Sandy Curnow Reflection

Saint Francis of Assisi – 800^th Anniversary of his death in 1226

If you go to the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee you can find the ruins of a settlement reliably identified as Capernaum – Kfar Nahum – where you can see the excavated walls and streets of a small town 2,200 years old.  Christ will have known these little alleys well.  All four Gospels agree that this was the place Jesus made his headquarters for much of His time in Galilee.  A place He lived in.  Moreover, Peter, Matthew, James and John came from here; it was a fishing village, mostly, right on the shore of the lake.  Men took nets out even until recently; going out into the deep water with them fishing, there is little more moving than the notice in Hebrew and English warning of the east winds’ sudden storms.

Photo – Excavations at Capernaum showing church above St Peter’s House (private photo by S Curnow)

The walls of the houses are drystone, of local black basalt with some smaller stones and mud filling, but one house in particular has a main room that seems to have been enlarged a little – it’s max seven metres in length – from the latter part of the 1^st Century CE – which had been for a considerable time treated differently.  The interior walls of the building were dressed and plastered, there was even some sacred graffiti, and pottery remains – which are so telltale – are of larger than domestic sized jars for oil or water or wine.  Most archaeologists agree that this was the house of Peter which was turned to a sacred gathering space by early Christians and remained in use for some centuries until the town was abandoned.  Now, floating above the house is a spaceship shaped modern church whose glass floor lies centrally over Peter’s place; it was built by the Franciscans who as Custodia di Terra Sancta have owned the site for over a century and undertook most of the original excavations.

Franciscans in the Holy Places?  The mendicant friars from Assisi, whose historical role was to preach repentance and renewal to the growing urban centres around Europe, owning sacred sites?

Image: Giotto – Legend of St Francis – St Francis before the Sultan (Trial by Fire). Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

But that wasn’t their founder’s first concern.

Francis had been born in Assisi, a hilltop town in Italy’s Umbria region in 1182, and abandoning a life of some wealth, he founded his order when he won approval from the Pope at 28 in 1210, and was thus permitted to preach.  Rather than the monks who joined a community in one place, living a life of labour, scholarship and prayer away from the world, Francis, as a friar, embraced a life of the total poverty of beggars who preached in the byways, living a life of complete abstinence, eating sparingly, if at all, but working in the world.  He was determined to live the simplest life of the Gospels.  To make himself as of nothing, he even embraced lepers as he cared for them.  He was clearly an extraordinarily charismatic character.  Men flocked to join him – a group of minimum organisation and no seniority, that lived a life of total gospel poverty and obedience to the Church.  In ten years his group had grown to over 5,000.

Nine years after foundation and at a second attempt, Francis managed to join the 5^th Crusade in Egypt, determined to achieve peace by, of all things, converting the Sultan of Egypt who was the nephew of Saladin to Christianity – or to be martyred in the attempt.  He achieved neither.  But to everyone’s amazement the Sultan received him graciously, heard him out, and then allowed him to go freely to Acre which was certainly the gateway to the Holy Land.  He left there about a year later, and it is accepted that the Franciscans have had a presence in the Holy Land almost continuously since 1217.  Which explains Capernaum but not the massive (and glorious) pair of churches which are his tomb in Assisi.

The simple friar’s narrative and work have become topical again since Pope Leo XIV proclaimed a special Jubilee Year marking the 800^th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis in 1226, highlighting the saint’s enduring message of peace, holiness, and care for creation.  In a decree issued by the Apostolic Penitentiary and announced by the Franciscan Friars, the Vatican declared a Year of St Francis that runs from 10 January 2026 to 10 January 2027.

