On the Road with Francis of Assisi (6 page)

But Francis was still of this “world,” and not yet fully confident that he would be able to resist the temptations of the flesh. According to the
Legend of the Three Companions,
the devil took advantage of his uncertainty by tempting him with a horrible image. There was, in Assisi, a “humpbacked and deformed woman and the Devil recalled her to Francis’s mind with the threat, that unless he turned from the good he had embarked on, he would free her from her deformity and cast it upon him.”

That image, and other “inopportune ideas,” plagued Francis in the cave and “greatly worried and distressed him.” The struggle within himself evidently took a considerable toll. He couldn’t rest, and he often wept for hours. “Consequently, when he came out again to his companion, he was so exhausted with the strain, that one person seemed to have entered, and another to have come out,” notes Celano.

There are no devils at the
carceri
during our visits. On one occasion we meet a small group of elderly nuns from Germany, clambering with some difficulty up and down the narrow, slippery paths to the caves marked by the names of Francis’s first followers—Brothers Leo, Rufino, Silvester, and Masseo—and to the now enclosed grotto overlooking a gorge where Francis prayed and slept.
“Grüss Gott,”
each nun greets us.
“Grüss Gott.”

Along Leo’s path we also we meet up with a group of Franciscan academicians from America, some forty of them, who are touring Umbria’s Franciscan sites under the auspices of www.franciscanpilgrimages.com. Their leader, Father John, is explaining the significance of a curious bronze sculpture grouping of three life-size friars looking up at the sky.

Some of the early Franciscans were scientists, he explains, and among the first to study nature. One of the bronze friars looks heavenward trying to identify the North Star. Another is measuring the distance between the stars with his hand. The third is lying on his back on the ground, smiling, with his hands under his head. “That’s St. Francis,” Father John says, “just looking up at all the stars and having a delightful time.”

Legends abound along the shaded paths of the
carceri
—the well in the courtyard, which Francis successfully coaxed to fill with water, the riverbed he would empty after a storm because the sound of the rushing water interfered with his prayers, the tree supposedly from the time of Francis that still clings to the side of the precipitous ravine with the aid of metal stakes and guy wires. Birds evidently gathered regularly in the tree to sing to Francis and just as regularly fell silent at his polite request when he wanted absolute quiet to pray.

We retrace our steps to the courtyard to a tiny chapel with a smoke-blackened ceiling the early friars built in a cave. Along the way we run into a Swiss family wearing sturdy hiking boots and carrying walking staffs. They have just come down a very steep path marked “Sister Moon,” a clearing high in the woods from which the early friars observed the skies, and they are breaking out protein bars to fuel them on the equally steep footpath back to Assisi.

We leave the
carceri
with some reluctance, unlike Francis, who must have been relieved to distance himself from his early travails with his conscience in the cave. He was making headway, and “his heart was aglow with divine fire,” notes the
Legend of the Three Companions,
but he still had not heard any instructions from the “voice” of Spoleto. Instead, he began to redirect his life on his own. “He was already a benefactor of the poor, but from this time onwards he resolved never to refuse alms to anyone who begged in God’s name, but rather to give more willingly and abundantly than ever before.”

His preoccupation with the poor spilled over into his home life. His mother, Lady Pica, who is described by all the early chroniclers as deeply religious, was far more sympathetic to Francis’s new charity than was his father. Famine was rampant around Assisi following the devastation of the countryside’s crops by a storm, and the number of hungry and starving had increased dramatically. When Pietro Bernadone was away, as he frequently was, Lady Pica went along with Francis’s request to bake extra loaves of bread for the beggars who came to the door. And she presumably supported or at least turned a blind eye to his new habit of giving away his clothes to the poor when he found himself with no money. “He would give his belt or buckle, or if he had not even these, he would find a hiding place and, taking off his shirt, give it to the beggar for love of God,” reports the
Legend of the Three Companions.

Seeing the change in her son and the “new ardor which was taking possession of him and filling him with repentance for his past grave sins,” Lady Pica, perhaps, was the one who urged Francis to go on pilgrimage to Rome in that same life-altering year of 1205. It was a long trip, some 120 miles, and it is not known whether he walked or rode on horseback. But no matter. The important part of the legend is what happened to Francis when he got there.

