimental Legend

“Let all the brothers be Catholics, and live and speak in a Catholic manner.”

— St. Francis of Assisi, Earlier Rule, chapter XIX^1

St. Francis of Assisi is one of the most loved and one of the most falsified saints in Christendom.

The world remembers the birds and forgets the Blood of Christ. It remembers the wolf and forgets mortal sin. It remembers poverty and forgets chastity and obedience. It remembers peace and forgets penance. It repeats a few lines about the sun, moon, wind, and water while passing silently over the saint’s command that his friars must be Catholics, his reverence for the Holy Sacrifice, his insistence upon conversion and Baptism, and his submission to the Roman Church.

Thus a Catholic saint is gradually turned into a harmless emblem of tenderness toward animals, simplicity without doctrine, and fraternity without conversion.

Pope Pius XI warned against precisely this operation. At the seventh centenary of St. Francis’s death, he commanded Catholics to reject the “purely imaginary figure of the Saint” fashioned by defenders of modern error and lovers of worldly comfort. He condemned the fantasy of a Francis opposed to the Church’s discipline, indifferent to dogma, or prophetic of modern religious liberty. The historical Francis, he wrote, was “truly Catholic and apostolic,” devoted to the Holy Roman Church, her hierarchy, her doctrine, and her sacramental priesthood.^2

We need, therefore, to meet St. Francis again—not by despising the tender things in his life, but by restoring them to their Catholic order.

He loved creatures because they belonged to the Creator. He loved the poor because Christ became poor for us. He loved peace because peace is order beneath God. He loved priests because through their sacred office the true Body and Blood of Jesus Christ are offered and given. He loved sinners by calling them to penance. And he loved the Church too much to treat heresy as another path to God.

St. Francis did not begin his Testament with the beauties of nature. He began with conversion:

“The Lord gave to me, Brother Francis, thus to begin to do penance; for when I was in sin it seemed to me very bitter to see lepers, and the Lord Himself led me amongst them and I showed mercy to them.”^3

This is the key to his life. Francis does not present himself as a naturally gentle man who gradually enlarged his affections. He says that he was in sin, that God led him where nature recoiled, and that grace changed bitterness into sweetness. Mercy toward the leper was not a substitute for repentance; it was one of repentance’s fruits.

His conversion passed through the Cross. He adored Our Lord in Catholic churches and confessed that Christ redeemed the world by His holy Cross. The marks of the Passion later impressed upon his body at La Verna did not introduce a new devotion at the end of his life. They manifested outwardly the mystery around which his converted life had long revolved.

The real Francis is therefore not soft. He is cruciform.

Pope Pius XI recalled that Francis wore rough clothing, fasted, mortified his senses, and exhorted men “to love and fear God and to do penance for their sins.”^4 Some austerities in his life were extraordinary acts not proposed for indiscriminate imitation. Their governing truth, however, binds every Christian: the old man must not be indulged and renamed innocent. Sin must be hated, confessed, and overcome by grace.

St. Francis’s own Rule destroys the modern portrait more decisively than any argument.

Chapter XIX of the Earlier Rule bears the title “That all the Brothers must live in a Catholic way.” It then commands:

“Let all the brothers be Catholics, and live and speak in a Catholic manner. But if anyone should err from the Catholic faith and life in word or in deed, and will not amend, let him be altogether expelled from our fraternity.”^5

This is not religious indifferentism. St. Francis requires Catholic faith, Catholic speech, and Catholic life. Error is not permitted to settle comfortably inside the brotherhood. The erring brother is called to amend; if he obstinately refuses, he is expelled.

Here Francis shows both charity and hatred of heresy in their proper order. The person is summoned to correction. The falsehood is never welcomed. As Father Frederick William Faber would later write, “Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness.” Hatred of heresy is not hatred of the heretic. It is the holy refusal to allow a lie against God to devour the soul while calling that refusal unkind.^6

Francis applied the same vigilance at the end of his life. In his Testament he ordered action against friars who altered the Divine Office contrary to the Rule or “who are not Catholics.”^7 He knew that a religious family could retain his name, dress, vocabulary, and outward works while losing the Faith that gave them life.

A Catholic name does not sanctify a contradiction of Catholic doctrine. A familiar exterior does not turn another religion into the Church. Where the Faith is altered, Francis does not teach us to admire the surviving atmosphere. He teaches us to hold fast to the Faith.

Francis did not imagine that a private revelation or personal fervor conferred jurisdiction upon him. When companions gathered, he sought the Church’s judgment. He wrote a Rule and presented it for approval. He did not claim that the corruption of individual Catholics released him from Catholic order.

