My God and My All: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi

  But it is all conjecture. All that he did, all that he thought, is his secret.

  Part IV

  The Power and The Glory

  Chapter 15

  The Return

  How much interior patience and humility

  a servant of God may have cannot be known

  so long as he is contented.

  But when the time comes that those

  who ought to please him go against him,

  as much patience and humility as he then shows,

  so much has he and no more.

  WRITINGS OF SAINT FRANCIS

  FRANCIS CAME BACK TO ACRE and was welcomed by the minister provincial, Brother Elias, Caesar of Speyer, and Peter Cathanii. With them was a young lay brother, Stephen, who had come out from Italy to find Francis, bringing much news for him. He told him of the martyrdom of the brothers whom the order had sent to Morocco. Francis had longed to die in this way himself but he felt no jealousy, only infinite gratitude to God who had allowed to his sons his highest honor of martyrdom. “Now I can truly say I have five brothers,” he said. He or they, what did it matter? The order was one. But Stephen had other news. The brothers at home who were Francis’s closest friends had sent him out to find Francis and beg him to come home and save them. He had been away too long; so long that at home they had wondered if he was dead. His disloyal sons had thought they could do what they liked now and his loyal sons had been in grief and despair. This was the beginning of a trial harder for Francis to bear than the rack or the fire and he must have known it as he quietly told Stephen to tell him all that had happened. Physically he was in poor shape now to stand up to the shock and grief of betrayal, but his spirit was steady and calm, for he had prayed beside the rock of the agony and its strength was in him.

  The news could hardly have been worse. The two men to whom he had entrusted the government of the order in his absence, his two friends Matthew of Narni and Gregory of Naples, had betrayed the trust he had placed in them. They had put themselves at the head of discontented brothers, and at a chapter meeting over which they had presided they had imposed upon the order a new set of constitutions which were totally at variance with the rule that Innocent III had ratified, the rule which all the Brothers Minor had vowed to keep, the command of God which made them what they were. The loyal brothers who had refused to consider themselves bound by the new constitutions had been persecuted by the two vicars-general. Some of them had been driven out of the order altogether and Stephen had had to escape from Italy secretly without the knowledge of the vicars.

  The new constitutions were admirably devised for preparing the knights of God to forsake the Lady Poverty and play a distinguished part in the affairs of the Church. The Franciscan missionaries were no longer to go out carrying their lives in their hands, objects of ridicule and potential martyrs, they were to carry with them letters of protection from the pope and the order was to do no work that had not received legal sanction. The small families of brothers that Francis had favored, as fostering brotherly love and holiness, were to be superseded by much larger communities of men, living not in small hermitages and rustic “places” but in well-built convents. These convents were to possess libraries so that the Brothers Minor might become the equals of the other religious orders in learning and scholarship. Discipline was to be enforced by a bewildering number of rules and regulations, replacing the few simple precepts of love that had been based upon the gospel of Christ.

  When Francis was told of it all, many memories must have passed through his mind, memories of his Lord and master and of the old happy days of the order. No legal sanctions had protected Christ and his apostles from martyrdom and no stone walls had housed them, keeping out wind and rain and beggars. Christ could have been the greatest scholar the world has ever known, but he said goodbye to the scribes in the temple at Jerusalem and went home to Nazareth with his parents and was subject unto them. He could have been a great man among the princes of the world but he chose his friends among the outcast and the poor. Francis remembered the sunshine of the spring day when Bernard had given away all his wealth to the poor. There would not have been such joy in the square if he had been building a library with it. He remembered Pacifico crying out to him, “Take me away from the world and give me back to God,” and he had been able to do it in a matter of minutes, not after a year’s novitiate. He remembered nights sleeping out under the stars and the friendliness of the birds and the flowers and the creatures; the friendliness of a poor man when you shared your last crust with him, both of you huddled together on the leeward side of a haystack on a cold night. No doubt the new constitutions were full of wisdom and common sense, and rules much like them regulated the lives of the other orders. But the Brothers Minor were not other orders. They had been called by God to embrace the poverty and suffering of Jesus Christ their Lord, for the salvation of sinners for whom he died.

  Perhaps Francis said little at first to the anxious brothers, but later, when they were seated at table for their meal, and the parchment bearing the new constitutions was put into his hands, his eyes lighted upon the sentences regulating what the Brothers Minor were to eat, or not eat, upon this day or that. He read that the brothers were not to quest for meat even on days which were not fast days, and that they were to fast on Mondays as well as on the days prescribed in the rule. There was meat on the table now. Francis looked at it and then he looked at his old friend Peter. “Messer Peter, what shall we do?” he asked.

  “Ah Messer Francis,” replied Peter with a touch of fire, “do as you think well, for authority is yours.”

  “Then we will eat what is set before us according to the gospel,” said Francis. And they ate meat.

  As soon as it was possible, probably in the following September, Francis sailed for Italy and with him were Peter Cathanii, Caesar of Speyer, and Elias, to help him and uphold him in his need. He trusted Elias and there is no doubt that that extremely able man was a great comfort to him at this time.

