I once came across a book in Italian about Pope John XXIII and his ties to the Franciscan Order. Later, when I accompanied pilgrims to Pope St. John XXIII’s birth home Sotto Il Monte in northern Italy, I translated sections of it that illustrate Angelo Roncalli’s love for and connection with the Franciscan family and the personal Franciscan dimension of this great Pope and saint whose short papacy opened the path to aggiornamento — updating the Church by convoking the Second Vatican Council.

Pope John was captivated by the charism of the Franciscan Order and once exclaimed: “What a mystery this Franciscanism!” His family lived near the friary at Baccanello which influenced him throughout his entire life.

Pope John explained the origin of his vocation as a secular Franciscan when he was still very young: “I would see the friars who edified me passing nearby my house. They often invited me to the Franciscan friary of Baccanello to pray in solitude and recollection.” He recalled that when the bells of Baccanello invited the friars to pray at 11:30 AM, his mother came to the door of the house and called: “Angelino, come because it’s time to light the fire to cook the polenta!” He wrote to the friars: “Fraternizing with the sons of St. Francis accompanies and sweetens my spirit for the whole year.” During a visit as Pope to Bellegra Friary in 1959, he told the friars: “At one time, I thought of following the humble friars of Baccanello, but then a stronger wind blew me on to another road.”

On April 12 , 1959, Pope John canonized the first saint of his pontificate, the Franciscan lay brother Charles of Sezze. After the canonization, the Pope thought of the friary at Baccanello and sent “the reliquary of St. Charles of Sezze, gift of Pope John XXIII, Secular Franciscan from Sotto Il Monte, to the friary of Baccanello, most dear to him from his childhood.”

Every time that he met the sons of St. Francis, he would call them fratelli, brothers. He did not forget the Poor Clares and described St. Clare as “on fire with love.” When visiting a monastery where there was adoration day and night, he asked which sister did her adoration at 2 AM, and, when they told him, he joyfully exclaimed to her: “I, too, will be in prayer with you,” for he arose at that hour to pray and work because of the silence and peace.

Bishop Righi, who worked with Pope John in Istanbul, said of him: “Bishop Roncalli, from the beginning, never had, nor wished to have, money in his pocket. He lived nine years in Istanbul without having transport for his personal use. He used the tram or taxi.” Bishop Righi’s comment has overtones to our present Pope Francis who seems to be unwittingly evoking images and memories of Pope John XXIII. Angelo Roncalli came from poverty and obviously lived with a sense of the evangelical counsel of poverty, both economically and spiritually.

May Secular Franciscan Pope John, and his love for Saints Francis and Clare and their Gospel way of life, set us afire as well!

When I was conducting a retreat on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i, I was invited to visit a hospital of Franciscan Sisters and they proudly walked me through their corridor of Franciscan art. At the end of the tour, I was shocked because, in this building of healing, there was not a single art piece of St. Clare, renowned for the gift of healing. St. Clare healed many people by signing them with the sign of the cross. Many healings both within her monastery in Assisi and without are attributed to her.

In the monastery, Sr. Benvenuta had a serious infection under her arm, a fistula, for 12 years. The sign of the cross was made by St. Clare with the Lord’s Prayer, and she was cured of her infection. Sister Amata was seriously ill with dropsy, fever, and a very swollen stomach. She had received the sign of the cross from the Holy Mother and was touched with her hands. The next morning, she was cured. One time, when five sisters were sick in the monastery, St. Clare made the sign of the cross with her own hand over them, and all of them were immediately cured. The “medicine” for the sisters in their illnesses was the sign of the cross their Mother made over them.

One of the friars, Br. Stephen, was mentally ill. St. Francis sent him to the monastery of San Damiano so St. Clare could make the sign of the cross over him. Having done this, the brother went to sleep in the place where the Holy Mother usually prayed. Upon waking, he ate a little and then departed cured.

Among the people, a little boy of the city of Spoleto, called Mattiolo, three or four years old, had put a small pebble up one of his nostrils, so it could in no way be removed. The little boy seemed to be in danger. After he was brought to St. Clare and she made the sign of the cross over him, that pebble immediately fell from his nose. The little boy was cured.