4

The Old Rome

R
OME
,
where Francis identifies with the beggars ·
S
AN
D
AMIANO,
where he finally hears a message from the Lord ·
F
OLIGNO,
where he acts on that message—with dramatic results

S
t. Peter’s Basilica looms ever larger from the Via della Conciliazione, the grandiose, column-lined boulevard Mussolini built to the Vatican in the 1930s by razing a medieval neighborhood. We hike across the basilica’s vast and familiar Piazza San Pietro, where thousands of empty white plastic chairs await the faithful for the Pope’s weekly blessing. One hundred and forty sculpted saints march around the top of Bernini’s graceful colonnade rimming the sixteenth-century piazza, and I am warmed to see Francis among them.

If the scope of St. Peter’s is meant to humble mere mortals, it succeeds. Two-story-high marble sculptures of Jesus and his disciples look down on the piazza from the basilica’s imposing façade, while huge marble replicas of St. Peter and St. Paul flank the broad marble steps leading up to the basilica. The separation is appropriate given that the two saints had a falling-out in the earliest years of Christianity and rarely spoke to each other again.

For centuries St. Peter’s was the largest church in Christendom, until it was eclipsed in 1990 by Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, the capital of the Ivory Coast. But no matter. It is to St. Peter’s in Rome that Catholic pilgrims, including Francis, have always journeyed from all over the world.

Francis was furious when he entered the basilica in 1205. Here he was in the very heart of the Catholic Church, yet the offerings left at the altar by other pilgrims were paltry in comparison with the stature of the saint they were supposedly honoring. Save Christ himself, and possibly the Virgin Mary, no other Christian was as venerated as Peter. Christ himself had changed the disciple’s name from Simon the Fisherman to Peter the Rock, and the Church considered Peter the first Pope, from whom all the subsequent Popes descended.

Moreover, Peter, like Christ, had accepted, even sought out, his martyrdom. He and other Christians had been wrongly accused and subsequently persecuted by Emperor Nero for having caused the fire that engulfed Rome in
A.D.
64. Legend has it that Peter had escaped Nero’s jail in Rome and was on his way out of town to safety when he met a man on the Via Appia and asked him the famous question
“Quo vadis?”
When the man replied that he had come to be crucified for a second time, Peter realized he was speaking to Christ and immediately turned around to go back to Rome—and his certain death.

That such a man should be so poorly served at his own grave caused Francis to all but empty his purse at the altar. “Astounded when he came to the altar of the prince of the apostles that the offerings of those who came there were so meager, he threw down a handful of coins at that place, thus indicating that he whom God honored above the rest should be honored by all in a special way,” writes Celano.

The sacred basilica Francis was visiting, the “old” St. Peter’s, was built by Constantine, the first Christian-convert emperor, at the beginning of the fourth century over the necropolis where the martyred Peter had been buried. The “new” and current St. Peter’s would be built on the same site thirteen centuries later. Tradition holds that both the Papal altar in today’s St. Peter’s, framed by Bernini’s hundred-foot-tall canopy of bronze (stolen and melted down from the Pantheon’s portico), and the more modest altar in the “old” St. Peter’s were sited directly over Peter’s grave. It is intriguing to think some of the coins from Francis’s purse may be among the assortment found during a subterranean search for Peter’s remains; early pilgrims to the old St. Peter’s evidently dropped coins directly into the grave through a grille in the marble slab covering it.

Having made his dramatic offering to St. Peter, Francis left the basilica as he had entered it—through an enclosed garden known as Paradise. But the atrium hardly fit the definition of Paradise, filled as it was with beggars and the poorest of the poor pleading for a coin or two. Francis surely gave the poor what coins he had left, but the gesture was suddenly not enough for him.

Instead he stopped among the beggars and committed one of the famous acts of his ongoing conversion—he swapped his fancy clothes with a beggar for his rags and found they suited him. “He put off his fine garments out of love of poverty, clothed himself with the garments of a certain poor man, and joyfully sat among the poor in the vestibule before the church of St. Peter,” writes Celano.

