Our Lady of the Angels of the Portiuncula

On August 2, the Franciscan family keeps the feast of Our Lady of the Angels of the Portiuncula — the little chapel in the plain below Assisi that Francis restored with his own hands and that became the cradle of his Order. The chapel, dedicated to St. Mary of the Angels, was already ancient in Francis's time; its name refers either to Mary's Assumption accompanied by angels or to a local legend of angelic singing heard among the oaks. The Benedictines of Monte Subasio held it as a small parcel of land — portiuncula, "little portion" — and gave it to Francis outright around 1211 as the motherhouse of the Friars Minor. On Palm Sunday of that same year he received Clare here, in the founding gesture of the Poor Clares.

The feast's wider significance is the Pardon of Assisi. According to tradition, Francis prayed here one night and was granted by Christ a plenary indulgence for all who visit the chapel on this day. The story is poorly documented before the late thirteenth century — the earliest testimony is a notary's deed of 1277 in which Blessed Benedict of Arezzo reports Brother Masseo's account of Pope Honorius III's confirmation — but the indulgence is unquestionably ancient, and the chapel itself became, after Francis's death in a hut a few yards away in October 1226, one of the most visited pilgrimage sites of medieval Europe.

Successive popes widened the privilege. Sixtus IV extended it in 1480 to all Franciscan churches; Gregory XV in 1622 to all the faithful who, after confession and Communion, visit such a church on the appointed day. After the Council, Paul VI's Indulgentiarum Doctrina (1967) confirmed and broadened the grant: any Catholic may now gain the Portiuncula Indulgence on August 2 (or a day set by the local ordinary) by devoutly visiting any parish church — or the cathedral, co-cathedral, or quasi-parish — and there reciting the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, under the usual conditions of sacramental confession, Eucharistic Communion, prayer for the Pope's intentions, and detachment from all sin.

The little chapel — measuring only about 5.5 by 3.2 metres — now stands entire beneath the dome of the great Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, built around it between 1569 and 1578 by Giacomo Barozza da Vignola and Galeazzo Alessi at the order of Pius V. Pilgrims who step down into the Portiuncula enter the very stones Francis laid; on its façade, the nineteenth-century fresco by Friedrich Overbeck shows Christ and the Virgin granting the indulgence to the kneeling saint.

The feast's reach extends far beyond Assisi. In Cartago, Costa Rica, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles holds the Romería on August 2 — the country's largest annual pilgrimage, drawing some two million walkers to venerate La Negrita, the small dark stone image of the Virgin that appeared on this date in 1635. The basilica's Marian title is the Portiuncula's own, and the Costa Rican feast binds the Italian indulgence to a Latin American apparition shrine in a single day. In Italy, the great Franciscan churches observe the Pardon with solemn liturgy: the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, Franciscan custodians of the Capitoline, and Santa Croce in Florence, the principal Franciscan church of Tuscany. La Verna — the Tuscan mountain sanctuary where Francis received the stigmata in 1224 — keeps the indulgence day within its own annual cycle of Franciscan feasts.

Across the Atlantic, the Franciscan family in the United States has built physical replicas of the Portiuncula so that the indulgence can be gained without travelling to Italy. The National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi in San Francisco houses a 78% scale copy of the chapel, opened in 2008 under Capuchin care; the city itself, like the original chapel, was named for St. Francis. Los Angeles takes its name indirectly from the Portiuncula — El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula — and its Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels continues the dedication. Franciscan University in Steubenville holds a Vatican- designated Portiuncula indulgence site, and the Franciscan Monastery in Washington DC, on the Mt. St. Sepulchre complex, preserves another replica among its Holy Land reproductions.