Image: Portiuncula on the Feast of the Pardon (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons)

Now an early vision in the saint’s life was that of the crucifix in a tiny church on the plain below Assisi, asking Francis to “repair my church”.  He took this literally, and he himself rebuilt several small churches in the area, including one called the Portiuncula – a little chapel roughly 5.5 x 3.2 metres in size, called St Mary of the Angels.  It was not even as big as the room in the house of St Peter.  Eventually given to St Francis, this tiny, fairly graceless chapel was the spot where the Franciscan order was founded, and became the annual meeting place for the friars and its mother house.  Francis actually died in the chapel after a long illness, blind from trachoma contracted in Egypt, probably from tuberculoid leprosy in 1226.  He was only 44.  Buried there temporarily, he was canonised only two years later.  Not surprisingly, the little chapel became much visited and, in a case of one Franciscan place of pilgrimage echoing the other, the little chapel was encased in a huge (and rather ugly) Basilica ordered by the Pope during the Council of Trent.

Image: Basilica St Mary of the Angels, Assisi (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons)

If the size and grandeur of the Papal Basilica encasing Our Lady of the Angels seem totally unlike ‘Il Poverello’, this was the place where the year of St Francis started a few weeks ago under the aegis of the Order of Friars Minor – the Franciscans – minister general.  In a letter marking the opening of the Jubilee in Assisi, Pope Leo XIV said, St Francis’ witness was needed now “more than ever” in a world marked by war, division and environmental harm.  “Peace be with God, peace among human beings, and with creation are inseparable dimensions  to a single call to universal reconciliation” he added.

The original little chapel of Mary of the Angels has much in common with the simple little domestic church below the chapel in Capernaum, of one building encasing another, but it has one extraordinary and unexpected by-product.  The ‘degli Angeli’ became in Spanish ‘de los Angeles’ which the friars’ memory carried to the other side of the world and gave to a place they settled on the west coast of America.  Which is indeed another country.

As a final word, the great series of buildings – in fact one church built on another – which we know now as the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, was started as the saint’s tomb almost immediately he was sanctified.  They are huge and movingly lovely buildings for which we must be most grateful, but they are the antithesis of the little saint without any property.  But somehow we must set that aside.

Image: Lower Basilica Altar of St Francis in Assisi (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Image: Upper Basilica of St Francis of Assisi (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Francis’ tomb is under the floor of the lower church, and both upper and lower churches are decorated in honour of the saint by the greatest masters of the 12^th and 13^th Centuries in Italy.  St Francis glorified creation in all its elements of birds and animals, of sun and moon, of fire and water and even “sister death”.  The frescoes here that illustrate his life, are indeed some of the great glories of the created world: Giotto has him preaching to the birds or the Sultan, Cimabue’s Virgin Enthroned with St Francis has a portrait of the young saint painted from descriptions of those who knew him.  Like the saint himself, these glorious worlds of colour, life and movement resonate with joy.

The issue of whether to build the lower and upper churches as a tomb for the saint of utter poverty, divided the Franciscan order almost immediately after the saint’s death.  Brother Elias, an earliest companion of St Francis, and head of the order at the time of his death, moved within days of his sanctification to set the foundations.  He was an outstanding organiser (which he had already proved in the Holy Land and Syria) and he was deeply attached to Francis.  He started the lower Romanesque church in 1228 and completed it by 1230, when the saint’s body was transferred to a secret spot there.  Equally impressive organisation surrounded the upper (revolutionary styled) Gothic church started in 1239 and finished by 1255.  But of course buildings cost money and Elias broke Francis’ central rule of never accepting cash donations, and then of not owning great property.  Eventually Elias was expelled from the friars, although he never lost his love of Francis, but the issues he raised were the inevitable result of idealism so loosely framed in the saint’s rule.

Ultimately, the order divided into two groups, one demanded absolute poverty; opposed to them were the group called Conventuals, who stood for a more moderate community life adapted to the needs of study and preaching.  Papal decisions favoured the Conventuals and the other group gradually became what we now know as the Capuchins, and the matter was settled.  Francis may have sought peace and poverty, but wishing does not automatically make it so.

As we know.

An afternote: As a measure of their generosity: three Franciscan friars were reported today as supplying the only Catholic priest in Greenland.  The Slovenian-born Fr Majcen and two other Franciscan friars make up the Conventual Franciscan Mission in Denmark, part of the order’s Province of St Jerome in Croatia.

By Sandy Curnow