On the Road with Francis of Assisi (19 page)

It was Elias, the organization man, who would translate Francis’s romantic dream of the “Lord’s wandering minstrels” into a sustainable Catholic order by dividing the free-form body into seventy-two distinct provinces; it was Elias, the public relations man, who would make Franciscanism global by multiplying the order’s foreign missions; it was Elias, according to the biographer Omer Englebert, who contrary to Francis’s embrace of solitude and hermetical worship, “promoted study, and urged the friars to mix in politics”; and it was Elias, the pragmatist, who would pressure Francis to relax his strictest rules to accommodate the exploding number of would-be friars. Under Elias, for example, houses began to rise for the Franciscan clerics and scholars who did not want to wander the land barefoot.

All this may have been necessary to keep the order alive, but such departures from Francis’s ideal of radical poverty and humility constituted a betrayal to the first, inner circle of friars and subsequent generations of purists. And it got worse, much worse, after Francis died.

Elias, the showman, would build himself a house in the fanciest part of Cortona and have a world-class chef; Elias, the brilliant architect and builder, would design and construct the current and opulent basilica in Assisi without regard to Francis’s insistence on simplicity; Elias, the venture capitalist, would finance the construction of the basilica by soliciting financial contributions despite Francis’s anathema toward money and build such a luxurious attached convent for the new breed of friars that the first friars grumbled: “All they need now is wives.” Worst of all, several of the dissenting first friars were beaten and thrown in prison. One even died.

Elias’s “sins” would not go unpunished. It was probably here at the
celle
that, well before Elias enacted all these changes, Francis had an apocryphal dream that Elias was damned and would die outside the order. Francis was so horrified by this revelation from God that he stopped speaking to Elias, even stopped looking at him. Elias, who was devoted to Francis in his way, finally forced Francis to tell him why he was being shunned, and on hearing about the prophecy, cried so piteously that Francis said he would pray to God for his forgiveness. And it worked—after a fashion. Though the dream would come true in that some three decades later Elias was excommunicated and defrocked for siding with the emperor against the Pope, a last-minute plea to the Pope from a sympathetic friar brought him absolution and returned him to the Franciscan Order in 1253, while he was lying critically ill at the
celle.

But it is Francis, not Elias, whose spirit lingers on among the tumbled rocks and noisy streams at the
celle.
The guide we’d picked up quotes a 1705 chronicle that marvels at the “gentle fragrance which overcomes every odor of nature” in and around Francis’s cell. Moving on in time, the guide recounts a miracle in 1882, when a construction worker, seeming crushed by a huge boulder, emerged “hale and hearty as before,” and yet another miracle in 1959, when two men fell into the “stream in full flood” and survived with only minor injuries.

All this goodwill conspires to make us feel totally secure on the mountain road back down from the
celle
and the journey through the Chianti vineyards and ancient olive groves of southern Tuscany to the next hermitage Francis founded, at Cetona. And another surprise.

If ever there is a success story for the Franciscan involvement with Mondo X, it is the convent at Cetona. Near the “hermitage” cave of travertine rock Francis prayed in, the thirteenth-century Convento di San Francesco is now a sought-after restaurant and inn nestled on the side of a forested hillside. There are walking trails through the woods, a medieval church and chapel, cloisters and courtyards, terraces and gardens, and seven serene bedrooms, all with baths.

The Mondo X commune of young men and women at Cetona, one of thirty-five such communities founded by a Franciscan friar, Padre Eligio, worked together for twelve years to restore the beautiful convent and to transform the cells the early friars reserved for pilgrims into comfortable modern rooms, furnished with antiques, for paying guests. There is no television and no swimming pool, but there is a first-class restaurant run by the resident commune. So we settle down to a delicious six-course lunch, starting with
prosecco
in the garden and moving on through the multiple courses assembled from the fresh produce in the convent’s gardens.

