They left Saint Peter’s and Francis led the brothers through the busy streets of Rome toward the Lateran Palace. Was he afraid? Did he think of the man he was going to see as the Lord Pope Innocent III, the most alarming man in Christendom, or simply as Christ’s representative on earth and therefore a man who would surely be loving, gentle, and approachable as Christ himself? The simplicity and fearlessness of his approach suggests that he thought of him in the latter way and was not afraid.
Knowing nothing of the difficult and complicated process of seeking an audience, Francis simply left the brothers to wait for him in some quiet corner, walked into the Lateran Palace apparently unchallenged, and by extraordinary good luck managed to make his way straight to the corridor where the pope was pacing up and down in thought. Turning in his walk his Holiness, outraged and astonished, found himself confronted by a slight young man with a sensitive, eager face, dressed in some dilapidated grubby sort of tunic, barefoot, travel-stained, and very tired. He was clutching a bit of parchment in his thin nervous brown hands and sinking to his knees he began to tell the pope, gently and humbly, about his bit of parchment. His voice was low, resonant, and musical, his eyes, as he looked up in the pope’s face, were dark and very bright. Few men could withstand Francis but this was an occasion when his charm for once failed to make any impression. As soon as he could sufficiently command his anger and astonishment the pope told Francis to take himself off and curtly turned his back upon him.
Francis crept away down a corridor which must have seemed quite endless, his whole sensitive being lacerated by the contemptuous words and the abrupt dismissal. He went to the brothers and told them what had happened and they went out into the crowded streets again, to be jostled and stared at by the passers-by, with nothing to eat and nowhere to go. They had come all this way and the pope did not want to hear about their rule.
In the street they met Bishop Guido of Assisi, to Francis’s astonishment and his, for neither had known the other was in Rome. Francis would have been less astonished than the bishop, for he would have expected that God would send them help. Bishop Guido took them into his care, and it was probably he who brought them to Saint Anthony’s hospital near the Lateran, where they found lodging. The modern biographers of Francis differ as to what sort of man this Bishop Guido was but one thing about him is quite clear; he loved Francis and could be wise for him. Among the great men about the pope was one who he guessed would love Francis as much as he did, and want to help him, the Cardinal John of Saint Paul, Bishop of Sabina, and he brought Francis to him.
The cardinal, had God called him to the life of a monk or hermit, would have stripped himself as gladly as Francis had done. That would have been the easier way for him, but God had called him to the infinitely harder task of living the dedicated life within the world. Pressed upon by the luxury of the papal court, by the ambitions, subtleties, and cruelties of the men around him, he had to hold himself detached from it all, adoring Christ in poverty of spirit within the cell of his own soul. He had won his victory, and when he and Francis met each other there was between them that instant recognition of those who can truly say to Christ, “My God and my all.” They understood each other.
But at first the cardinal could see no necessity for a new order and he would have liked to see Francis and his sons bring their fiery love into one of the older orders for its purification. He begged them, as Bishop Guido had already done, to enter a monastery. But Francis knew that God had called him to this adventure of living the gospel life in entire poverty and dependence upon him, and he could not agree, and after a few days the cardinal realized that this was indeed the will of God for the brothers and he went to the pope to plead for them. Describing Francis to Innocent he said, “I have found a very perfect man who wishes to live after the precepts of the holy gospel, and in all things to adhere to the evangelical perfection. And I believe the Lord intends by him to renew the faith all over the world.” Then the pope consented to see Francis and his brothers.
If it were possible to go back in time and to be present as a spectator at a given number of historical events, it is fascinating to wonder which one would choose. The day when Francis and the brothers appeared before Pope Innocent III in consistory would certainly be one of them. Innocent sat in his great chair, his cardinals grouped around him in their gorgeous robes, the splendor of the room where they sat gleaming about them, and before them knelt the twelve poor men who had come to beg for leave to follow Christ in the full rigor of his hard commandments. There could have been no greater contrast than that between Innocent and Francis, and Cardinal John of Saint Paul, who understood both men, must have been intensely moved as he watched them. For he knew the likeness that hiddenly united them; each man loved God, and was trying each in his own way to fulfill the will of God for his church. Perhaps as he looked at the humble kneeling figure of Francis of Assisi the cardinal, with the intuition of the saint, found himself possessed of a strange piece of knowledge; in centuries to come the great man seated on his thronelike chair would be chiefly remembered because of his association with the shabby insignificant young man kneeling before him.
Francis read the rule, his voice dwelling in loving reverence on the words of Christ in which it was chiefly expressed, and the pope and his cardinals listened, and perhaps as they listened they looked at the faces of the twelve brothers; at the sensitive face of Francis himself, and from him to the gentle knight Angelo of Tancredi, to Bernard and Peter Cathanii, and the aged Sylvester. These were not men born to hardship, they were for the most part men of gentle birth, culture, and intelligence. Could they endure to the end such a life as they were proposing to lead? With nothing behind them, no certainty from one day to another of even the bare necessities of food and shelter, and their chosen companions the poor, the outcast and the lepers, surely the inevitable end would be weariness, sickness, and death. This sort of thing had been tried before and had always ended in disaster. These men would come to grief too and there would be yet another failure of a religious undertaking to bring ridicule upon the Church. When Francis ceased speaking there was a murmur of vigorous dissent. The pope gathered it up into a kind but firm refusal to ratify the rule, and advised Francis and his brothers, as the cardinal and Bishop Guido had done before him, to enter one of the already recognized religious orders.