The Later Rule opens:

“The Rule and life of the Minor Brothers is this, namely, to observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, by living in obedience, without property and in chastity. Brother Francis promises obedience and reverence to the Lord Pope Honorius and to his successors canonically elected and to the Roman Church.”^8

Those two words—canonically elected—belong to the text. Franciscan obedience was neither leaderless independence nor the irrational claim that every demand made beneath an ecclesiastical title must be obeyed. It was submission to true Catholic authority according to the order Christ established.

The Rule also required candidates to be examined concerning “the Catholic faith and the Sacraments of the Church.”^9 Catholic faith and sacramental adhesion stood at the gate.

This rebukes two contrary errors. It rebukes the revolutionary who uses the sins of churchmen to authorize his own religion. It also rebukes false obedience, which asks the soul to accept contradiction, heresy, or counterfeit worship merely because a claimant commands it. Every created authority is beneath God and bound by the office received from Him. Francis sought no autonomous purity outside the Church. But neither would he have called departure from the Catholic Faith obedience to her.

If the popular portrait were true, we should expect Francis’s writings to linger chiefly over landscapes and animals. Instead, some of their most urgent passages concern the Holy Eucharist, the purity of the altar, the sacred vessels, the priesthood, and the true Sacrifice of the Mass.

In his Testament he explains his reverence for priests:

“In this world, I see nothing corporally of the most high Son of God Himself except His most holy Body and Blood, which they receive and they alone administer to others.”^10

He therefore wills that these holy Mysteries “be honored and revered above all things” and kept in precious places.^11 His reverence is founded upon the objective reality of the priestly office and the Real Presence of Christ.

In his Letter to the whole Order, Francis beseeches his friars to show every possible honor to the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Addressing priests, he writes:

“When they wish to celebrate Mass, being pure, they offer the true Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ purely, with reverence, with a holy and clean intention.”^12

He warns against receiving unworthily and reminds priests of the sanctity required of hands that touch Him. He places this Eucharistic priesthood beside the Divine Maternity: if the Blessed Virgin is rightly honored because she bore Christ in her holy womb, how holy ought the priest to be who touches, receives, and gives the glorified Lord.^13

This is the heart of Franciscan devotion. The crib, the Cross, and the altar belong together. Francis cannot honestly be invoked to defend worship remade around man, casual handling of sacred things, a merely commemorative meal, or a religion in which priesthood and sacrifice have been emptied of their Catholic meaning.

St. Francis’s mission among the Muslims is often presented as though it anticipated modern interreligious dialogue: a peaceful encounter whose purpose was mutual affirmation. His Rule says otherwise.

The Earlier Rule gives two ways for friars living among non-Christians. They may first live humbly and confess themselves to be Christians. Then, “when they see it is pleasing to God,” they are to announce the Word of God so that their hearers may believe in Almighty God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—in Christ the Redeemer and Saviour, and that they “should be baptized and be made Christians.” Francis gives the reason in the words of Our Lord:

“Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”^14

Peacefulness governed the manner of mission. Conversion governed its end.

Francis did not travel to the Sultan because he believed Islam was another salvific expression of man’s search for God. He desired confession of the Holy Trinity, faith in Christ, Baptism, and Christian life. His courage was charitable precisely because error endangers souls. A courtesy that leaves a man peacefully separated from Christ is not the apostolic charity of St. Francis.

The early Franciscan missionaries confirmed this purpose in blood. They did not die to prove that all religions lead to God. They died because Jesus Christ is Lord and the Gospel must be carried to the nations.

Francis loved Lady Poverty with an ardor almost impossible for comfortable souls to understand. But his poverty was not class warfare, romantic primitivism, resentment toward property, or a plan to reorganize society without reference to grace.

It was evangelical renunciation for love of Jesus Christ.

Pope Pius XI carefully distinguished Franciscan poverty—the voluntary surrender of possessions through divine inspiration and love—from forced poverty and philosophical contempt for material things. Francis saw poverty as dear to Our Lady and chosen by Christ upon the Cross.^15 He desired freedom from possession because he desired to belong wholly to God.

Nor did he separate exterior poverty from humility. A man may own little and remain full of himself. Francis wanted the deeper dispossession: the surrender of self-will.

His poverty therefore belongs with obedience and chastity. Each cuts a chain by which fallen man tries to enthrone himself: possession says this is mine; lust says this is for my use; pride says my will shall rule. The three evangelical counsels answer: God is my treasure; the body belongs to His order; my will must bow beneath His.