There are no Franciscan legends that we know of directly associated with Cetona, but that is not surprising. Geographical location was not a medieval criterion for the recounting of Francis and his legend, and many sites are referred to simply as “the place.” But Cetona must have been important to the Franciscans then, because it certainly is now. A convocation of senior Franciscans in 2002 chose to meet at three places: the Porziuncola in Santa Maria degli Angeli; La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata; and the Convento di San Francesco in Cetona.

Thrilled by our discovery in Cetona, we press on with Francis to Sarteano, a photo-perfect Tuscan castle town just north of Cetona where Francis preached in the winter of 1212. He lived for a time within the walls of the tenth-century castle with some local monks and helped care for the sick in the hospital of Santa Maria outside the walls. But Francis, as ever, yearned for solitude and soon started climbing the hills above Sarteano to find perfect seclusion. He succeeded. And so, after many false starts, do we.

Unlike Cetona, the hermitage two miles above Sarteano is rich with documented legends about Francis. It was here that Francis so fixated on his injunction against the ownership of any property that when he overheard a friar saying he had just come from Francis’s cell, Francis declared he would never use that cell again. It was from this hermitage that Francis, who claimed he could see Mount Subasio thirty-eight miles distant, dispatched Brother Masseo to San Damiano to ask Clare whether he would better serve God as a hermit or as a pilgrim. And it was at Sarteano that Francis had one of his epic fights with the devil.

On a cold, snowy winter night, the legend goes, the devil so tempted Francis with the desires of the flesh that Francis finally took off his habit and whipped his naked body with the cord so strenuously that he was covered in welts. But the devil’s wicked lust continued. The bruised and naked Francis then confronted his desire by suddenly leaving his cell to build a family out of snow.

He sculpted a father and a mother, and two sons and two daughters, and a servant and a maid to take care of them all, then called out to his naked body: “Hurry, and clothe them all, for they are dying of cold. But if caring for them in so many ways troubles you, be solicitous for serving God alone.” And with that, according to Celano, the devil withdrew “in confusion,” and Francis went back to his cell, praising God.

All this makes it imperative for us to find where Francis built his snow family. We set out with the directions we’ve been given in a coffee bar and head up into the hills on the Via dei Cappuccini. We are heartened when we see a hand-painted sign reading “Celle di San Francesco” and keep on going up an ever-steeper dirt road until we come to a fork and another primitively hand-painted sign to the celle. And then it becomes ridiculous. We take the fork and proceed straight up the ever-narrowing, increasingly washed-out road until the branches of the roadside bushes and trees cover the windshield and our wheels start spinning.

The prudent course is to back the car down that track until we can turn around and depart, but somewhere on that mountain is the hermitage of Sarteano. So my husband starts rolling the car backward, and I start hiking up the path, which is so steep that I need the walking stick I pick up on the side of the path to keep from sliding backward down the mountain. And then, suddenly, around a last gasping turn, I step onto a small plateau. In front of me is a massive, three-story-high boulder hollowed through at the base by a waist-high natural arch and bearing another hand-painted sign, reading “San Francesco.” We have found the hermitage.

I crawl through the arch to find myself on the edge of the plateau and in the midst of a complex of caves on the back side of the rock, which I discover later are Ionic Age tombs. I stoop to enter one of the cells and discover that I am hardly the first to do so. A hand-carved wooden sign inside reads,
“Una Notte Chiamo per Francesco,”
and there are unlit candles and slightly wilted flowers and passport photographs of families and children presumably seeking Francis’s blessing. I shake my head in disbelief, thinking I must be imagining these icons in such an impossibly remote spot, but my husband arrives on his hands and knees and sees the same thing.

We explore the other caves, which is not altogether easy. The mountain ledge is very narrow, and we have to navigate over the raised, intertwined roots of trees and then climb the crumbly rock to reach the caves. But the peril is well worth it. One of the caves we achieve is adorned with a rude cross chiseled into its stone wall.

