.
You should learn more
about St. Francis of Assisi
if you want to understand the rather radical and eye opening actions of this
most unusual Pope. Just 120 days into
his historic election to be Pope, Francis has demonstrated a passion and
devotion to one St. Francis of Assisi.
Born in Buenos
Aires, Argentina
the new Pope Francis has electrified the somewhat complacent Catholics of the
world while sending shock waves through the ancient "Curia" running
the Vatican in Rome.
After four months as Pope
he still refuses to move into the plush and private Pope's apartment in the Vatican. Descriptions make it sound like a penthouse
overlooking Central Park. But our Francis chooses to stay in the
Vatican Guesthouse rather than the Papal Residency, while dining with the mere
mortals sharing the visitors quarters.
So that makes him the
first American Pope. The first Pope from
the southern hemisphere. The first
Jesuit Pope.
BBC News
14 March 2013 Last updated at 05:16 ET
How many Roman Catholics are there in
the world?
There are an estimated 1.2 billion Roman Catholics
in the world, according to Vatican figures.
More than 40% of the world's Catholics live in Latin America - but Africa has seen the biggest growth in Catholic
congregations in recent years.
Latin America accounts for 483 million Catholics,
or 41.3% of the total Catholic population. Of the 10 countries in the world
with the most Catholics, four are in Latin America.
Brazil
has the highest Catholic population of any country. The figure was put at 123
million in the last Brazilian census and as high as 150 million in 2010 figures
compiled by the World Christian Database. Italy has the most Catholics in
Europe, with 57 million, while DR Congo has the biggest Catholic population in
Africa, ranking ninth in the world with almost 36 million.
There are currently an
estimated 6.7 billion people on the planet Earth. Approximately 33% of those,
or 2.2 billion, consider themselves Christian. That makes Christians the
largest religion in the world by far. However, Islam is currently growing at a
higher rate than Christianity. Just over half of those Christians, or about 1.2
billion, are Roman Catholic (with some additional 240 million Eastern
Orthodox).
That makes Roman
Catholics, by an overwhelming margin, the largest “denomination” of any
religion on the planet. No other Christian “denomination” comes anywhere close
to comparing. The only other religious entities that can even start to compare
in size are the Sunni Muslims (estimated at 940 million) and the Vishnuism
Hindus (580 million) , but neither compare in organization, unity, reach, and
influence next to that of the Catholic Church.
So the Pope has a pretty
sizeable flock to start with but there has been a lot of drifting by Catholics
the past few decades. There are a lot of
Catholics who would like to find a reason to get more devoted to their faith
and Francis may be the key to the return of the fallen faithful sons or
daughters.
Today he travels to the Rio
De Janeiro slums in Brazil
while a crowd of one million people will join him on the beach to pray for the
poor. With a ready smile and a hand out
to the people Pope Francis is well on his way to becoming one of the most popular
and charismatic of the 266 Popes that have presided over the Roman Catholic
Church.
But about his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, there is no mystery why he is so
drawn to such a priest from nearly a thousand years ago when you know the story
of St. Francis. Here is a brief account
of his remarkable and clearly inspiring life of St. Francis of Assisi.
Catholic Online
St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan
Order who was born at Assisi in
Umbria, in 1181.
In 1182, Pietro Bernardone returned from a trip to France to find
out his wife had given birth to a son. Far from being excited or apologetic
because he'd been gone, Pietro was furious because she'd had his new son
baptized Giovanni after John
the Baptist. The last thing Pietro wanted in his son was a man of God -- he
wanted a man
of business, a cloth merchant like he was, and he especially wanted a son who
would reflect his infatuation with France. So he renamed his son
Francesco -- which is the equivalent of calling him Frenchman.
Francis enjoyed a very rich easy life growing
up because of his father's wealth and the permissiveness of the times. From the
beginning everyone -- and I mean everyone -- loved Francis. He was constantly
happy, charming, and a born leader. If he was picky, people excused him. If he
was ill, people took care of him. If he was so much of a dreamer he did poorly
in school, no one minded. In many ways he was too easy to like for his own
good. No one tried to control him or teach him.
As he grew up, Francis became the leader of a crowd
of young people who spent their nights in wild parties. Thomas of Celano, his
biographer who knew him well, said, "In other respects an exquisite youth,
he attracted to himself a whole retinue of young people addicted to evil and
accustomed to vice." Francis himself said, "I lived in sin"
during that time.
Francis fulfilled every hope of
Pietro's -- even falling in love with France. He loved the songs of
France, the romance of France,
and especially the free adventurous troubadours of France who
wandered through Europe. And despite his
dreaming, Francis was also good at
business. But Francis wanted more, than wealth. But not holiness! Francis
wanted to be a noble, a knight. Battle
was the best place to win the glory and
prestige he longed for. He got his first chance when Assisi
declared war
on their longtime enemy, the nearby town of Perugia.
