The Poor Man of Assisi

The following comes from Fr. Steve Grunow at Word on Fire:

Evangelical poverty. St. Francis of Assisi embodied this way of being "poor" in order to radically live out the Gospel. Father Steve Grunow explains what it means on this, St. Francis' Feast Day.

St. Francis of Assisi was born in the year 1182 and his early life was spent in an atmosphere of privilege and wealth. Francis was the son of a well-to-do family of merchants.

Yet a life of material comfort did not satisfy Francis, and through his acceptance of an extraordinary offer of grace he set about a mission of personal transformation that he believed would lead to the reform and renewal of the Church. The means by which this transformation would happen would be a commitment to a radical witness of evangelical poverty.

Francis would eschew material resources and make himself a poor man. However, the poverty he would embrace would not be the crushing burden of poverty that is imposed by human callousness and social inequities. Francis accepted as his way of life evangelical poverty.

Evangelical poverty is about more than just having a lack of material possessions. It is a way of life, freely chosen, in which one intentionally seeks to represent Christ, who emptied himself of glory and power and, as the scriptures testify, “took the form of a slave.” Further, evangelical poverty is an invitation to an experience of freedom that happens as a result of detachment from material things. The purpose of this freedom is that without the constraining desires of material possessions one can more readily give oneself over to the demands of the Gospel without distraction.

Evangelical poverty also manifests a deepened faith in God’s Providence. It is an act of trust that God will provide us with what is necessary for our mission, and it witnesses to the idea that it is unseemly for a Christian to live in a constant state of anxiety and fear about the status of one’s material resources. 

St. Francis embodied the truth of evangelical poverty in a way that was not simply inspiring, but off-putting. He owned nothing that the world considered to be of value and understood that he was always entitled to less that what he needed. This disposition should have made him miserable, but he apparently exuded uncanny qualities of joy and peace which were contagious. A small band of brothers soon accompanied him in his mission and the Lord soon worked through St. Francis to gather into communion large numbers of men and women who still witness to the mission of St. Francis to this very day.

St. Francis demonstrated that a heightened sense of compassion can emerge from personal sacrifice, and sufferings accepted as having within them redemptive possibilities have the power to make us ever more like Christ. For St. Francis, likeness to Christ in his poverty and suffering became so complete that he literally bore in his body the wounds of Christ. Mystical union with Christ’s Passion was displayed physically in the strange gift of the stigmata.

Few of us are called to live the holy poverty of St. Francis, but we can learn from him that the purpose and meaning of our existence will never be disclosed simply in relation to what we can own or accumulate. We may not be called to give up all of our material possessions, but if we are to follow Christ, we must accept that detachment and sacrifice are not options- they are essential to our salvation.

On this feast of holy Francis, the rich young man who made himself a poor man, the saint who rejected worldly treasures so that he might have treasure in heaven, may we choose to have less so that someone else might have more. May we find in God’s providence the remedy for our anxiety and fear. May we reverence Christ poor, finding in them the presence of the Lord and may we pray to become ourselves more like the poor man, St. Francis.
Father Steve Grunow is the Assistant Director of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. 

Discovering our Saints: St Francis of Assisi

Stigamta: 6 Interesting Facts about this Spiritual Mystery

The following comes from ChurchPop:

Stigmata is one of the strangest phenomenons in the Catholic Church in the last few centuries.

If you don’t already know, stigmata is a supernatural phenomenon in which the wounds of Christ from his passion and death miraculously appear on a person’s body. Some saints have also suffered what is called invisible stigmata, in which they feel the sufferings of Christ but without the bodily marks.

What should Catholics make of this?

Here are 6 things you may not have known about this incredible phenomenon:

1) The first stigmata dates back to the 13th century

There are no known accounts of stigmata prior to St. Francis of Assisi receiving it in the 13th century. You can read the amazing account of his stigmata from his first biography here.

