Stigmata of St. Francis

On September 17 the Franciscan Order keeps the feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis — the imprinting of the five wounds of Christ on the body of Francis during a retreat on La Verna, the Tuscan mountain sanctuary, in 1224. The event itself occurred on September 14 of that year, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross — a coincidence the Franciscan reading has always held to be no coincidence. The feast is set three days after the Exaltation so that the stigmata have their own distinct observance beside the Cross that caused them.

Francis had been keeping a forty-day fast in preparation for the feast of St. Michael the Archangel (September 29). On the morning of September 14, while praying on the mountainside, he saw a six-winged seraph bearing the image of a crucified man. When the vision departed, Francis bore the marks of the nails in his hands and feet and the wound of the lance in his side. The account comes from St. Bonaventure's Legenda Maior, the official biography of the 1260s, and from the earlier Vita Prima of Thomas of Celano. Francis is the first historically recorded case of stigmata.

The feast was granted to the Franciscan Order by Pope Paul V in 1611 and was never inserted into the post-1969 General Roman Calendar. It is kept as an optional memorial in the Franciscan proper calendars — OFM, OFM Conv, OFM Cap, and the Third Order Regular — and as a Greater Double in the 1962 extraordinary form.

The pilgrimage site of the Stigmata is La Verna itself, the mountain that Count Orlando of Chiusi gave to Francis in 1213. The Chapel of the Stigmata, built in 1263, stands on the spot where the seraph appeared; the Sasso Spicco, the rock fissure where Francis is said to have hidden in awe, is a short walk away. The principal annual Franciscan pilgrimage to La Verna is on September 17. Assisi holds the visual memory: the great fresco of the Stigmata in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, painted by Giotto's workshop around 1295-1300, is the image that fixed the scene in the Western imagination. The tunic Francis died in, bearing the visible marks of the side wound, is preserved at the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi.