Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Page 4

Rome with a violence that has never been surpassed. St. Francis so
surely believed that the Church had become unfaithful to her mission
that he could speak in his symbolic language of the widowhood of his
Lady Poverty, who from Christ's time to his own had found no husband.
How could he better have declared his purposes or revealed his
dreams?
What he purposed was far more than the foundation of an order, and it

is to do him great wrong thus to restrict his endeavor. He longed for a
true awakening of the Church in the name of the evangelical ideal
which he had regained. All Europe awoke with a start when it heard of
these penitents from a little Umbrian town. It was reported that they
had craved a strange privilege from the court of Rome: that of
possessing nothing. Men saw them pass by, earning their bread by the
labor of their hands, accepting only the bare necessities of bodily
sustenance from them to whom they had given with lavish hands the
bread of life. The people lifted up their heads, breathing in with deep
inspirations the airs of a springtime upon which was already floating
the perfume of new flowers.
Here and there in the world there are many souls capable of all heroism,
if only they can see before them a true leader. St. Francis became for
these the guide they had longed for, and whatever was best in humanity
at that time leaped to follow in his footsteps.
This movement, which was destined to result in the constitution of a
new family of monks, was in the beginning anti-monastic. It is not rare
for history to have similar contradictions to record. The meek Galilean
who preached the religion of a personal revelation, without ceremonial
or dogmatic law, triumphed only on condition of being conquered, and
of permitting his words of spirit and life to be confiscated by a church
essentially dogmatic and sacerdotal.
In the same way the Franciscan movement was originally, if not the
protest of the Christian consciousness against monachism, at least the
recognition of an ideal singularly higher than that of the clergy of that
time. Let us picture to ourselves the Italy of the beginning of the
thirteenth century with its divisions, its perpetual warfare, its
depopulated country districts, the impossibility of tilling the fields
except in the narrow circle which the garrisons of the towns might
protect; all these cities from the greatest to the least occupied in
watching for the most favorable moment for falling upon and pillaging
their neighbors; sieges terminated by unspeakable atrocities, and after
all this, famine, speedily followed by pestilence to complete the
devastation. Then let us picture to ourselves the rich Benedictine

abbeys, veritable fortresses set upon the hill-tops, whence they seemed
to command all the surrounding plains. There was nothing surprising in
their prosperity. Shielded by their inviolability, they were in these
disordered times the only refuge of peaceful souls and timid hearts.[4]
The monks were in great majority deserters from life, who for motives
entirely aside from religion had taken refuge behind the only walls
which at this period were secure.
Overlook this as we may, forget as we may the demoralization and
ignorance of the inferior clergy, the simony and the vices of the prelates,
the coarseness and avarice of the monks, judging the Church of the
thirteenth century only by those of her sons who do her the most honor;
none the less are these the anchorites who flee into the desert to escape
from wars and vices, pausing only when they are very sure that none of
the world's noises will interrupt their meditations. Sometimes they will
draw away with them hundreds of imitators, to the solitudes of
Clairvaux, of the Chartreuse, of Vallombrosa, of the Camaldoli; but
even when they are a multitude they are alone; for they are dead to the
world and to their brethren. Each cell is a desert, on whose threshold
they cry
O beata solitudo. O sola beatitudo.
The book of the Imitation is the picture of all that is purest in this
cloistered life.
But is this abstinence from action truly Christian?
No, replied St. Francis. He for his part would do like Jesus, and we may
say that his life is an imitation of Christ singularly more real than that
of Thomas à Kempis.
Jesus went indeed into the desert, but only that he might find in prayer
and communion with the heavenly Father the inspiration and strength
necessary for keeping up the struggle against evil. Far from avoiding
the multitude, he sought them out to enlighten, console, and convert
them.

This is what St. Francis desired to imitate. More than once he felt the
seduction of the purely contemplative life, but each