For most of Church history, no one had heard of stigmata, and now it’s something many people claim to experience, which brings us to our next point…

2) Hundreds of people have claimed stigmata since then

Even though there are no known cases of stigmata prior to St. Francis of Assisi in the 13th century, since then there have been hundreds of people who have claimed to have miraculously received stigmata.

It’s hard to understand why God may start acting in a new way, and some people take this fact as an argument against the supernatural character of at least most stigmata (seeing most as copycats rather than miracles).

3) At least one stigmatist admitted to faking it

And yes, at least one significant stigmatist publicly admitted to faking it. Magdalena de la Cruz was a Franciscan nun in Spain in the 16th century who for years claimed to have miraculously received stigmata. She was famous and widely considered to a be living saint, though St. Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuits) viewed her with suspicion.

At the end of her life, though, after getting very sick, she admitted that her stigmata was fake. She was tried and found guilty by the Inquisition, which sentenced her to penance for the rest of her life in her convent.

4) Around 85% of stigmatists have been women

This number might be a bit dated (it’s hard to find up to date statistics on this sort of thing), but according to a study in the early 20th century, out of 321 known stigmatists from the 13th century until then, only 41 of them had been men.

Even so, some of the most famous cases have been men, such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Padre Pio.

5) St. Padre Pio had stigmata for 50 years and was studied by multiple doctors

Probably the most famous modern case of stigmata, and one that was able to be examined in light of modern science, was the stigmata of St. Padre Pio.

He first received it as a young man in 1911 at the age of 24. Word began to spread worldwide about his condition in 1919. From the 1920s through the 1950s, multiple sets of doctors and scientists examined and studied his wounds, with differing conclusions. While everyone agreed the wounds were real, they couldn’t conclusively determine whether they were miraculous, natural, or simply self-inflicted.

The Church, however, was satisfied enough with the evidence for Padre Pio being honest that Pope St. John Paul II canonized him in 2002.

6) St. Catherine of Siena had invisible stigmata

The famous 14th century saint first received the normal visible stigmata when she was 28. But she humbly didn’t want to draw attention to herself, so she requested that God take away the physical wounds while keeping the same physical suffering. Other saints have also reportedly done this.

St. Francis of Assisi on the Humility of Christ

Everyday, Jesus humbles himself just as He did when He came from His heavenly throne into the Virgin’s womb; everyday He comes to us and lets us see Him in abjection, when He descends from the bosom of the Father into the hands of the priest at the altar.
                                  -St. Francis of Assisi 

St. Francis of Assisi on Spiritual Warfare

“We need to be especially alert to the evil subtlety of Satan. His one desire is to keep people from having a mind and heart disposed to their Lord and God…He wants to extinguish the light of the human heart, and so he moves in by means of worldly busyness and worry.”

— St. Francis of Assisi

St Francis: The Poor Man of Assisi

The following comes from Fr. Steve Grunow at Word on Fire:

St. Francis of Assisi was born in the year 1182 and his early life was spent in an atmosphere of privilege and wealth. Francis was the son of a well-to-do family of merchants.

Yet a life of material comfort did not satisfy Francis, and through his acceptance of an extraordinary offer of grace he set about a mission of personal transformation that he believed would lead to the reform and renewal of the Church. The means by which this transformation would happen would be a commitment to a radical witness of evangelical poverty.

Francis would eschew material resources and make himself a poor man. However, the poverty he would embrace would not be the crushing burden of poverty that is imposed by human callousness and social inequities. Francis accepted as his way of life evangelical poverty.

Evangelical poverty is about more than just having a lack of material possessions. It is a way of life, freely chosen, in which one intentionally seeks to represent Christ, who emptied himself of glory and power and, as the scriptures testify, “took the form of a slave.” Further, evangelical poverty is an invitation to an experience of freedom that happens as a result of detachment from material things. The purpose of this freedom is that without the constraining desires of material possessions one can more readily give oneself over to the demands of the Gospel without distraction.