Francis does not merely ask how much we own. He asks what owns us.

Here accuracy matters.

It is commonly assumed that every English hymn, prayer, or song now bearing St. Francis’s name came from his hand. That is not accurate. We must distinguish the medieval composition attested by the early Franciscan sources from the paraphrases, translations, musical settings, and unrelated prayers later associated with him.

St. Thomas of Celano gives near-contemporary testimony. In the First Life, written within a few years of the saint’s death, he describes Francis contemplating the wisdom, power, and goodness of the Creator in the sun, moon, stars, flowers, water, fire, air, and wind. Francis called the creatures his brothers and summoned them, not to receive honor, but to love, praise, and serve God.^16

Celano is still more explicit in the Second Life. He relates that during Francis’s final illness, after Our Lord consoled him with the promise of the kingdom, Francis composed certain “Praises concerning the Creatures,” inciting the creatures to praise their Creator. Near death, Francis used words he had composed earlier to summon all creatures to God’s praise and welcomed bodily death as “my sister Death.”^17

Celano therefore establishes that Francis truly composed praises of the creatures. But Celano does not reproduce the complete canticle word for word. His testimony must not be made to prove more than it says.

The surviving medieval canticle comes through a separate manuscript tradition. Father Paschal Robinson’s 1906 Catholic edition identifies old witnesses—including Assisi manuscript 338, folio 33—and prints a literal English rendering of the Umbrian text. Robinson records that critical scholars accepted the canticle as authentic, while also noting a tradition that Brother Pacifico may have assisted in its embellishment. He further explains that its absence from one important Franciscan collection resulted from that collection’s restriction to Latin writings; the canticle was written in the vernacular.^18

The careful conclusion is therefore this:

St. Francis composed the medieval Praises of the Creatures. Celano independently confirms the fact. The surviving Umbrian canticle is received as authentic by the pre-1955 Catholic edition used here. But later English hymns, shortened versions, musical settings, and devotional adaptations are not thereby made St. Francis’s exact words.

One especially familiar example is All Creatures of Our God and King. It is not a verbatim work of St. Francis. It is William Henry Draper’s free English versification of the medieval canticle, published as hymn 79 in The Public School Hymn Book with Tunes in 1919. Its metre, repeated alleluias, arrangement, and some of its expressions belong to the later English hymn. Many still later printings omit or rearrange stanzas.^19

The prayer beginning “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace” is another and more complete misattribution. It is not the Canticle of the Creatures and is absent from Francis’s writings and the early Franciscan sources. It first appeared anonymously in French in 1912. However worthy some of its petitions may be, it must not be quoted as a composition of St. Francis.^20

The necessary correction is therefore to distinguish the saint’s received medieval canticle from popular paraphrases and later prayers bearing his name. Above all, we must not mutilate what Francis actually composed.

Modern presentations commonly preserve the sun, moon, stars, wind, water, fire, earth, fruits, and flowers. They often neglect what governs the whole hymn and where it ends.

The first words give all praise, glory, honor, and blessing to the “Most high, omnipotent, good Lord.” The sun is not divine; it signifies God. The moon and stars are things God formed. Wind serves His providence. Earth sustains because the Creator ordered it so.

Then the canticle leaves the comfortable picture. Francis praises God for those who forgive for His love and patiently bear weakness and tribulation. He praises God for bodily death, “from the which no living man can flee.” Then comes the judgment:

“Woe to them who die in mortal sin;
Blessed those who shall find themselves in Thy most holy will,
For the second death shall do them no ill.”^21

And the final command is:

“Praise ye and bless ye my Lord, and give Him thanks,
And be subject unto Him with great humility.”^22

The canticle is not pantheism, nature worship, or sentimental environmentalism. It is a Catholic song of creation beneath the Creator, providence, forgiveness, suffering, death, mortal sin, final judgment, perseverance in God’s will, thanksgiving, and humble subjection.

It becomes “sappy” only after men remove God’s sovereignty, man’s sin, death’s judgment, and the command to submit.

The stories of Francis preaching to birds and taming the wolf of Gubbio have their place in Franciscan tradition. They reveal something true: the saint who had subjected disorder within himself could move through creation with an unusual innocence. He recognized creatures as works of the one Father and summonses to praise.

But animals were not the principal object of his apostolate. Souls were.

His tenderness toward a lamb cannot be separated from his zeal for the Lamb of God. His speech to birds cannot be separated from his command to preach Christ to men. His peace with creatures cannot be separated from war against sin. He ascended into a rightly ordered love in which every creature is loved according to its place beneath the Creator.