  They reached Venice and stayed there for a few days, for Francis was not well, and when they set out for home he was too weak to walk and they had to find a donkey for him to ride. The brother who tramped beside the donkey was Leonard, who had set sail with Francis and now was home with him again, and today he showed himself not quite worthy of the donkey brotherhood. If they had been in danger he would have been worthy, but the trouble today was not wolves or brigands but sore feet and hurt pride. He had been a great man in the world, with horses and servants at his command. He uttered no word of complaint but his aristocratic temper was fretted by stones in the road and the remembrance of past glory. “In the world,” he thought to himself, “my people would not walk beside the Bernadone, and here am I compelled to trudge behind his son whilst he rides.” He had forgotten that saints can read thoughts. Francis stopped the donkey, dismounted and said courteously, “Take my place, brother; truly it is not becoming that I should ride whilst thou, who art of noble stock, should have to walk on foot.”

  Leonard, overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, knelt down at Francis’s feet.

  They went on to Bologna and here the storm broke. The minister provincial of Lombardy, Peter Stacia, was a doctor of law of the University of Bologna. When he had joined the order he had sacrificed his academic fame for the love of Christ, but deep in his heart learning had remained his first love. When Francis disappeared in the East, and the changes began to take place in the order, the old love flamed up again. The Dominicans had opened a school at Bologna and why should not the Brothers Minor do the same? He collected money and built a House of Study which he proclaimed to be the property of the order. Franciscan scholars flocked into it, and in his eagerness he forgot that years before Bernard of Quintavalle had been sent here to witness to the humility and poverty of Christ in the midst of the intellectual pride and intolerance of Bologna, that he had been stoned in Bologna’s marketplace, and later had fled because the people did him too much honor. Probably in the thrill of i
t all he scarcely realized that he had broken the rule of the order, to which he had promised obedience as to God, three times over. He had collected money, which no Franciscan might touch, he was holding property in the name of the order, and the life which he and the brothers were living within the convent was no longer the life of evangelical poverty and simplicity to which they were vowed.

  Francis, arriving at Bologna ill and anxious, was faced with this thing, and became for a short while a man whom it is difficult to recognize as Francis, a man fierce, intolerant, and even pitiless. All the gentleness and humor of that “Messer Peter, what shall we do?” that seems to us the true Francis, was lost as the harsh streak that was in him burst out like the pent fires of a volcano. Yet that harshness was Francis too. The serenity and gentleness of the saints is not necessarily something they are born with, but the fruit of struggle. Robert Bridges says of them, “Their apparent grace is won by discipline of deadly strife.” The control is hardly held and can break when a man is tested beyond his strength. Francis was confronted with the disloyalty of his own sons to the ideal to which he had given his life, at a time when he was physically exhausted, and it was too much for him. It is a comfort to think that even the saints can at times be betrayed by the weakness of the body.

  Francis cursed Peter Stacia with that father’s curse of which every Italian of the Middle Ages lived in dread, and of which he himself had been so terrified. He ordered the brothers who were living in the convent to leave instantly. Some of them were ill but though he was usually so gentle with the sick he had no mercy on them. They had to get out of bed and go. He himself would not enter the place but took refuge with the Dominicans, and it was left to a Dominican to plead with him to be merciful and to tell him that the brothers were grieved and sorry, and willing to make any reparation that he demanded. The fierce anger began to leave Francis and he demanded no penance from them except that of not going back to the convent.

  Then he left Bologna. During all the sorrows of the few years of life still left to him, though he would yield not one inch of ground and kept his personal integrity intact until the end, he never again lost his temper or tried to bludgeon his sons into obedience. It would seem that the harshness in him was purged by the sorrow and shame he endured after he left Bologna. The depth of his penitence is seen in the humility of what he did next. He did not go home but set out on the donkey through the wintry weather for Rome. He had had a dream which expressed his thoughts at this time, and seemed to give him guidance for the future. The three companions tell us of it. In his dream “he beheld as it were a little hen that was black and had feathered legs with feet like a tame dove, and she had so many chicks that she was not able to gather them under her own wings, but they went about in a circle round the hen, beyond her wings. Then, waking from sleep, he began to think about this vision, and forthwith perceived by the Holy Spirit that he himself was intended under the parable of the hen. And he saith: ‘I am that hen, small of stature, and by nature black, and ought to be simple as a dove, and on winged affection of the virtues to fly toward heaven. And unto me the Lord of his mercy hath given and will yet give many sons, whom I shall not be able in mine own strength to protect. Whence behooveth me to commend them unto Holy Church, the which under the shadow of her wings shall protect and govern them.’”