Evangelical poverty also manifests a deepened faith in God’s Providence. It is an act of trust that God will provide us with what is necessary for our mission, and it witnesses to the idea that it is unseemly for a Christian to live in a constant state of anxiety and fear about the status of one’s material resources. 

St. Francis embodied the truth of evangelical poverty in a way that was not simply inspiring, but off-putting. He owned nothing that the world considered to be of value and understood that he was always entitled to less that what he needed. This disposition should have made him miserable, but he apparently exuded uncanny qualities of joy and peace which were contagious. A small band of brothers soon accompanied him in his mission and the Lord soon worked through St. Francis to gather into communion large numbers of men and women who still witness to the mission of St. Francis to this very day.

St. Francis demonstrated that a heightened sense of compassion can emerge from personal sacrifice, and sufferings accepted as having within them redemptive possibilities have the power to make us ever more like Christ. For St. Francis, likeness to Christ in his poverty and suffering became so complete that he literally bore in his body the wounds of Christ. Mystical union with Christ’s Passion was displayed physically in the strange gift of the stigmata.

Few of us are called to live the holy poverty of St. Francis, but we can learn from him that the purpose and meaning of our existence will never be disclosed simply in relation to what we can own or accumulate. We may not be called to give up all of our material possessions, but if we are to follow Christ, we must accept that detachment and sacrifice are not options- they are essential to our salvation.

On the eve of the feast of holy Francis, the rich young man who made himself a poor man, the saint who rejected worldly treasures so that he might have treasure in heaven, may we choose to have less so that someone else might have more. May we find in God’s providence the remedy for our anxiety and fear. May we reverence Christ poor, finding in them the presence of the Lord and may we pray to become ourselves more like the poor man, St. Francis.

The Transitus of St. Francis of Assisi

The following comes from The Franciscans:

A devotion familiar to all Franciscans which has survived the test of the last three decades is the Transitus. Each year on the third evening of October, we ritually remember the passing of Francis of Assisi from this life into God. In fact, the Transitus has become a significant and even a necessary annual event. To ritually revisit the story of Francis' passing is vital; without it something significant is missing. It specifies the living memory of Francis; it intensifies our commitment to follow Christ in the way of the poor man of Assisi.

 Read more about the Transitus of St. Francis here.

The Little Flowers of Pope Francis

The following comes from National Review:

There is a point to the popular mythology about Saint Francis of Assisi. Obviously, the emasculated bard of the 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon is a mostly insipid caricature. Saint Francis of Assisi was much more than an animal-loving peacenik with an odd haircut.

But the popular mythology is symbolic of the prevailing reality of Francis of Assisi: He lived a policy of joyful and intense engagement with the real world. He was a missionary disciple of Jesus Christ: alive, open, and convicted. He proclaimed the mercy of God, manifested in the incarnation of Christ His son, and he proclaimed our sinfulness. He was aware of our mortality, and he was aware of our eternal destiny.

Saint Francis was a poet, a pastor, and an evangelist: He stood before sultans and saints, beggars and bishops, and he preached Jesus Christ crucified. And Saint Francis lived a Gospel that was unnuanced, optimistic, and ceaselessly demanding. Saint Francis was the man who said that “pure joy” would come through being tossed from a monastery, left in the snow, denied, and abandoned. Some would say he was insane, a madman — others that he was a passionate Christian. I prefer the latter perspective.

But I think Saint Francis is reduced to a caricature to diminish the radical call of his life. It’s easier to recast the saint as a medieval flower child, preaching unbridled sentimentality, than it is to take seriously the witness of solidarity and fidelity he lived.

Pope Francis’s recently released apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, reflects the charism and dynamism of his namesake. The document sketches an expansive vision of the Church — joyful, missionary, and charitable.  

Evangelii Gaudium does not present a new ecclesiology: We’ve long known that the Church is its mission. And the text upholds a hermeneutic of continuity with the historical doctrine of the Catholic faith. But what makes this text remarkable is its candor, breadth, and expectations. No one can read Evangelii Gaudium without being reminded of God’s love.