This, presumably, was the first time Francis had actually cross-dressed with the poor. His biographers all make note of his increasing sense of charity toward the least fortunate and the various articles of clothing he had spontaneously taken off and given to others. But there is no indication that he had ever given away all his clothes and donned beggars’ rags in return—though he wanted to.

Celano postulates that Francis had resisted the temptation because he was worried about what people in Assisi would think of his already strange behavior and waited to experiment until he was out of town. “Many times he would have done a similar thing had he not been held back by shame before those who knew him,” Celano writes.

Safely away in Rome, Francis did not stop with the clothes exchange. He joined the beggars outside St. Peter’s and started begging for alms himself—in French. Though Francis certainly could have afforded to buy himself a good meal, he settled down with his new friends to share their scraps of food. “Considering himself one of them,” notes Celano, “he ate eagerly with them.” Celano does not record how the beggars must have felt having this seemingly crazy man enter their midst, don their rags, and eat their stale crusts with relish, but Francis probably felt the first stirrings of the pleasure, and ultimate freedom, of doing without. He was still playing a role, however. He wasn’t a true
poverello—
yet.

Francis came closer on the way home to Assisi, where he confronted his greatest nightmare, as in a different sense do we. Ours occurs on the ancient Via Flaminia, the Roman road linking Rome with the Adriatic coast, as it passes through the southern industrial city of Terni. We have every intention of stopping in this modern bus and train hub to find the little twelfth-century church of San Cristoforo, where Francis preached in his later years, and the stone he stood on outside the bishop’s residence. But we are foiled by a soccer game.

The rush-hour traffic inside Terni is gridlocked by the large police contingent double- and triple-parked along the streets to oversee the regional soccer game about to take place in the city’s stadium. Our nightmare begins when a convoy of police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, tries to force a busload of players through our car into the stadium parking lot. It is compounded when yet another flashing, screaming police car suddenly roars out of the parking lot and fetches up half an inch from my side of our car. We can’t move forward or back, despite the sirens and flashing lights. When we finally manage to extricate ourselves from Terni, vowing never to return, I try to dispel my negative feelings about the city by reminding myself it is the birthplace of St. Valentine.

Francis met his nightmare farther along that same road when he came face-to-face with a leper. Of all the diseases for which there was no cure at the time, leprosy was the most vile, mutilating, and feared. It was believed to be highly contagious, so that anyone with skin ulcers, suppurating sores either from leprosy or from other skin diseases like St. Anthony’s fire from eating contaminated grains, was forcibly quarantined for forty days in leprosariums, or
lazzaretti,
before being allowed into any of the walled cities.

Assisi had several such leprosariums nearby, places of such horror to Francis that, like most of his fellow citizens, he went far out of his way to avoid them. His fear of lepers was so strong, according to the
Legend of the Three Companions,
that “if, by chance, he happened to pass anywhere near their dwellings or to see one of the lepers, even though he was moved to give them alms through some intermediate person, he would nevertheless turn his face away and hold his nose.”

It is not surprising, then, that the story of Francis and the leper he encountered on the road just outside Assisi became one of the legendary turning points of his conversion. In one of the agonizing sessions in the cave outside Assisi during which he’d pleaded with God to tell him what do, God had evidently given him an answer in the form of a riddle: “O Francis, if you want to know my will, you must hate and despise all that which hitherto your body has loved and desired to possess,” recounts the
Legend of the Three Companions.
“Once you begin to do this, all that formerly seemed sweet and pleasant to you will become bitter and unbearable; and instead, the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content.”

So, coming face-to-face with the leper, the source of his greatest shudder, really put it to Francis. He knew what he wanted to do, but this time, remembering God’s admonition, he did not flee from the shrouded, stinking, rattle-shaking miserable or turn his face or hold his nose. “Though the leper caused him no small disgust and horror,” records Celano, “nevertheless, lest like a transgressor of a commandment he should break his given word, he got off the horse and prepared to kiss the leper.”