  The outbreak at Bologna, and his penitence after it, had made him see himself as a greater sinner than ever, by nature black. He ought to have been gentle as a dove with his erring sons and he had been angry and intolerant. He was not fit to look after them anymore, and there were so many of them now, so strong and self-willed, that he could no longer control them. When he had had only a few sons he had been able to gather them all under his wings, now he could not, for “they went about in a circle round the hen, beyond her wings.” Stronger, broader wings than his must cover them now. It is one of the mercies of God that true penitence after sin can bring a man even nearer to him than he was before he sinned, and so Francis on this humble, heartbroken journey would have felt very close to his Lord, and remembered his cry, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Christ too had known this sorrow of having the children circling beyond the wings.

  If when he reached Rome Francis followed his usual custom, he went first to Saint Peter’s tomb and prayed there, his mind full of memories of the days when he had brought the first little company of the Brothers Minor to see the pope. Now he was once more going to see the pope, but because he had too many sons he had to go alone. He was too ashamed, too humble, to ask for an audience and be received with the honor that would have been accorded to the head of the Order of the Brothers Minor, but went to the corridor outside the pope’s room to wait until he should come out. He was too tired to stand so he sat down on the ground. At last the door opened and the pope came out, and Francis greeted him with the words, “Father Pope, God give thee peace!”

  The old and holy Honorius III, who loved Francis, replied gently, “God bless thee, my son,” and waited to hear about the trouble. Francis explained his need. The pope, he said, was so busy and so great that the poor could not always have access to him. He wanted Honorius to appoint some wise man who would be a father to him and the order in the pope’s place, and to whom he could turn for counsel and guidance. “Whom do you wish that I should give thee, my son?” asked the pope, and Francis replied, “Give me the Lord Cardinal of Ostia.” And so Cardinal Ugolino, as the representative of the pope and the Church, took the Brothers Minor under his wing and became Protector of the Order.

  Francis could have asked for no better protector, for by his very nature the cardinal was well fitted to do what could be done to heal the differences between Francis and the rebellious brothers. He understood both sides, for they represented the two sides of his own character. He was scholar and diplomat and able administrator, but he was also a humble man of God. As a scholar he sympathized with those brothers who demanded that they should be allowed to study and use their minds for God. He thought it was a legitimate demand. If a man of intellect does not use it he wastes the gift of God, and scholars must have books. As an administrator he realized that an order numbering thousands of men could not live at the table of the Lord in quite the old manner without becoming a burden on the lay fraternity, and that the sick and old of a perpetually growing company of men would increase in number too and would have to have adequate care. He could see no way out of it except the raising of money to build convents that should include libraries and infirmaries. And the larger the number of men the stricter must be the discipline and the more careful the novitiate. In the nature of things it seemed to him that the changes had to come and that his task was to try and help the order to preserve through them all, as far as was possible, the Franciscan spirit of simplicity and humility and love. And as well, he had to try and protect Francis from too much suffering, for with all his heart he loved him and sympathized with him. If there would be many in the days to come who would not understand the attitude of Francis to inevitable change he would not be one of them. His own humble devotion to his God would enable him to realize that Francis was quite unable to separate Jesus Christ, the poor man crucified, either from his poverty or his crucifixion, and that from this fundamental inability grew his conviction that men called of God to follow Christ in the way of the gospel could not be separated from them either. A Brother Minor must be utterly poor and utterly crucified or he was not a Brother Minor. In the worldly nature of things there had to be compromise but in the heavenly nature of things Francis could not accept it and remain Francis. That was the dilemma, the old tormenting dilemma of how to live in two worlds at once.

  The cardinal was in Rome during the winter of 1220 and he and Francis met and talked together of the difficulties, and from their discussions grew two decisions of the cardinal’s that well illustrate his double sympathies. Peter Cathanii, Francis’s faithful
friend and loyal son, was to take the place of Matthew of Narni as vicar at the Portiuncula, so that Francis should have the comfort and support of his presence there, but before the next Whitsun chapter the cardinal wished Francis to revise the rule of the order and bring it more into line with the inevitable changes that the passing years had brought. Then they said goodbye and Francis journeyed home to the Portiuncula, and as the news of his return spread quickly from one mountain hermitage to another, where the sons who had been faithful to him had hidden themselves from persecution, joy leapt up like the flames of spring. Their father was not dead. He was alive and he was home again and now all would be well. Spring was coming and up in the mountains under the melting snow the grass was green.

  But the spring brought sorrow to Francis, for on the 10th of March Peter Cathanii died. For his old friend he would have rejoiced, for Peter had lived long enough to come back from the crusades and for the last time see the Portiuncula in the spring, but not long enough to grieve for the sorrows that were coming. For himself it was irreparable loss. Never again would he be able to say, “Messer Peter, what shall we do?”

  2

  PERHAPS IT WAS SOME COMFORT TO FRANCIS that Peter Cathanii’s successor as vicar at the Portiuncula was the able Elias, for Elias was a man who knew how to keep his own counsel when it was expedient to do so, and Francis did not know yet that the sympathies of the man whom he had chosen to bring home with him from the East, to help him, were with the enemy. Elias has been called the Judas of this story, but that is surely to blacken him too much. His chief likeness to Judas seems to be in the puzzle which he presents, for his complex baffling character has produced many divergent judgments from those who have studied his extraordinary career.