But like the Gospel that Saint Francis preached, Evangelii Gaudium is demanding. Anyone who reads it honestly will be convicted. The Holy Father unmasks the false rigidity, the relativism, the consumerism, and the complacency that hampers the Christian life. Evangelii Gaudium identifies the temptations and pitfalls of Christians, with insight garnered from decades in leadership. Only a pastor, and a very good one, could have written such a thing.

Read the rest here.

The Power of the Pope’s Embrace

The following comes from National Review:

To understand the theological underpinnings of Pope Francis’s vision and agenda for the Catholic Church, you should study his papal documents and read his speeches. But to appreciate his mission in action, you should check him out on YouTube. There you will find videos featuring some of his most powerful moments — his encounters with people on the margins of society: prisoners, refugees, the poor, the homeless, and, most of all, people with disabilities.

In a video from last Easter Sunday, Francis is seen touring St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican in his popemobile. At one point his attention is directed to the front row of the throng of pilgrims. Suddenly an usher lifts up a small boy who appears to have a physical disability.

Francis takes the boy into his arms, kisses him, and whispers something into his ear. The boy — eight-year-old Dominic Gondreau, an American, who has cerebral palsy — looks positively enraptured.

The scene lasted no more than 15 seconds, but video and photographs of the encounter quickly went viral. A photo of the embrace got top billing on the Drudge Report and was published in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal,Philadelphia Inquirer, and Le Figaro. Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, and CNN all showed clips and aired follow-up interviews with Dominic and his family.

Something similar happened one morning last November during the pope’s weekly general audience in Saint Peter’s. Photos from that day show Francis embracing Vinicio Riva, an Italian man with neurofibromatosis type 1, a genetic condition affecting cell growth of neural tissues, which has left him covered with severe tumors, swelling, and itchy sores. One can imagine many people being repulsed by Riva’s condition, but it seemed to draw Pope Francis.

“He came down from the altar to see the sick people,” the 53-year-old Riva later told reporters. “He embraced me without saying a word. I felt as though my heart was leaving my body.” Riva described the hug as “like paradise. My head was against his chest, his arms were wrapped around me. It lasted just over a minute, but to me it seemed like an eternity.”

Riva’s moment with Francis also went viral. Photos were shown on local, national, and international news broadcasts, posted on Facebook, and tweeted thousands of times. The event was picked up by publications as diverse as People magazine, theDaily Mail, and the Italian magazine Panorama. CNN later broadcast a profile of Riva, and Time magazine ranked the encounter as its second-most heartwarming story of 2013.

Dominic Gondreau and Vinicio Riva aren’t the only people with disabilities whose interactions with Pope Francis have made headlines and melted hearts. There was the striking image of Francis on his knees washing the feet of twelve elderly and disabled people on the Thursday before Easter; there was the touching video of the pope inviting a teenage boy with Down syndrome up to check out the popemobile; and a recent video shows Francis stopping his car to embrace and bless a young woman on a stretcher who was waiting by the side of the road with her family.

Since taking over as leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, Pope Francis has made it an important part of his mission to combat what he calls “the ‘throw away’ culture,” according to which everything can be discarded. He has called on all people of goodwill to engage in “a culture of encounter, solidarity, and hospitality” with people on the margins of society, including people with disabilities. This proposal of his could not have been more timely.

The first indication that Pope Francis intended to make solidarity with the marginalized a major theme of his papacy was the name he chose for himself, in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi. One of history’s most venerated religious figures, Saint Francis was born into moderate wealth and lived a life of some extravagance until a gradual spiritual conversion led him to embrace monastic poverty and simplicity. He came to believe that the only way to truly love the poor, sick, and oppressed was to become one of them.

“As Francis showed mercy to these outcasts, he came to experience God’s own gift of mercy to himself,” the Dominican historian Augustine Thompson writes. “As he cleaned the lepers’ bodies, dressed their wounds, and treated them as human beings, not as refuse to be fled from in horror, his perceptions changed. . . . Francis’s aesthetic sense, so central to his personality, had been transformed, even inverted. The startled veteran sensed himself, by God’s grace and no power of his own, remade into a different man.”