When man forgets God, he does not truly elevate animals; he degrades man, obscures sin, and may treat human souls as inconveniences while celebrating selective compassion toward creatures that make no moral demands upon him.

Francis’s love is harder. It requires that we praise the Creator, receive the created order, practice mercy, mortify appetite, forgive injuries, endure suffering, remain in God’s will, and prepare for judgment.

St. Francis was not principally a scholastic controversialist. He did not defend the Faith chiefly by composing large theological refutations. He defended it in a form fitted to his mission:

• he required Catholic faith and Catholic life;
• he excluded obstinate deviation from the fraternity;
• he submitted his Rule to the Church;
• he bound his Order to the Roman Church and canonically elected authority;
• he required examination concerning the Faith and sacraments;
• he confessed the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Christ;
• he preached Baptism and conversion to non-Christians;
• he taught the Real Presence and the true Sacrifice;
• he revered the priesthood and sacred theology;
• he called sinners to penance;
• he warned of mortal sin and the second death.

This is not a marginal part of his life. It is its Catholic structure.

Because he was humble, he did not replace revelation with himself. Because he loved, he did not leave souls inside a lie. Because he was poor, he had no worldly interest to protect by silence. Because he was obedient, he distinguished divine order from self-appointed reform.

His age had its own counterfeit reformers. Some combined austerity with heresy and used the sins of Catholics as an accusation against the Church herself. Francis answered them not by becoming less austere, but by uniting evangelical severity to Catholic obedience. He showed that corruption among men does not make Christ’s Church false, and zeal for reform does not make a rebel Catholic.

Francis’s writings give us marks by which to judge every claimant speaking in his name.

Where is the Catholic Faith required whole and entire?

Where is the true Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ offered by a true priesthood?

Where are sinners called not merely to feel included, but to repent?

Where are non-Christians called with charity to believe in the Trinity, receive Baptism, and become Christians?

Where is Our Lady honored because she truly bore the Incarnate God?

Where are mortal sin, judgment, and the second death still preached?

Where is authority received as a sacred office beneath God rather than a power to recalculate revelation?

The Francis who answers these questions is not the mascot of a universal fraternity detached from conversion. He is a son of Holy Mother Church. His charity lives inside her doctrine. His poverty kneels before her altar. His missionary peace desires that every nation enter the unity of Christ.

Men may manufacture a false Francis without changing the saint in heaven. They may preserve his name, copy his habit, quote fragments of his canticle, and build ceremonies around his birthplace. The counterfeit does not alter the original. It only reveals what the counterfeiters needed to remove.

St. Francis speaks with particular force to Catholics in exile.

First, he forbids despair. The Church may be obscured by treachery, luxury, heresy, and confusion among men, but holiness remains possible because Christ remains the source of holiness. Francis arose in an age of scandal and false reform. He did not conclude that fidelity had become impossible.

Second, he forbids counterfeit solutions. The answer to corrupted authority is not the enthronement of private judgment. The answer to false obedience is not freedom from all obedience. The answer to worldly possessions is not hatred of creation. The answer to sentimental mercy is not cruelty. Catholic restoration recovers the divine order in full.

Third, he brings the accusation inward. Do we praise orthodoxy but refuse penance? Defend the Mass but approach prayer carelessly? Expose false authority but make an idol of our own will? Speak against luxury while being ruled by comfort? Condemn religious indifferentism but fail to desire and pray for the conversion of those in error?

The Pharaoh of self-will can live inside a man who speaks accurately about the crisis. Each delayed act of obedience, each bargain with a known duty, and each attachment preserved from God repeats the ancient refusal: I will not let this go. Francis answers Pharaoh not with autonomy, but with dispossession beneath Christ.

Finally, Francis teaches the remnant to repair what can truly be repaired. The words “rebuild My Church” did not authorize him to invent another church. They sent him first to humble labor and then into a providential mission wholly Catholic in faith, worship, and submission. In exile, much may be beyond our office. But no soul is forbidden to repair the neglected chapel of his own heart: confession of sin, custody of the senses, reverence in prayer, almsgiving, forgiveness, fidelity to duty, love of the Holy Sacrifice, and uncompromising adhesion to Catholic truth.

• Do I love St. Francis as he was, or only the image that asks nothing of me?
• Do I regard heresy as a mortal danger to souls while refusing hatred and contempt toward persons?
• Do I confess the Catholic Faith in speech and in life?
• Do I approach the Holy Eucharist with faith, purity, and reverence?
• Do I pray and sacrifice for the conversion of those outside the Church?
• What possession, appetite, resentment, or opinion has become my master?
• Do I use another person’s faults to excuse disobedience to God?
• Have I confused gentleness with silence before error?
• Am I willing to do penance, or do I want a Francis without the Cross?