Few people reading this book will probably make the difficult journey to this hermitage. And understandably so. There is no payoff of a medieval convent or a church with gorgeous art or splendid gardens or a waterfall. What there is, is the stark reality of a no-frills medieval hermitage and the literal experience of what Francis and his followers sought out and endured. “He often chose solitary places to focus his heart entirely on God,” Celano writes. No other “solitary” place we would find on our journey with Francis would duplicate the rugged authenticity of Sarteano. It was among these caves, in the dead of winter, I remind myself, that he built his “family” out of snow.

Francis was well aware of the severity of life in the hermitages. He worried about his friars who chose to live in the growing number of secluded cave complexes or primitive mountain huts, and in 1217, he wrote the Rule for Hermitages governing the friars’ behavior and spiritual life. To ensure the close bonds of a “family,” he limited their numbers to three or four per hermitage and decreed that “two of these should be mothers and they may have two sons or at least one.” Having determined that the appointed “mothers” would look after their “sons” and “protect” them from outsiders, he also ordered that each would have his own cell, “in which he may pray and sleep.”

Francis remained characteristically harsh on himself, however. During one cold winter, his friars grew so concerned for his health that they sewed an animal skin to the inside of his habit for warmth. Francis, being ever obedient, accepted the pelt next to his skin but insisted that another be added to the outside of his habit so everyone would know of his hypocrisy.

The way back down from the Sarteano hermitage is easier, of course, both for us and, presumably, for Francis. He would need the spiritual renewal he had received here to continue his journey to save as many souls as was humanly possible. What was becoming increasingly apparent, however, was that he was succeeding beyond expectation. The response to Francis and his traveling message of peace and redemption was bringing him so many new converts that he had to rethink the structure of his movement. The answer would come to him in the little Umbrian hill town of Alviano—and multiply his followers by the thousands.

14

Shrieking Swallows in Alviano

A
LVIANO,
where Francis silences the swallows and considers a Third Franciscan Order ·
S
AN
R
OCCO,
the Third Order’s Porziuncola near Montefalco · the tiny shrine of
S
ANT’
I
LLUMINATA
near
A
LVIANO,
where Francis might have formulated the whole idea

T
he drive to the picture-book castle town of Alviano is spectacular. The road hugs the banks of the Tiber River, then rises to run along a dramatic gully past a huge, artificial lake, the Lago di Carbara, and continues on to the Lago di Alviano and the Alviano Oasis. The “oasis,” a huge marsh area created by the damming of the Tiber River, attracts some 150 species of migratory birds and is managed by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF oversees the nature walks through the oasis and its “hides,” from which bird-watchers can see migrating cranes and fish hawks and geese. There must be close to three thousand geese and ducks on the lake the October afternoon we are there.

Birds of a different sort are central to an important chapter of Francis and his legend at Alviano. It was here, inside the charming walled and turreted fortress town overlooking the lake, that Francis is thought to have created the Third Franciscan Order, this one composed of urban laypeople. And all because of a flock of swallows.

According to his medieval biographers, Francis came to Alviano around 1212 to preach but ran into a natural obstacle. There were so many nesting swallows making so much noise—“shrieking” is the word used by Celano—that the people gathered in Alviano’s central piazza could not hear him. Francis solved the problem by simply addressing the birds. “My sister swallows, now it is time for me also to speak since you have already said enough,” he advised the swallows, which according to Celano immediately fell silent.

According to the
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
the people were so astonished when Francis quieted the “shrieking” swallows that “they wanted to follow him and abandon the village.” Francis dissuaded them—with a promise: “Don’t be in a hurry and don’t leave, for I will arrange what you should do for the salvation of your souls.” It was from that moment, the
Little Flowers
claims, that Francis started formulating the idea of a Third Order, “for the salvation of all people everywhere.”

It was a brilliant concept. People had been flocking to Francis wherever he preached. Married couples, widows, mothers, fathers embraced his teachings and wanted to live a Franciscan life. “Many of the people, both noble and ignoble, cleric and lay, impelled by divine inspiration, began to come to St. Francis, wanting to carry on the battle constantly under his discipline and under his leadership,” writes Celano.