Cardinal John of Saint Paul got up to speak for Francis. He pointed out that these men were asking permission to follow the way of life commanded in the gospel. To say it was impossible to do so was blaspheming against Christ, who had himself given these commandments to his disciples. The pope was shaken by the cardinal’s speech. What he said was true. Francis and his brothers were asking only that they might be allowed to take Christ at his word. How could that be forbidden? He decided to test this thing with time and he said to Francis, “My son, go and pray to Jesus Christ that he may show us his will; and when we know his will more certainly, we shall the more safely sanction your pious purpose.”
Francis and the brothers left the presence of the pope, and the old chronicler says that Francis “ran trustfully to Christ and began to pray, bidding his brethren do the same.” One would like to know where Francis prayed, in what church or garden in Rome in the springtime. Perhaps it was in the chapel of Saint Anthony’s hospital, which still exists today. In whatever quiet place he knelt, waiting upon the will of God in childlike trust and patience, the answer came as to a beloved child. He who so loved symbol and parable was told a story. There was once a poor woman who lived in a desert. Here she was found, loved, and wedded by a king, who begot of her handsome sons. These sons grew up nurtured by her in all gentleness, and when they were grown their mother said to them, “My dear sons, be not ashamed you are poor, for you are all the sons of a great king. Gladly therefore go to his court and ask him for whatever is necessary to you.” The sons marveled and were glad, and knowing themselves the king’s sons they esteemed their very need as riches. They went boldly to the king, and they
were not afraid before him whose likeness they bore. The king, recognizing in them this likeness to himself, inquired whose sons they might be and they told him that they were the sons of the poor woman who lived in the desert. At this the king embraced them and said, “My sons and heirs you are: fear not. If strangers are fed at my table, by a greater right must I nourish them for whom all my possessions are lawfully kept.” And afterwards the king ordered that the poor woman should send to his court all the sons that should be born of her, that they might be nurtured there. Francis realized that when he saw the pope again he must tell him the story.
Innocent too had turned to God in prayer and like Pharaoh of old he had dreamed a dream. He thought that he stood in the Lateran Palace, in the place called the Speculum, because of its fine view, and looked out at the church of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, the mother church of Christendom, and as he looked at this great and beloved church he saw that the walls were cracking and that very soon it would fall into ruin. The awful paralysis of nightmare came upon him. He could not move or cry out, he could not even raise his hands to clasp them in prayer, he could do nothing except stand there in agony, as though turned to stone. And then he saw a small lithe figure crossing the piazza, dressed in a shabby habit with a rope around his waist. The little man crossed quickly to the tottering building and set his shoulders against the cracking walls of Constantine’s basilica. The pope thought he would be crushed to death, but instead of that the whole church straightened and stood once more in its accustomed place, and the man who supported it turned his face toward the pope and Innocent saw that he was the extraordinary little man from Assisi, Brother Francis, and he remembered the words of Cardinal Saint Paul, “I believe the Lord intends by him to renew the faith all over the world.”
The next day Francis and the brothers were once more summoned to an audience and Francis said, “Lord Pope, I will tell you a story,” and he told the story of the poor woman and her sons. “Holy Father,” he said, “I am that poor woman whom God so loved and of his mercy hath so honored.”
So to both men, in answer to their prayer, God had spoken by a parable, as he had loved to do so long ago in Galilee.
The pope was won over now. He believed that this adventure was indeed inspired by the Spirit of God, and he must do nothing to prevent it. He told Francis he would sanction the rule and he and the brothers might preach penance and exhort men to love God and forsake evil. It was a limited commission, for the brothers were not authorized to expound the dogmas of the Church. Innocent was putting them on trial. “Go forth with the Lord, brothers,” he said, “and as the Lord shall deign to inspire you, do ye preach repentance unto all men. But when God Almighty shall have multiplied you in numbers and grace, come again to me rejoicing and I will grant more unto you than this and with a greater assurance commit to you greater powers.”
The brothers knelt before the pope and Francis promised obedience to him, and the brothers in their turn promised obedience to Francis, and the pope blessed them and sent them away rejoicing; back again to the tomb of Saint Peter to kneel there and pour their hearts out in thanksgiving. The Cardinal John of Saint Paul was equally thankful. They had all of them won his reverence as well as his love and he had taken them to his heart as his sons. Before they left he gave them the small tonsure, marking them as religious but distinguishing them from the monastic orders who wore the large tonsure, and it may have been now that Francis received the diaconate. He was never a priest but remained a deacon only to the end of his life, and though in later years he might have worn the larger tonsure he did not do so, but was content to be always the “lesser brother.” And so Francis and his brothers left Rome to travel back to Assisi, no longer a company of crazy vagrants whom everybody laughed at but the Order of the Friars Minor who were destined to turn to the love of Christ such an innumerable host of sinners, from that day until this, that heaven alone can reckon up the number.