In spite of all these healings through the intercession of St. Clare, she herself was seriously ill for the last 29 years of her life, the final six years bedridden. The woman with the gift of healing from God had to suffer herself, aligning herself to the Passion of her Beloved, Jesus Christ.

The feast day of St. Clare of Assisi is August 11. In any experience of sickness or illness, you may consider asking for her intercession with God and imitating her action of making the sign of the cross over a sick person. And, may you know the healing power of the crucified Jesus through the intercession of the Lady Clare!

In his “Six Days of Creation,” St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan friar, defined justice as follows: “Justice makes beautiful that which had been deformed.” If we apply this definition to the corporal works of mercy — feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead — these deformities can be restored to beauty by doing these works of mercy.

St. Bonaventure’s definition for justice can be applied to the commandments of love. St. Bernard says that there are not two commandments of love, but three. He says we must first love ourselves before we can love others or God.

First, love of self. When a person has a poor self‐image, that deformity needs to be restored to beauty which can be accomplished by therapy or counseling. As a person begins to face this deformity, the conversation can raise the person’s self‐image to see the goodness of who he/she is as created by God. Restoring to beauty one’s self image, for St. Bonaventure, would be doing justice unto oneself.

Second, love of neighbor. At times, our relationship with others — relative, friend, enemy — gets deformed. Scripture advises us to leave our gift at the altar and first be reconciled with our brother/ sister, meeting with the other to discuss the deformity to restore the relationship to its original beauty or to a new relationship with one’s enemy. Restoring to beauty a deformed relationship, for St. Bonaventure, would be doing justice unto our neighbor.

Third, love of God. Sometimes, our relationship with God gets deformed perhaps through carelessness or sin. One can restore this deformity either through spiritual dialogue/direction or the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Restoring the beauty of our relationship with God, for St. Bonaventure, would be doing justice unto God.

Here is an example: I worked at the Little Portion Retreat House, South Bronx, offering retreats, free of charge, to the poor. A priest in Harlem asked if he could bring street people to one, and it was during a meal that we discovered it was the birthday of one of the retreatants. We had a cake in the freezer which we microwaved and added icing and a candle. While all sang "Happy Birthday," he was in tears, and the cook asked him: “Why are you crying?” He answered, “Because no one ever before in my life has given me a birthday cake!” And a deformity of his life restored beauty to him with that “nuked” cake.

“Justice makes beautiful that which had been deformed,” writes St. Bonaventure. Why restore a deformity to beauty? When we look at God, at the One who is Beauty itself, then restoring any deformity to beauty is to make that person more like the One who is Beauty itself. That person is made to be more like God. And that, according to St. St. Bonaventure, is to do justice! It is part of the process of divinization of humanity.

For anyone who prays the Liturgy of the Hours (once called the Divine Office), each psalm is introduced by an antiphon, which is a short verse, usually from Scripture. And when St. Francis composed his Office of the Passion, he wrote just one antiphon in honor of the Blessed Mother that he prayed before and after each of his psalms:

Holy Virgin Mary,
there is no one like you born in the world among women:
Daughter and Handmaid of the most high, sovereign King, the heavenly Father;
Mother of our most holy Lord Jesus Christ;
Spouse of the Holy Spirit.
Pray for us with St. Michael the archangel
and with all the powers of the heavens
and with all the saints together
with your most holy beloved Son, Lord and Teacher.

There are many reflections that can be made on this antiphon, but I choose just one. After saluting her as “Holy Virgin Mary,” he makes a statement: “there is no one like you born in the world among women,” which seems to resonate with a title given to Mary that has significance for our parish community.

In St. Francis’ time, Mary was never referred to by the title “Immaculate Conception.” In fact, it was forbidden to use this as a title for Mary. However, I think St. Francis is strongly hinting at this title by the expression, “there is no one like you born in the world among women.”