Most of the troops from Assisi were
butchered in the fight. Only those wealthy enough to expect to be ransomed were
taken prisoner. At last Francis was among the nobility like he always wanted to
be...but chained in a harsh, dark dungeon. All accounts say that he never lost
his happy manner in that horrible place. Finally, after a year in the dungeon,
he was ransomed. Strangely, the experience didn't seem to change him. He gave
himself to partying with as much joy and abandon as he had before the battle.
The experience didn't change what he wanted from life either:
Glory. Finally a call for knights for the Fourth Crusade gave him a chance for
his dream. But before he left Francis had to have a suit of armor and a horse
-- no problem for the son of a wealthy father. And not just any suit of armor
would do but one decorated with gold with a magnificent cloak. Any relief we
feel in hearing that Francis gave the cloak to a poor knight will be
destroyed by the boasts that Francis left behind that he would return a prince.
But Francis never got farther than one day's ride
from Assisi.
There he had a dream in which God told him
he had it all wrong and told him to return home. And return home he did. What
must it have been like to return without ever making it to battle -- the boy
who wanted nothing more than to be liked was humiliated, laughed at, called a
coward by the village and raged at by his father for the money wasted on armor.
Francis' conversion did
not happen over night. God had waited
for him for twenty-five years and now it was Francis' turn to wait. Francis
started to spend more time in
prayer. He went off to a cave and wept for his sins. Sometimes God's grace
overwhelmed him with joy. But life couldn't
just stop for God. There was a business to run, customers to wait on.
One day while riding through the countryside,
Francis, the man
who loved beauty, who was so picky about food, who hated deformity, came face
to face with a leper. Repelled by the appearance and the smell of the leper,
Francis nevertheless jumped down from his horse and kissed the hand of the
leper. When his kiss
of peace was returned, Francis was filled with joy. As he rode off, he turned
around for a last wave, and saw that the leper had disappeared. He always
looked upon it as a test from God...that he had passed.
His search for conversion led
him to the ancient church at San Damiano. While he was praying there, he heard Christ on the crucifix speak to
him, "Francis, repair my church." Francis assumed this meant church
with a small c -- the crumbling building he was in. Acting again in his impetuous
way, he took fabric from his father's shop and sold it to get money to repair
the church. His father saw this as an act of theft -- and
put together with Francis' cowardice, waste of money, and his growing
disinterest in money made Francis seem more like a madman than his son. Pietro
dragged Francis before the bishop and in
front of the whole town demanded that Francis return the money and renounce all
rights as his heir.
The bishop was
very kind to Francis; he told him to return the money and said God would
provide. That was all Francis needed to hear. He not only gave back the money
but stripped off all his clothes -- the clothes his father had given him --
until he was wearing only a hair shirt. In front of the crowd that had gathered
he said, "Pietro Bernardone is no longer my father. From now on I can say
with complete freedom, 'Our Father who art in heaven.'" Wearing nothing
but castoff rags, he went off into the freezing woods -- singing. And when
robbers beat him later and took his clothes, he climbed out of the ditch and
went off singing again. From then on Francis had nothing...and everything.
Francis went back to what he considered God's call.
He begged for stones and rebuilt the San Damiano church with his own hands, not
realizing that it was the Church with a capital C that God wanted
repaired. Scandal
and avarice
were working on the Church from the inside while outside heresies flourished by
appealing to those longing for something different or adventurous.
Soon Francis started to preach. (He was never a
priest, though he was later ordained a deacon under his protest.) Francis was
not a reformer; he preached about returning to God and obedience to
the Church. Francis must have known about the decay in the Church, but he
always showed the Church and its people his utmost respect. When someone told
him of a priest
living openly with a woman and
asked him if that meant the Mass
was polluted, Francis went to the priest, knelt before him, and kissed his
hands -- because those hands had held God.
Slowly companions came to Francis, people who
wanted to follow his life of
sleeping in the open, begging for garbage to eat...and loving God. With
companions, Francis knew he now had to have some kind of direction to this life so he
opened the Bible in three places.
He read the command to the rich young man to sell
all his good
and give to the poor, the order to the apostles to
take nothing on their journey, and the demand to take up the cross daily.
"Here is our rule," Francis said -- as simple, and as seemingly
impossible, as that. He was going to do what no one thought possible any more
-- live by the Gospel. Francis took these commands so literally that he made
one brother run after the thief who stole his hood and offer
him his robe!
Francis never wanted to found a religious order --
this former knight thought that sounded too military. He thought of what he was
doing as expressing God's brotherhood. His companions came from all walks of
life, from fields and towns, nobility and common people, universities, the
Church, and the merchant class. Francis practiced true equality by showing
honor, respect, and love to every person whether
they were beggar or pope.