Give us back St. Francis of Assisi—not because the world has praised his tenderness, but because it has hidden its source.

Give us the Francis who began to do penance. The Francis of the Cross and the stigmata. The Francis who saw the Body and Blood of the Son of God upon the altar. The Francis who required his brothers to be Catholics. The Francis who sought the Church’s approval and promised obedience to canonically elected authority. The Francis who went peacefully among unbelievers so that they might believe in the Trinity, be baptized, and become Christians. The Francis who sang of sun and moon—and also of forgiveness, tribulation, bodily death, mortal sin, the second death, and humble subjection to God.

Then the creatures return to their proper beauty. They cease to be screens hiding the Creator and become windows through which His wisdom shines. Poverty becomes freedom for God. Peace becomes order under God. Mercy becomes the road of repentance. Obedience becomes the surrender of self-will to truth. And the little poor man of Assisi stands again where he always desired to stand:

at the feet of Jesus Christ, within His one Catholic Church, calling souls to penance, faith, and eternal life.

Sources and Notes

1. St. Francis of Assisi, Earlier Rule (Regula non bullata), ch. XIX, in Paschal Robinson, O.F.M., trans., The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi (Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1906), pp. 52–53. This pre-1955 Catholic edition, bearing an imprimatur, is the principal English source for quotations from St. Francis in this chapter.
2. Pope Pius XI, encyclical Rite Expiatis, April 30, 1926, nos. 1, 23–25.
3. St. Francis, Testament, Robinson, pp. 81–82.
4. Pius XI, Rite Expiatis, nos. 26–27.
5. St. Francis, Earlier Rule, ch. XIX, Robinson, pp. 52–53.
6. Frederick William Faber, C.O., The Precious Blood (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860), ch. VI, p. 316.
7. St. Francis, Testament, Robinson, p. 85.
8. St. Francis, Later Rule (Regula bullata), ch. I, Robinson, pp. 64–65.
9. Ibid., ch. II, p. 65.
10. St. Francis, Testament, Robinson, p. 82.
11. Ibid., pp. 82–83.
12. St. Francis, Letter to All the Friars, Robinson, pp. 112–13.
13. Ibid., pp. 113–14.
14. St. Francis, Earlier Rule, ch. XVI, Robinson, pp. 49–50; cf. John 3:5.
15. Pius XI, Rite Expiatis, nos. 13–18.
16. Brother Thomas of Celano, The First Life of St. Francis, I, ch. XXIX, nos. 80–81, in A. G. Ferrers Howell, trans., The Lives of St. Francis of Assisi (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), pp. 78–80. Celano’s First Life was composed in 1228–1229 by commission of Pope Gregory IX.
17. Thomas of Celano, The Second Life of St. Francis, II, nos. 213 and 217, Howell, pp. 341–46. No. 213 expressly attributes the composition of the “Praises concerning the Creatures” to Francis; no. 217 connects his previously composed words with the creatures’ praise of God and with Sister Death.
18. Paschal Robinson, O.F.M., introduction to St. Francis’s Canticle of the Sun, in Writings, pp. 150–52. Robinson identifies Assisi MS 338, fol. 33, the Book of the Conformities, and other manuscript witnesses; he also reports the tradition concerning Brother Pacifico and distinguishes the vernacular canticle from the Latin works collected at Quaracchi.
19. William Henry Draper, “All Creatures of Our God and King,” in The Public School Hymn Book with Tunes (London: Novello & Co., 1919), hymn 79. Draper’s text is a free English versification of the medieval canticle, not its literal text.
20. “Belle prière à faire pendant la Messe,” La Clochette, no. 12 (December 1912), p. 285. The prayer was printed anonymously and without attribution to St. Francis. It does not occur in the medieval Franciscan writings used in this chapter.
21. St. Francis, Canticle of the Sun, Robinson, pp. 152–54.
22. Ibid., p. 154.

Source-boundary note

This chapter uses St. Francis’s writings in Father Paschal Robinson’s 1906 Catholic edition, Brother Thomas of Celano’s two medieval Lives in A. G. Ferrers Howell’s 1908 translation, and Pope Pius XI’s 1926 encyclical Rite Expiatis. The 1912 La Clochette text and Draper’s 1919 hymn are cited only to identify later compositions that must not be confused with Francis’s own words. No post-1954 ecclesiastical or devotional authority has been used.