Within the Franciscan Order, it was Blessed John Duns Scotus (+1308) who taught that the greatest good ever to be born, namely Jesus, could not be born of a vessel tainted with original sin. Consequently, Scotus taught that Mary’s conception by her parents—Saints Joachim and Anne—was sinless. However, Immaculate Conception was not a title accepted by the Church, and Scotus was maligned for even suggesting such a title for Mary.

Moreover, when the Franciscan St. Junípero Serra founded a mission in Lompoc, California on December 8, 1787, it was forbidden to call it by the title Inmaculada Concepción. So, to circumvent the prohibition, he named the mission La Purísima “The Most Pure One.”

It was not, however, until December 8, 1854, that Pope Pius IX solemnly declared that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was revealed by God and was to be firmly believed by all Catholics. Then on February 11, 1858, St. Bernadette Soubirous, then aged 14, was out gathering firewood near the grotto of Massabielle when she experienced her first of 18 visits from a woman. During the 16th vision, St. Bernadette asked the woman her name, and the woman responded: “I am the Immaculate Conception!”

In the 13th century, St. Francis, in his antiphon to Mary, hinted at the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and his spiritual son, Blessed John Duns Scotus, taught regarding today’s dogma:

Potuit. — God could do it!
Decuit. — It was fitting for God to do it!
Ergo fecit! — Therefore, God did it!

Within the writings of St. Francis that exist today, we find a brief prayer composed by the saint known as his Prayer Before a Crucifix. In his Major Life of St. Francis, St. Bonaventure wrote: “The brothers spent their time praying continuously. They prayed more from the heart than with the lips, since they did not yet possess any liturgical books. Rather, the cross of Christ was their book, and they studied it day and night after the example of their father, who never ceased exhorting them about the cross.”

Whenever Francis would go into a forest for prayer in solitude with his brothers, not having any prayer books, they would take two branches of a tree, bind them in the form of a cross, and on this symbol of Christ’s suffering and death, they focused their prayer. St. Francis would have recited this prayer before the famous Crucifix of San Damiano and would have used it whenever he saw any crucifix:

Most High, glorious God,
enlighten the darkness of my heart
and give me right faith, firm hope,
and perfect charity, wisdom, and perception,
O Lord, that I may do your holy and true will.

The only type of crucifix that St. Francis knew in the 13th century was a painted crucifix, of which a few remain in Assisi today. He was acquainted only with the type of crucifix in the style of the Crucifix of San Damiano, an icon, and never knew the familiar crucifix we frequently see today, with a threedimensional corpus on it which emerged a century after St. Francis. It was before these wooden or painted crucifixes that he prayed, he meditated.

During a few of the Lents of my life, I meditated on St. Francis’ Prayer Before a Crucifix. I found five themes for myself in this short prayer: Light, Faith, Hope, Love, and the Will of God. These themes animated St. Francis’ prayer whenever he sat before a crucifix, and they would have been for him a deep well from which to draw living water that nourished his meditation. And it was during one of these Lents, reflecting on those five themes with the Scriptures and from stories about St. Francis, St. Clare, and some of the early Franciscans, that I wrote down my reflections. I began using them for Lenten retreats with others and ultimately got them published, entitled: The Cross Was Their Book. The book is available HERE.

At the end of each section in the book, there are suggestions to assist you in your own meditation. Since Sacred Scripture was the main focus of St. Francis’ meditation, biblical passages are offered for each of the five themes. And finally, St. Francis reflected on his encounters with God every day. This reflection becomes the challenge for each of us as we try to discover how we personally encounter and incarnate in ourselves each of the themes of St. Francis’ Prayer Before a Crucifix.

A myth about St. Francis that I’d like to dispel is the claim that he was responsible for the first Christmas crib scene, il presepio. I cringe a bit when I hear this, as I believe he would as well, for it seems one already existed in Rome in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Nevertheless, he certainly helped popularize the Christmas crèche.