The challenge was that many of these new converts had family obligations and could not become itinerant preachers or enter convents or monasteries. They wanted to follow Francis in their everyday lives. The result is the subject of an ongoing debate among Franciscan historians. Some claim that Francis merely urged his secular followers to live godly lives in their own homes, while others, including several of his medieval biographers, insist Francis established what was known as the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, or the Franciscan Third Order, for both secular penitents and clerics. “Thus through Blessed Francis’s perfect devotion to the Blessed Trinity, the Church of Christ was renewed by three new orders,” says the
Legend of the Three Companions.
“His three distinct orders were each in due time approved and confirmed by the sovereign pontiff.”

Whatever its original makeup, the Third Order would prove to be an enormous success. Francis had tapped into the religious resurgence sweeping the towns and cities of Italy, a resurgence due largely to his preaching tours. “It is an historical fact that around 1215 in the urban centers of Italy we see a sudden increase in the number of penitents, even among married persons,” writes G. G. Messerman in his 1961 history of the penitential movement. The “unexpected increase” of urban penitents, he continues, is “attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.”

Francis would write a “norm of life” for the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, believed to be his Letter to the Faithful, in which he exhorts his lay followers to follow a religious life of penance, charity, humility, and prayer. “Oh, how happy and blessed are these men and women when they do these things and persevere in doing them, since the spirit of the Lord will rest upon them,” Francis writes. The consequences are dire, however, for those who don’t. “No matter where or when or how a man dies in the guilt of sin without doing penance and satisfaction,” Francis warns, “the devil snatches up his soul from his body with so much anguish and tribulation that no one can know it unless he has experienced it.”

Approved orally by Pope Honorius III in 1221 and more formally in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan Pope, the “rule” for the Brothers and Sisters of Penance contained a revolutionary provision: In the pursuit of peace, members of the Third Order were forbidden to carry arms and were instructed to avoid taking oaths. The result was a serious blow to feudalism and the ability of warring governments, communes, and landed families to order up armies. The prohibition so infuriated the bellicose tendencies of some members of society at the time that yet another Pope, Gregory IX, had to issue a Papal bull in 1228 defending the right of the increasingly persecuted members of the Third Order not to carry arms or enter military service.

Nonetheless, the Third Franciscan Order attracted extraordinary people who wanted to follow Francis and his life of penance. Francis’s close female friend “Brother” Jacopa in Rome joined the new order. So did members of some of Europe’s royal families: the widowed princess St. Elizabeth of Hungary; the widowed queen St. Elizabeth of Portugal; King St. Louis IX of France; and King Ferdinand V and his queen, Isabella I, of Spain.

According to a Third Order website, Christopher Columbus also joined the Third Order, as did the artists Giotto, Raphael, and Michelangelo; the scientist Louis Pasteur; the musicians Franz Liszt and Charles Gounod; and the poet Dante, who is buried in the church of St. Francis in Ravenna, allegedly in a Franciscan habit. The Third Order would also produce many, many Popes and, beyond the “royal” saints, St. Margaret of Cortona, a single mother turned penitent, and St. Rose of Viterbo, who converted an entire village by standing for three hours, unscathed, in a burning pyre.

Fraternities of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance sprang up all over Italy and soon spread through Europe. Some were laypeople, known today as the Secular Franciscan Order, or S.F.O.; others were clerics, who became known as the Franciscan Third Order Regular, or T.O.R. The men and women established their own convents and churches and eventually had their own Franciscan habits. By the mid-fifteenth century, they also had their own minister general and their own Porziuncola, at the Little Church of San Rocco near the Umbrian high hill town of Montefalco.

Because of its historical significance, we had gone to Montefalco to try to find San Rocco. Local legend holds that Francis established a convent here in 1215, the year the Third Order took hold, and miraculously caused a spring to appear to supply fresh water. But we also went to the sky-scraping Montefalco, known familiarly as the “balcony of Umbria,” to see the vibrant fifteenth-century fresco cycle of Francis’s life by the Florentine artist Benozzo Gozzoli in the old San Francesco church and to indulge in Montefalco’s unique and universally celebrated red Sagrantino wine. It is tempting to think that Francis, who passed often through Montefalco, indulged as well in the wine from the town’s ancient vineyards.

