Saint Francis Of Assisi And The Saints Of God

As the whole church celebrates the Feast of St Francis today (4 October), I want to take the opportunity to share with you why the church honours and celebrates saints. I want to reflect with you what the saints have to teach us about our calling to be Jesus' followers, our faith in God, and our discipleship in the world.

Today, several coincidences also connected me personally to St. Francis and his feast day. This said the message is about what the saints have to teach us. To get to this message, let me first say what the coincidences are connecting me to St Francis and get me out of the way of the message.

I hope you remember my message a few Sundays ago, in which I shared my story of wanting to be a Franciscan Friar. It was precisely 44 years ago that I entered the Junior Novitiate with twenty-three other boys my age.

In 1980, it was the Feast Day of St Francis. Today is the 44th anniversary of my being a postulant at the junior novitiate along with my partner, postulant Darshan.

Since 4 October was a Saturday in 1980, I rang Brother Darshan yesterday on the eve of the Feast of St Francis to wish him a happy Feast Day and catch up. We spoke for almost two hours, using free WhatsApp telephone calls.

Out of the two hours we spoke, it may have taken about ten minutes to bring us up to speed on mundane matters. The rest of the time, we spoke heart-to-heart, reflecting on St Francis’s life and what he has to say to us at present while the world is still a long way from recovering from the COVID pandemic.

Although we may seem to live quite far away from the epicentres of the world where the impact of the pandemic is felt, we know that the virus's re-emergence is creating havoc on many fronts of life in places we may not even imagine.

On Tuesday and Thursday last week, I appeared on two community radio programs, sharing how people in our communities have been affected by the pandemic. Personal, emotional, and social breakdowns are rampant.

For the first time during our interview with the host, all four of us realised that we, too, have been, invariably, working as “first respondents” since March this year. Together, we also acknowledged the strain that had started taking on us and how our faiths have provided us with anchors and beacons of hope. (A remarkably exciting exchange of ideas, which I will share with you on another occasion)

I know that all of us can share personal experiences of the cost of the pandemic to our families and ourselves. The sheer isolation and emotional distance we are experiencing are real.

Darshan and I reflected on St Francis’ message to a stressed and tired world. To our conversation and sharing, Darshan also added two other names. The first name was St. Padre Pio. We talked about him because his life and witness to Jesus had influenced our lives since our novitiate days. I will tell you how he influenced our lives a little later.

The other important person we spoke about was Venerable Carlo Acutis, a young person who is on his way to being made a saint. I think he is the youngest person in the last twenty years who is being made a saint.

St Francis, St Padre Pio, and Venerable Carlo Acutis are interconnected and bring a message we need to hear now. Let me briefly share information about these people with you.

Francis was born in 1181, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant of Assisi. Although christened John, he was always known as Francis (the Frenchman) because his mother was from Provence.

As a young man, Francis took an active part in the city's social life. He also saw service in a petty war with nearby Perugia, which led to a spell as a prisoner of war. On his release, he turned his back on warfare. He continued to be involved in the social life of Assisi, but now a strain of seriousness became increasingly apparent.

As he was feeling his way towards his new vocation, he knelt before a Byzantine-style crucifix in the half-ruined church of San Damiano and prayed. The crucifix seemed to speak to him, “Francis, go and rebuild my church, which you see is in ruins.” With typical compulsiveness, he sold some goods belonging to his father to pay for the church's repairs and went to live with the priest of San Damiano.

A long and bitter altercation with his father culminated in the famous scene before the Bishop of Assisi. Francis renounced his earthly father and all his wealth, even to the clothes he was then wearing. Dressed in a grey-brown peasant’s smock that the bishop gave him and with a piece of rope for a belt, Francis began a life of poverty, preaching the love of Christ.