Read the rest here.

Pope Francis and St. Francis

The following comes from the NCR:

If you do a web search for the words, "Francis kisses hands," you might find a story about Pope Francis kissing the hand of the Ecumenical Patriarch, kissing the hands of Holocaust survivors, or "raising eyebrows" when he kissed the hand of a homosexual activist priest. 

Or you might find this story, somewhat less recent. The original story dates from the 13th century, and it's about a different Francis:

The saint was close to the end of his life, unable to walk and suffering from an eye disease and the stigmata. As he was brought through a region, some people from a nearby town came to ask for his help with their parish priest. They had discovered that their priest was involved in a scandalous relationship with a woman of that town. The saint was brought to the town and placed before the priest in front of everyone. They thought that the saint would upbraid the fallen priest. St. Francis instead fell to his knees, took the priest’s hands into his own stigmatized hands, kissed them and said, “All I know and all I want to know is that these hands give me Jesus.” It was said that the priest was converted.

You may wish that the Pope would do something different, besides imitating a saint. You may long to see him turn his back on the same people you turn your back on, come thundering down on the sinners you find especially revolting. But this is what he's doing instead: kissing hands. He is acknowledging that we are here to bring Christ to each other.

We hear that Pope Francis is "sending the wrong message" when he consorts with sinners like the dissenting activist priest. But it's the same message God sent to Adam when He called to him in the garden. It's the same message that Jesus was sending when He told the story of the prodigal son. When man sins, God calls him, begs him to return. The hands with the stigmata reach out for the hands that killed, that tortured, that squandered, that betrayed.

Read the rest here.

Francis of Assisi and Western Catholicism

The following comes from Archbishop Chaput:

I want to start with a simple statement of fact.  All Christian life is a paradox.  What I mean is this.

In Isaiah 55, God says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts [higher] than your thoughts” (8-9).  Then in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “You therefore must be perfect, [even] as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48). 

Scripture tells us that God is utterly different from us, vastly higher than us.  Then it tells us to become like him.  Therein lies the paradox.  The task seems impossible.  And yet weknow it to be possible.  We know it through the witness of the saints.  In Hebrew, God is called hakadosh, “the Holy One,” with the word kadosh meaning holy.  Our English word “saint” derives from the Latin word sanctus, which means the same thing: holy.  Holy does not mean “good,” though holy people are always good and often – though not always – nice.  St. Jerome was certainly holy and good, but “nice” might not be the first word that springs to mind in remembering him.

Holy means “other than.” It means different from the world; set apart from the profane; sacred.  The saints are ordinary men and women — persons with every kind of talent, weakness and personality — who took a different path, one step at a time, away from the routine habits of the world.  They fell in love with God.  They followed him.  They conformed their lives to him in simple ways that became extraordinary ways.  And now their example and their intercession give us hope that we can do the same.

I mention all this because my job today is to talk about “St. Francis and Western Catholicism.”  I’m a Capuchin Franciscan, so I’m happy to do that.  But I want to do it by posing three questions:  Who is Francis, this pope?  Who was Francis, the man of Assisi?  And after 800 years, what, if anything, can a man from the Middle Ages teach us about being alive and free and human?

Read the rest here.

Pope Francis on the 'real St. Francis'

The Last Franciscan

The following comes from the Fr. James Schall at NCR:

“It has been said that there was only one Christian who died on the cross; it is truer to say, in this sense, that there was only one Franciscan, whose name was Francis.”

— G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 1923

“You (Scalfari) did not ask me (Pope Francis) for a ranking of their (the saints) cultural and religious importance, but who is closer to my soul. So I’d say: Augustine and Francis.”