We found San Rocco with considerable difficulty in the adjacent and tiny village of Camiano. The ancient church stands now on private property in a small, gated community, and we never would have achieved it had it not been for a passing woman who unlocked the gate for us, insisting that, by law, San Rocco has to be accessible to anyone who wants to see it. What she neglected to tell us about was the dog that was presumably guarding the house next to the church and that immediately took a strong dislike to us.

Standing in front of the ancient, slightly peaked, almost windowless old stone church made our visit worth it, though. Solid and unadorned, San Rocco looks nothing like the tarted-up Porziuncola in Assisi. The old church breathes authenticity and seems a natural place for Francis’s followers to have convened so long ago and to make pilgrimages to today.

The Third Franciscan Order continues to thrive worldwide, and its members reportedly number in the millions. We had met several members ourselves on our journey—the smiling, elderly sister who runs a hostel for pilgrims in Assisi, an attractive young woman at a convent in the Marches, an extremely helpful man in New York—and they all owe a spiritual debt to this little church of San Rocco, where six hundred years ago the Franciscan Third Order was formally organized, and to the miracle of the shrieking swallows in Alviano, where two hundred years earlier the idea was born.

That miracle is re-created and celebrated in Alviano in the Chapel of the Swallows off the beautiful Renaissance courtyard inside the reconstructed sixteenth-century castle. The fresco of Francis silencing the birds has a familiar quirk: One of the faces in the thirteenth-century crowd listening to him preach belongs to the seventeenth-century woman Donna Olimpia, who commissioned the fresco.

Because we are in Alviano, we feel compelled to visit the nearby hermitage of Sant’Illuminata. The Franciscans inherited the second-century convent and hermitage in the twelfth century, and Francis is said to have stayed there often in a grotto whose singular stone slab “bed” is surfaced with a
panno di velluto,
or cloth of velvet. That description is intriguing enough to draw us up the mountain. We stop to ask directions from an old woman walking along the mountain road, having learned that young people are less apt to know the whereabouts of Francis sites, and she directs us higher up toward Guardia. After several wrong turns, we see a tiny yellow sign with a cross on it, and turning down an unmarked gravel road through an olive grove, we chance upon the little cell in the side of the hill, bearing the small inscription “Crypta di San Francesco.”

It would seem that, having visited so many Franciscan hermitages, we would be sated and even blasé about finding yet another. But these isolated caves, and the reverence they continue to inspire, never cease to amaze me. Here we are, on top of a mountain with nothing around for miles, in front of a roadside cave barely three feet wide and ten feet deep, and there are fresh flowers in the assorted tin cans outside the grated opening and candles burning inside on the altar.

A brochure we picked up in Alviano tells us that this little fissure in the rock was created in a “furious” earthquake and is a miniature La Verna, the much more dramatic mountain fissure where Francis would later receive the stigmata. But it is the “velvet” stone bed that has drawn us here, and we get the flashlight from the car to discover that the slab’s surface does indeed have a velvety, porous texture.

Perhaps Francis rested and meditated here after preaching in Alviano, and perhaps it was in this very grotto that he formulated his vision of a lay order for his followers. It is a lovely, quiet spot with a splendid view of Lake Alviano from across the road. He must have been as reluctant to leave this tranquillity to return to the real world of preaching as he was from every hermitage, in which he often spent months at a time. “He sometimes feared that, under pretext of withdrawing into solitude to pray, his body was in reality seeking only to escape from the fatigues of preaching throughout the world, this world for which Christ did not hesitate to come from heaven on earth,” records the
Legend of Perugia.

But Francis did not give in to his fatigue. Instead, he expanded the geography of his evangelical zeal. As a younger man, he had dreamed of becoming a knight and forcefully routing the Muslim infidels from Jerusalem. In this year of 1212, he dreamed again of going to the Middle East, but this time to peacefully convert the infidels to Christianity.

He didn’t make it.