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HTM003: Francis of Assisi couldn’t stand lepers. The sight turned his stomach, the smell of rotting flesh made him sick, and his standard move when he saw one on the road was to turn his horse around and go the other way.

Then outside the walls of Assisi he came around a bend, saw a leper, got down off the horse, took the man’s hand, pressed money into it, and kissed him.

He wrote almost nothing about it afterward. Years later, dictating his testament, he said only that what had seemed bitter to him “was changed for me into sweetness of body and soul.”

Dom Bettinelli makes the case that this is the conversion of St. Francis, and that the crucifix at San Damiano and the stigmata at La Verna were both downstream of it. If you’ve ever wondered why St. Francis kissed the leper, this episode argues it’s the only question about him that matters.

It starts with a 20-year-old rich kid who wanted to be Lancelot. Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone was a cloth merchant’s son who spent freely and sang troubadour songs in his mother’s French. In 1202 he rode out against Perugia in shining armor, watched the army of Assisi get wrecked at Collestrada, and spent close to a year chained to a wall in a Perugian prison, singing.

What follows: the fever dream at Spoleto that turned him back from a second war. The voice from the painted crucifix at San Damiano telling him to repair a house he assumed meant the building. His father hauling him before the Bishop of Assisi, and Francis stripping naked in the public square, folding his clothes, setting the money on top, and handing the pile back. Pietro picked it up and walked away, and the two never spoke again.

Then the movement. A hut at the Portiuncula, a barefoot walk to Rome to ask Innocent III for a blessing, and a papal dream about the collapsing Lateran Basilica that got them in the door. Clare Offreduccio slipping out of her family’s house on Palm Sunday 1212 to have Francis cut off her hair. Thousands of friars inside a decade, and an order Francis never wanted.

Also here: what happened when St. Francis met the Sultan al-Kamil at Damietta during the Fifth Crusade. Whether St. Francis really had the stigmata, and how he hid the wounds for two years. The Canticle of the Creatures, written while he was going blind. The Wolf of Gubbio, which Dom Bettinelli flags as legend rather than history, then tells anyway. And the night in 1223 above Greccio that gave every Catholic family its Christmas crèche.

He died on the bare ground at the Portiuncula on October 3, 1226, at 44, having asked his brothers to strip him and read the Last Supper aloud.

The real St. Francis of Assisi is harder to keep on a garden pedestal than the version most of us got handed. Somewhere in your life there’s a person you can’t bear, or a wound you’ve spent years pretending isn’t there. Francis says getting close to it will change you. He never said it would be easy.

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Links for this episode:

• Francis of Assisi — Wikipedia
• Saint Francis of Assisi — Britannica
• St. Francis of Assisi — Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent)
• Saint Francis of Assisi: Poverty, Humility, Franciscan Rule — Britannica
• Francis of Assisi: A Period of Crisis — Friar Musings
• Francis of Assisi: Military Adventures — Friar Musings
• Saint Francis Meets the Leper — Franciscan Media
• Francis’ encounter with the leper: psycho-spiritual viewpoint — CapDox
• Testament of Saint Francis (text and analysis) — Franciscan Studies
• San Damiano Cross — Wikipedia
• Francis and the San Damiano Cross — Franciscan Tradition
• The San Damiano Crucifix — Church Life Journal (Notre Dame)
• How St. Francis Dealt With His Difficult Father — National Catholic Register
• The Sins of St. Francis’s Father — Commonweal
• Letter on the Shrine of Renunciation — Pope Francis (Vatican)
• Rule of Saint Francis — Wikipedia
• Saint Francis in Front of Pope Innocent III (1209) — Noel Muscat OFM (PDF)
• Approval of the Franciscan Rule (1209) — StevenWood.com
• Clare of Assisi — Wikipedia
• Francis’s Tenacious Lady — Christian History Institute
• In 1219, St. Francis Crossed Crusade Lines — America Magazine
• Meeting Sultan Malik al-Kamil — Franciscan Media
• Damietta: Francis and the Sultan — Gordon Conwell
• St. Francis and the First Nativity Scene — EWTN Vatican
• Greccio and the First Live Nativity — Franciscan Media
• St. Francis and the Story of the First Nativity Scene — Catholic News Agency
• The Sacred Stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi — EWTN
• 800 Years Ago St. Francis Received the Stigmata — Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua
• The Stigmata of St. Francis — Franciscan Media
• Wolf of Gubbio — Wikipedia
• The Wolf of Gubbio: How a Man-Eating Beast Became a Saint’s Brother — Medievalists.net
• Brother Ugolino, Little Flowers of St. Francis, Ch. XXI — CCEL
• Canticle of the Creatures — Secular Franciscans (San Luis Rey)
• Chronology of the Life of St. Francis — Franciscan Media
• St. Francis of Assisi, Founder of the Franciscan Order — Vatican News
• Transitus (death) of Saint Francis — Franciscan Penance Library

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