— Interview of Eugenio Scalfari with Pope Francis, La Repubblica, Oct. 1, 2013

Pope Francis brings the name of St. Francis to world attention. His visit to Assisi on Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis, serves to emphasize both men. The greatest “secular” reminder of the saint from Assisi is probably the city of San Francisco itself. No doubt, the confluence of these names and cities is before us all. I would not be surprised if Pope Francis someday visits “our City by the Bay” — to recall the song about where we left our hearts.

Chesterton’s remark that there was only one Francis probably remains true. It was Nietzsche who said that the last Christian died on the cross. This remark was intended to be a slam at Christians who did not live up to Christ’s standards. But Christ came to save sinners. He did not expect to find a world in which the need for forgiveness was no longer urgent.

Certainly, Pope Francis today gives St. Francis a run for his money on being the “only Francis” that the world recognizes.

Several things about Chesterton’s book are worth recalling. He argued that the ancient pagan world had become so corrupted by symbols and myths of the gods that the only way to escape it was to retreat to the desert with the Egyptian Fathers like Anthony and let the world return to itself. Then, we could, when we saw a tree or fountain, say we saw a tree or a fountain, not some obscene myth. One cannot help but think that much in our modern world needs the same cleansing.

Chesterton also compared St. Francis and St. Dominic. He said that Dominic was successful in his war against the heretics, but the world hated him for it. Francis was a failure to incite people to live more simple lives, but the world loved him for it.

St. Paul said: “He who does not work neither let him eat.” This sounds like a cruel doctrine today. We hear talk of “rights” to food. When we think of poverty, something that the figure of Francis vividly recalls, we think of “the poor you will always have with you.”

It sometimes sounds like Christians want everyone to be poor so that they can have someone to take care of. Modern politicians have understood quite well that helping the poor is also a claim for more government, supposedly the chief instrument to meet this problem.

The history of the Franciscan order is torn by controversy over how poor we should be, both how poor monks should be and how poor or not poor everyone else should be. The Church, finally, at one point, had to insist that monks should have at least something to ground their community in. They could not be so absolutely poor that they had nothing and gave away what they received. No vow was intended to deny the reality of human nature and its ordinary necessities.

I was in the city of Assisi once. In those days, it was famous for its communist voting record. One of the great instruments in creating poverty is certainly the modern communist parties. But communism prided itself on being a way out of poverty, not a way to create it.

If we think of poverty as something that we ought to reduce, if not eliminate, there are many ideas and institutions that will not work to this purpose. If we really want to be poor, we should not envy those who are wealthier than we are. The connection of wealth, poverty and envy has been studied, but, I suspect, not closely enough.

St. Francis calls our attention to voluntary poverty, the poverty that chooses without envy to look at the higher things, the things that cannot be bought with wealth anyhow. It is not true that a rich man cannot get to heaven. It is true that he probably has a tougher row to hoe. Nor is it true that a poor man cannot lose his soul. Augustine was quite clear on this. What is true is that the riches of the world were given to us for our well-being. But we do not know, often, how this comes about until we work on it, understand it and know what we are.

A recent essay in The Economist pointed out that, in fact, most of the world’s historically poor countries are getting richer, often quite rapidly. I have never quite understood just why modern discussions of poverty, especially religious discussions, seldom seem to broach the question of “how not to be poor.” The simple and naive answer is always “because the rich are rich.” This mentality next concludes that we must “redistribute” existing wealth.

The problem is envy, the “gap” between rich and poor. Whenever this approach is tried on a national or world scale, the result is usually control by the absolute state that decided who gets what.

We do not think of ideas, creativity or innovations that are the real engines of wealth production, the kind that enables everyone to be richer. We will never get, nor do we want, a world in which everyone has exactly the same thing. This is the famous socialist ideal.

We have to recognize that we need to reward those who actually do make things better and, yes, punish those who make them worse. Instead, what we often do with the poor is to put them in government hands. This compounds things by making them worse.

Francis of Assisi, too, is noted for his love of nature, for the doves that seemed to hover over him. Yet we have developed a love of nature that sets it off against man’s presence on earth. Man is as much at home in this world as the birds and fishes, except, of course, for one thing. He not only has “dominion” over the earth, but the earth is not his final home.