Celano then adds a mystical dimension to the encounter, writing that when Francis remounted his horse and looked back at the leper, “though the plain lay open and clear on all sides, and there were no obstacles about, he could not see the leper anywhere.” Whatever the truth of this story, the historical reality is that for the rest of his life Francis would seek out leprosariums and lavish attention on their wretched inmates with such intimacy that it is widely believed he eventually caught the disease. “He washed all the filth off them and even cleaned out the pus of their sores,” writes Celano.

Francis evidently saw lepers as a gift sent to him by God as a test of his humility. In his Testament, written shortly before he died, Francis said: “When I was yet in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers, and the Lord led me among them and I showed mercy to them.” His ongoing dedication to lepers would play a central role not only in his life but also in the lives of others who wanted to join his order. “When postulants presented themselves, whether nobles or commoners, they were forewarned that among other things they would have to serve the lepers and live in their hospitals,” records the
Legend of Perugia.

We drive the short distance from Assisi to the site of one of those hospitals, San Salvatore della Parte, now a rather elegant, privately owned building called the Casa Gualdi. It sits near a crossroads on the old and well-traveled Via Francesca, the Road of the French, so named because it was the trade and pilgrimage route between Assisi, Rome, and France. But aside from a plaque on the building identifying it as a historic Franciscan site, there is nothing to suggest the suffering of the medieval lepers who were confined there, or the role lepers played in changing Francis’s life. “Strengthened by God’s grace, he was enabled to obey the command and to love what he had hated and to abhor what he had hitherto wrongly loved,” notes the
Legend of the Three Companions.

It was the next directive from on high, however, in this same year of 1205, that started the sequence of events that would scandalize Assisi and catapult Francis along the road to sainthood. This one took place in a small, half-ruined, twelfth-century church named San Damiano, less than a mile from Assisi, tended by an old, itinerant priest. It was not the priest who transformed Francis the day he wandered into San Damiano, but the twelfth-century Byzantine cross, painted by a Syrian monk, that hung over the altar. In one of the most critical moments in Francis’s life, re-created by Giotto in Assisi’s basilica, the crucified Jesus depicted on the cross spoke to Francis, some say even bowed to him, and repeated three times: “Francis, go, repair my house, which as you see, is falling completely to ruin.”

Francis must have been ecstatic finally to get the clear order promised him in the dream he had had months before, and he took the order literally. Rebuild this crumbling church. So that was what he was meant to do. But how? The reconstruction would take money, more money than he had. Where would he get it? Of course! His father’s shop. “After fortifying himself with the sign of the holy cross, he arose, and when his horse was made ready, he mounted it,” writes Celano. “Taking with him scarlet cloth to sell, he quickly came to a city called Foligno.”

Foligno surprises us. The once-thriving medieval market town nine miles east of Assisi (and strategically located at the crossroads of the ancient Via Flaminia and a secondary but equally vital trade road connecting the town to Spello, Perugia, and Assisi) is so universally trashed in our guidebooks as a dreary industrial, agricultural, and transportation center that we dread going there. But we find the valley city surprisingly inviting. It is a relief to be walking on flat pavement after our stiff climbs around the hill towns and a welcome change to be on wide, pedestrian-only streets and not dodging cars.

Our goal in Foligno is to find the medieval marketplace where Francis sold the “scarlet” cloth he had taken from his father’s shop and the horse he had taken from his father’s stable. It takes awhile. The obvious starting point is Foligno’s unexpectedly charming main Piazza della Repubblica with its funky twelfth-century duomo, whose carved façade boasts a pagan panoply of animals and signs of the zodiac. We step inside the church to hear a small group of worshipers singing harmoniously in a side chapel, but we see no sign of Francis.

The Piazza San Domenico, at the far end of the old town down a flag-lined shopping street and past a Benetton, seems more promising. The piazza is big enough for a marketplace; it is shaded by oak trees and close to an ancient city gate. It also has an unexpected treasure: the sunken, low, pink and white stone church of Santa Maria Infraportas, which bears a startling plaque identifying it as the “Mother Church of Foligno, established in 58
A.D.
” This church, too, is said to have pagan origins and to be the venue of a conversion sermon delivered to local animists by none other than St. Peter.