St. Francis of Assisi

Who they were

Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi and spent his youth accordingly, with money and a reputation for spending it. He went to war against Perugia, was captured, and spent about a year as a prisoner. He came home ill and unsettled.

What followed was gradual rather than sudden. He began caring for lepers, which he later described as the turning point, and specifically as something he had found repulsive and did anyway. Praying in the ruined church of San Damiano he understood a command to rebuild the church, and took it literally at first, selling his father's cloth to pay for stone. His father took him to the bishop to recover the money. Francis returned the money and his clothes with it, and walked out with nothing.

He attracted followers quickly. The order he founded was built on a literal reading of poverty that made it hard to institutionalise, and the tension between his vision and the practicalities of a growing order occupied his later years.

In 1224, two years before his death, he received the stigmata at La Verna, the first well-documented account of it. He died at forty-four. His Canticle of the Creatures, written near the end while he was in serious pain and nearly blind, is one of the earliest surviving poems in Italian.

Why people turn to St. Francis of Assisi

The animals are the most famous part and the most misunderstood. The stories of preaching to birds and negotiating with a wolf are not sentimental in their original telling; they belong to a view in which every created thing has its own standing before God, which is what the Canticle of the Creatures actually argues when it calls the sun a brother and death a sister. He was named patron of ecology in 1979. The blessing of animals on his feast day follows from all of it. The Peace Prayer commonly attributed to him is not his, and that is worth knowing.

How to ask their intercession

Ask him for the animals in your care, and for the parts of creation you are worried about. He is also the one to ask when what you actually want is to need less than you currently do, which was the whole project of his life.