If we see poverty, love of nature or wealth, for that matter, as somehow designed to make us fully at home in the world, we will have missed what St. Francis and Pope Francis are really telling us — the words are the Pope’s to Eugenio Scalfari: “From my point of view, God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and as a spark of Divine light is in each of us, our species will end, but the light of God will not; and at that point, it will invade all souls, and it will all be in everyone.”

Pope in Assisi: Christians must strip themselves of worldliness

(Vatican Radio)Christians and the Church must strip themselves of worldliness, said Pope Francis while addressing some of the poor in the Italian hill town of Assisi early Friday. The Pope offered this message in the same hall in which St. Francis, about 800 years ago, undressed himself and laid his fine clothes at his wealthy father’s feet, renouncing his riches and inheritance in favour of a life of poverty consecrated to God.


The Pope once again put aside his prepared speech and began his impromptu remarks by debunking a notion that had circulated in the press in recent days: that he would imitate St. Francis by divesting the bishops, the cardinals and himself, as well. However, he said, today serves as a good occasion to invite the Church to strip itself of worldliness.
All of the baptized comprise the Church and all have to follow Jesus, who stripped himself and chose to be a servant and to be humiliated on his way to the Cross. “And if we want to be Christians, there is no other way,” he said.

Without the Cross, without Jesus and without stripping ourselves of worldliness, he said, “we become pastry shop Christians… like nice sweet things but not real Christians.”
“We need to strip the Church,” he said. “We are in very grave danger. We are in danger of worldliness.”

The Christian cannot enter into the spirit of the world, which leads to vanity, arrogance and pride, he continued. And these lead to idolatry, which is the gravest sin.
The Church is not just the clergy, the hierarchy and religious, he said. “The Church is all of us and we all have to strip ourselves of this worldliness. Worldliness does us harm. It is so sad to find a worldly Christian.”

“Our Lord told us: We cannot serve two masters: either we serve money or we serve God.…We can’t cancel with one hand what we write with another,” he remarked. “The Gospel is the Gospel.”
The Pope acknowledged the local poor who were gathered with him, saying: “Many of you have been stripped by this savage world that does not give work, that does not help, that does not care if children die of hunger …, that does not care if many families do not have anything to eat or money to bring bread home.”

Referring to the hundreds of refugees who died in a shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa Thursday , the Pope lamented the large numbers of people who die trying to escape dire conditions in their home countries.
It is ridiculous that a Christian would want to follow a worldly path, he continued. “The worldly spirit kills; it kills people; it kills the Church.”

The Pope then asked the Lord to bestow upon Christians the courage to strip themselves of the spirit of the world, which he called “the leprosy, the cancer of society and the cancer of the revelation of God and the enemy of Jesus.”
He concluded: “I ask the Lord that he gives us all the grace to strip ourselves.”

St. Francis and Pope Francis

Francis: The Saint and The Pope

Archbishop Chaput: A New Holy Father and the Legacy of a Name

The following comes from Archbishop Chaput at Catholic Philly:

Francis is the name of several extraordinary saints.  Francis Xavier, cofounder of the Jesuits, is one of history’s greatest missionaries.  Francis Borgia, a member of one of the most famous (and infamous) families of the Renaissance, turned away from wealth and privilege, joined the Society of Jesus and rose to become its superior general.  And Francis De Sales, the great mystical writer, ascetic and bishop, founded a religious order of women with St. Jane De Chantal.  He also worked closely with the Capuchin Franciscans to preach a renewed Catholic faith in his diocese in the wake of the Reformation.

But the Francis most people remember when they hear the name, including many non-Christians and non-believers, is the Poverello, “the poor one” – St. Francis of Assisi.  This is the saint whose name our new Holy Father, Pope Francis, has chosen.  So it’s good to know a little bit about him.

