St. Francis of Assisi

On October 4 the Church honors Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226), the founder of the Order of Friars Minor and the most beloved saint of the Latin Middle Ages. Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, the son of a cloth merchant of Assisi, he renounced his patrimony before the city's bishop in 1206 after the painted crucifix of San Damiano spoke to him — "Francis, go and repair my house" — and spent the next twenty years rebuilding the Church in poverty, humility, and joy.

The Portiuncula, the little chapel of St. Mary of the Angels in the plain below Assisi, was given to Francis by the Benedictines around 1211 and became the motherhouse of the Franciscan Order. There, on Palm Sunday 1212, he received Clare's religious profession — the founding gesture of the Poor Clares. There, on September 14, 1224, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, he received the stigmata of Christ while praying on La Verna, the Tuscan mountain sanctuary that has been a Franciscan pilgrimage site ever since. And there, on the evening of October 3, 1226, Francis asked to be laid on the bare earth beside the Portiuncula, and died — his "transit" — singing Psalm 142. His body was carried up to Assisi and buried in the church of San Giorgio; in 1230 it was translated to the great basilica that Gregory IX had begun in his honour. The double basilica of San Francesco at Assisi — Upper and Lower, with the fresco cycles of his life by Giotto and his school — keeps his tomb in the Lower Church.

The "Transit" is kept at the great Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Santa Maria degli Angeli, the vast church built around the Portiuncula in 1569-1679. The Cappella del Transito, the hut where Francis died, stands within it. The feast of October 4 draws pilgrims to the Cappella for a ceremony of remembrance that has been kept since the thirteenth century. Cortona, the Franciscan hermitage of Le Celle where Francis dictated his Testament in 1226, is the third Umbrian-Tuscan site of the Franciscan heartland. In Rome, the Franciscan mother church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli rises on the Capitoline Hill, and the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, Michelangelo's conversion of the Baths of Diocletian, holds its own Franciscan memory.

Francis was canonized on July 16, 1228, by Gregory IX, less than two years after his death. Pius XII named him patron of Italy in 1939. John Paul II declared him patron of ecology in 1979, and Pope Francis took his name at the 2013 conclave — the first pope to do so. October 4 is observed in many parishes with the blessing of animals, honouring the saint who called the sun and moon brother and sister, preached to the birds, and tamed the wolf of Gubbio. His Canticle of the Creatures, written in the last year of his life, is the earliest surviving poem in the Italian language.