One of my Franciscan brothers, Bill Short, wrote: “In one sense, we can say that the events of Christmas 1223 were important to the ‘democratization’ of Jesus’ birth…Francis’ Christmas crib at Greccio proclaims that it is possible for ordinary folk, who work hard and raise families, to enter into union with God with the help of good preaching, good staging, and, of course, grace.” The first biographer of St. Francis describes that Christmas celebration at Greccio as follows:

“About fifteen days before Christmas, St. Francis was in the little town Greccio and sent this message to a citizen, John of Vellita: ‘If you wish to celebrate the feast of Christmas, go and prepare what I tell you. For I want to recall to memory the little Child born in Bethlehem, and set before our eyes the inconveniences of his infant needs, how he laid in a manger, how, with an ox and ass standing by, he lay upon the hay.’ So, John prepared all.

As Christmas drew near, the brothers arrived from various places. Neighbors prepared candles and torches to light up that night. Finally, St. Francis arrived and saw the manger prepared with hay, the ox and ass also present. There, simplicity was honored, poverty exalted, humility commended, and Greccio was made into a new Bethlehem.

The night was lighted up like the day. The people were filled with joy. The brothers sang as the saint of God stood before the manger overcome with love and joy. Mass was celebrated over the manger.

The saint of God, clothed with the vestments of the Deacon for he was a Deacon, sang the holy Gospel, preached to the people about the birth of the poor King and the little town of Bethlehem. A vision was seen by a man of a little child lying in the manger lifeless. Then he saw St. Francis go up to it and rouse the child as from a deep sleep, for the Child Jesus had been forgotten in the hearts of many; but, by the working of grace, the Child was brought to life again through St. Francis and impressed upon their memory. When the solemn night celebration concluded, everyone went home with joy.”

[Friar Thomas of Celano, First Life 84–86].

A parishioner gave me a magnetized bumper sticker of a Christmas crèche with the message: “Keep Christ in Christmas!” With all the commercialism and secularism surrounding this feast, displaying a crèche, both inside and outside our homes, proclaims that “the Child Jesus has [not] been forgotten in the hearts” of our parishioners.

Statues of St. Francis are often found in gardens, and he’s been jokingly referred to as “the birdbath saint.” St. Francis’ close, almost mystical, association with nature has emerged because of a poem he composed in the last months of his life: his Canticle of the Creatures or his Canticle of Brother Sun. This Canticle is the first poem encountered by all students of Italian literature.

St. Francis lived intimately with creation, was enamored of creation, and sang the praises of God for his relationship with Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Stars, Brother Wind and Weather, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and our Sister Mother Earth. This Brother/Sister/Mother connection with all of creation was also experienced with the men who began to follow him as brothers/friars.

In the 13th century, there was no concept of one-to-one relationships like St. Francis had with his brothers and creation which he referred to by the word fraternitas, a Latin word of feminine gender. To translate it literally into English as “fraternity” alludes to male dwellings at a university, so the Latin word is the preferred use.

Religious life up to the time of St. Francis was mostly lived in monasteries, and the only expectation of the monk or nun was to relate to the community as a whole, one-to-all. So, when men and women began to join his movement, St. Francis invited them into a fraternitas, not into a communitas — a community. In fact, the word “community” is not found anywhere in St. Francis’ personal writings. Those who came to live with St. Francis were invited into a fraternitas — meaning they were taught and encouraged to live a life of relationship to each other on a one-to-one basis.

One example of his one-to-one relationship with creation occurred in the last year of his life. He suffered from trachoma of the eyes, and the treatment then was cauterization of the eyes. As the doctor started the procedure, St. Francis said: “My Brother Fire, be kind to me…for I have loved you and beg the Lord to temper your heat.” As the doctor drew the iron from the fire, the brothers in the room with him fled. When they returned, St. Francis said to them: “I did not feel either the heat of the fire nor any pain in my flesh;” and then to the doctor: “If my flesh is not sufficiently burned, burn it again” [Second Life of St. Francis, Thomas of Celano, section 166]. He lived in harmony with all of creation.

It’s interesting to note that no animals at all are mentioned in his Canticle of the Creatures. However, the early biographies are filled with stories about the Saint and his experiences with the animal world.

So, in spite of sometimes being referred to as “the birdbath saint,” it was Pope Saint John Paul II who made St. Francis of Assisi patron saint of the environment and ecology on November 29, 1979.