3
WHEN THE BROTHERS RETURNED to Assisi they did not go back to the Portiuncula but went to live in a ruined hovel in a part of the woods called Rivo-Torto, the crooked stream. Perhaps they did this because they were afraid of getting too attached to the beloved Portiuncula, of laying claim to it, they who had vowed to lay claim to nothing but the poverty of Christ. But the Portiuncula was only a short walk away through the woods and they could easily reach it to hear mass at Santa Maria degli Angeli. They were close too to the leper settlement of Santa Maria Maddalena and only half an hour’s walk from Assisi. They stayed at Rivo-Torto all through that summer and well into the next winter. It was a time of quietness in their lives, a pause and breathing space before the great days that were soon to come, the days of the expansion of the order, the gathering crowds, the missionary journeys, the miracles and the fame. Now that they had been recognized and blessed by the pope they met with no further persecution in Assisi, and they undertook no long journeys or great enterprises at this time. They labored in the fields, nursed the lepers, fasted and prayed. Perhaps Francis knew it was God’s will that his sons should have this time of stillness and quiet growth, for these first brothers were the foundation stones of the order and they must be humble, disciplined, strong in faith and love and prayer before they could support, teach, and train other men and bear their witness to the world.
Rivo-Torto was a good choice as a training ground, for behind the hovel where the brothers ate and slept a deep wooded ravine gashed the side of the mountain, the bed of the crooked stream that rushed down it as a torrent in wet weather, and high up in the ravine were caves in the rock that Francis called the carceri, the prisons, and here the brothers could fast and pray, contemplate and adore the beauty of God in loneliness and peace. These caves were to them what the wilderness was to John the Baptist. Here they broke themselves in for God. Even after they left Rivo-Torto Francis and the brothers loved and used these caves. Stark in themselves, like the discipline practiced within them, they were surrounded by great beauty. The ravine was thickly wooded, cool and fresh at the rocky summit where there was a small oratory dedicated to the Virgin. This oratory was very old and perhaps like Santa Maria degli Angeli had taken the place of an earlier shrine. Under the oratory was a little cave where Francis would sometimes sleep between his hours of prayer and below it were those used by the two contemplatives Bernard and Sylvester. It was the sort of place that birds love, with trees and water, and the woods echoed with their music. It was here that Francis held a contest in singing with a nightingale, which was won by the nightingale, and blessed a flock of birds which had perched upon an ilex tree. The flowers were as happy here as the birds. In the spring the cyclamen were like a host of butterflies upon the ground, and later dog roses festooned the banks of the ravine. Fine weather must have given to the brothers days that were idyllic in their beauty and their peace.
But winter came with driving rain, snow, and sleet, and winds that were like a knife, and then the big wooden cross that the brothers had put up outside the ruined hovel, and before which they prayed as a family together, was a fitting symbol of the hardship of their life. The hovel, by no means waterproof, in which they slept on straw covered with rags and laid on the damp miry earth floor, was so small that Francis had to mark each man’s place with chalk on the beam above his head, so as to ensure as much order and quietness as possible for their hours of prayer. Often they had nothing to eat but mangels and were very hungry. There was only one brother who could not stick it out and who left them, John of the Hat. The hat was no doubt a symbol of the creature comforts that he could not bring himself to abandon. One night a young brother who had added too much fasting to the normal condition of semi-starvation woke up in such pain that he thought he was dying, and cried out in fear. Francis got up at once and when he had discovered the cause of the trouble he put together such scraps of food as they had and made a little meal for the young brother, and shared it with him lest he should feel ashamed to eat alone. Then he gathered all the brothers around him a
nd talked to them about moderation in fasting, which was designed to make of the body a tempered instrument of the spirit, not to break it. “My best beloved,” he said, “I tell you that each one of you ought to pay heed to his nature; for some of you may be strong enough to be sustained on less food than others; yet it is my will that he who needs more food shall not be bound to imitate those who need less, but let each give to his body what it requires in order to be strong enough to serve the spirit. For whilst we must beware of that superfluity of food which is a hindrance both to body and soul; in like manner, nay even more, must we beware of too great abstinence, seeing that the Lord wills to have mercy and not sacrifice.”
For his sons Francis always showed wisdom when faced with the difficult business of mortification. When later he discovered that many of them were wearing iron chains upon their bodies, and lashing themselves to extremity in impetuous efforts to break their self-will, he made them bring him all their instruments of torture and forbade them to use them again. But for himself he was not so wise. In this one thing only he did not practice what he preached and he shortened his life by his austerity. The normal disciplines that for his sons in the beginning of the way sufficed for mortification, the disappointments, hardships, and humiliations of their life, soon became for him things that he hardly noticed. He had to go further. He could never forget the sufferings of Christ, and his longing to share them consumed him.