Francis' brotherhood included all of God's
creation. Much has been written about Francis' love of nature but his
relationship
was deeper than that. We call someone a lover of nature if they
spend their free time in the
woods or admire its beauty. But Francis really felt that nature, all God's
creations, were part of his brotherhood. The sparrow was as much his brother as
the pope.
In one famous story, Francis preached to hundreds
of birds about being thankful to God for their
wonderful clothes, for their independence, and for God's care. The story tells
us the birds stood still as he walked among him, only flying off when he said
they could leave.
Another famous story involves a wolf that had been
eating human beings. Francis intervened when the town wanted to kill the wolf
and talked the wolf into never killing again. The wolf became a pet of the
townspeople who made sure that he always had plenty to eat.
Following the Gospel literally, Francis and his
companions went out to preach two by two. At first, listeners were
understandably hostile to these men in rags trying to talk about God's love.
People even ran from them for fear they'd catch this strange madness! And they
were right. Because soon these same people noticed that these barefoot beggars
wearing sacks seemed filled with constant joy. They celebrated life. And people
had to ask themselves: Could one own nothing and be happy? Soon those who had
met them with mud and rocks, greeted them with bells and
smiles.
Francis did not try to abolish poverty, he tried to
make it holy. When his friars met someone poorer than they, they would eagerly
rip off the sleeve of their habit to give
to the person. They worked for all necessities and only begged if they had to.
But Francis would not let them accept any money. He told them to treat coins as
if they were pebbles in the road. When the bishop showed
horror at the friars' hard life, Francis said, "If we had any possessions
we should need weapons and laws to defend them." Possessing something was
the death of love for Francis. Also, Francis reasoned, what could you do to a man who owns
nothing? You can't starve a fasting man, you can't
steal from someone who has no money, you can't ruin someone who hates prestige.
They were truly free.
Francis was a man of action.
His simplicity of life extended
to ideas and deeds. If there was a simple way, no matter how
impossible it seemed, Francis would take it. So when Francis wanted approval
for his brotherhood, he went straight to Rome to see
Pope Innocent III. You can imagine what the pope thought when this beggar
approached him! As a matter of fact
he threw Francis out. But when he had a dream that this tiny man in rags
held up the tilting Lateran basilica, he quickly called Francis back and gave
him permission to preach.
Sometimes this direct approach led to mistakes that
he corrected with the same spontaneity that he made them. Once he ordered a
brother who hesitated to speak because he stuttered to go preach half-naked.
When Francis realized how he had hurt someone he loved he ran to town, stopped
the brother, took off his own clothes, and preached instead.
Francis acted quickly because he acted from the
heart; he didn't have time to put
on a role. Once he was so sick and exhausted, his companions borrowed a mule
for him to ride. When the man who owned
the mule recognized Francis he said, "Try to be as virtuous as everyone
thinks you are because many have a lot of
confidence in you." Francis dropped off the mule and knelt before the man to thank
him for his advice.
Another example of his directness came when he
decided to go to Syria to
convert the Moslems while the Fifth Crusade was being fought. In the middle of
a battle, Francis decided to do the simplest thing and go straight to the
sultan to make peace. When he and his companion were captured, the real miracle was
that they weren't killed. Instead Francis was taken to the sultan who was
charmed by Francis and his preaching. He told Francis, "I would convert to
your religion
which is a beautiful one -- but both of us would be murdered."
Francis did find persecution
and martyrdom of a kind -- not among the Moslems, but among his own brothers.
When he returned to Italy,
he came back to a brotherhood that had grown to 5000 in ten years. Pressure
came from outside to control this great movement, to make them conform to the
standards of others. His dream of radical poverty was
too harsh, people said. Francis responded, "Lord, didn't I tell you they
wouldn't trust you?"
He finally gave up authority in his order -- but he
probably wasn't too upset about it. Now he was just another brother, like he'd
always wanted.
Francis' final years were filled with suffering as
well as humiliation. Praying to share in Christ's passion he had a vision received
the stigmata, the marks of the nails and the lance wound that Christ suffered, in his own
body.
Years of poverty and
wandering had made Francis ill. When he began to go blind, the pope ordered
that his eyes be operated on. This meant cauterizing his face with a hot iron.
Francis spoke to "Brother Fire": "Brother Fire, the Most High
has made you strong and beautiful and useful. Be courteous to me now in this
hour, for I have always loved you, and temper your heat so that I can endure
it." And Francis reported that Brother Fire had been so kind that he felt
nothing at all.
How did Francis respond to blindness and suffering?
That was when he wrote his beautiful Canticle of
the Sun that expresses his brotherhood with creation in
praising God.
Francis never recovered from this illness. He died
on October 4, 1226 at the age of 45. Francis is considered the founder of all
Franciscan orders and the patron saint of ecologists and merchants.
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