St. Francis once said that “the saints lived lives of heroic virtue, [but] we are satisfied to talk about them.”  Francis himself wasn’t satisfied with pious words.  He wanted to act on the things he believed.  He called his brothers to live the Gospel with simplicity and honesty.  And that’s why he used the words sine glossa – “without gloss” — in his Testament.  He saw that the Gospel wasn’t complicated, but it was demanding and difficult.  The scholars and Church lawyers of his day in the 13^th century had written commentaries called glosses.  And these glosses were very good at either explaining away the hard parts of the Gospel, or diminishing our need to follow Christ’s demands.  Francis wanted none of that.  He was a radical in the truest sense.  He wanted to experience discipleship at its root.

Francis lived in a time as troubled as our own.  It was an age of Christians killing Christians, Muslims and Christians killing each other, wars between cities and states, and corruption both within and outside the Church.  Views of society and the Church were changing.  The feudal system was falling apart.  For much of his life, Francis was lost in the confusion.  But in his experience of faith and prayer, he came to some basic insights that gave him a very powerful inner freedom.  And this enabled him to live the Gospel with simplicity and clarity in such a way that he not only was converted himself, but also became the leader of a movement of conversion in the Church and society at large.

Today the Church seems to be in similar disarray.  We have all sorts of factions fighting each other, among priests, among bishops, and certainly among our laypeople.  We’re humiliated and shaken by the criminal sexual behavior of some of our clergy.  And this has led, even for some who are deeply loyal to the Church, to a lack of confidence in our bishops, in the Church and her future, and even sometimes to a lack of confidence in Jesus Christ.  We wonder if the Gospel is really true or if the Church is just another fraud.

Francis felt many of the same sentiments, and he faced many of the same questions.  And yet a very clear part of his spirituality was his love for the Church, his obedience to her pastors, his unwillingness to be critical of the Church.  Instead of tearing her down because of the sins of her leaders, Francis chose to love the Church and serve her — and because of that love and by his simple living of the Gospel without compromise, he became the means God used for the renewal of a whole age of faith.

When God spoke to Francis from the cross of San Damiano – “Repair my house, which is falling into ruin” — Francis heard it literally.  He thought he was supposed to repair the chapel of San Damiano near Assisi.  But of course the real call was to repair the larger Church with an interior revolution, by the personal witness of a pure and basic living of the Gospel.

The Franciscan tradition tells us that often in his life, Francis would meet with his community, and this man who was one of history’s greatest saints would say to them, “Brothers, up to now we have done nothing.  Let us begin.”  And I think that even though we’ve accomplished many wonderful things in the Church in Philadelphia and throughout the United States, if we want to be what God calls us to be in the years that lie ahead, we need to be like St. Francis.

Francis wasn’t the only Church reformer of his day.  Plenty of other men and women saw the problems in the Church and tried to do something about it.  Francis wasn’t even the smartest or the most talented – but he was almost certainly the most faithful, the most honest, the most humble, the most single-minded in his mission, and the most zealous in his love for Jesus Christ.  And I’d argue that these marks of authentic Church renewal haven’t really changed at all in 800 years.

Throughout my life, I’ve often turned to the Prayer of St. Francis before the Crucifix.  It goes like this:

Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart and give me true faith, certain hope, and perfect charity, sense and knowledge, Lord, so that I may carry out your holy and true command.

It’s always easier to talk about reform when the target of the reform is “out there,” rather than in here.  The Church does need reform.  She always needs reform, which means she needs scholars and committed laypeople to help guide her, and pastors who know how to lead with humility, courage and love.  But what she needs more than anything else isholiness – holy priests and holy people who love Jesus Christ and love His Church more than they love their own ideas.

Today, just like 800 years ago, the structures of the Church are so much easier to tinker with than a stubborn heart, or an empty hole where our faith should be.  Reforming the Church, renewing the Church, begins with our own repentance, our own humility and willingness to serve — and that’s the really hard work, which is why sometimes so little of it seems to get done.  But as our new Holy Father understands so well, it can be done.  Francis showed us how.  Now it’s up to us to do something about it.