The following notes contain material partly produced by their author and partly taken from miscellaneous articles on the internet.
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (c. 1181 – 3 October 1226), known as Francis of Assisi, was an Italian mystic, poet and Catholic friar who founded the religious order of the Franciscans. Inspired to lead a Christian life of poverty, he became a beggar and itinerant preacher.
One of the most venerated figures in Christianity, Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 16 July 1228. He is commonly portrayed wearing a brown habit with a rope tied around his waist, featuring three knots symbolizing the three Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
In 1219, he went to Egypt in an attempt to convert the sultan al-Kamil and put an end to the conflict of the Fifth Crusade. In 1223, he arranged for the first live nativity scene as part of the annual Christmas celebration in Greccio. According to Christian tradition, in 1224 Francis received the stigmata during the apparition of a Seraphic angel in a religious ecstasy.
Francis is associated with patronage of animals and the environment. He was noted for his devotion to the Eucharist. Along with Catherine of Siena, he was designated patron saint of Italy.
Key to understanding Francis’ witness to the Eucharist is the self-emptying of Jesus. St. Paul calls it the kenosis (Philippians 2); it expresses the generosity of God, the astounding humility of God. The kenosis begins with the incarnation and Paschal Mystery and is continued in the Eucharist. Kenosis another way of talking about the poverty of God. Is there anything poorer than a small piece of bread, drop of wine? Daily condescension of the Eucharist.
Francis never used the word Eucharist to describe the sacrament of the altar, but always “the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This avoided seeing the Eucharist as a thing: it is the dynamic person of Jesus present among us as He was in Galilee and now is in Heaven. It is His living, breathing reality and presence which comes down to us each day “from the bosom of the Father upon the altar.” He is talking of the Real Presence, of course, but, in the Holy Spirit, Francis’ sense of this presence is characteristically lively, concrete and intimate. Jesus came to him personally in Communion.
Let those who believe that Jesus truly is the Son of God also believe that the bread and wine we see with our bodily eyes are “His most holy Body and Blood living and true.” Francis urges those who do not believe in this great gift, who cannot discern the true presence with “spiritual eyes” to refrain from receiving it lest they incur judgment on themselves, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians. St. Francis repeats this warning throughout his writings. Perhaps we could put it this way: if you don’t believe it, don’t receive it.
St. Francis also preached the connection between receiving the Eucharist and living our lives in accordance with the will of God. Our Communion must lead to eradicating vice and sin, to producing worthy fruits of penance by loving God and neighbour in concrete ways. Francis teaches that Jesus presents himself humbly in the Eucharist so that we will both be reconciled to God and grow in imitation of Him. To receive the gift of the Eucharist means to try and understand why Jesus so lovingly offered it to us, and to reciprocate in the same terms.
Returning to the humility of Jesus in the Eucharist, Francis wrote in a letter to all the friars: “O wonderful loftiness and stupendous dignity! O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! The Lord of the universe, God and Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under an ordinary piece of bread! Brothers, look at the humility of God and pour out your hearts before Him!” Becoming bread to save us is what makes God so lovable, good, magnificent and splendid for Francis. God holds nothing back, and this is the poverty and humility of God.
In the same letter, Francis exclaims that there is only one possible response to such divine generosity and humility: “Humble yourselves that you may be exalted by him! Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that He Who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally!” This is rooted in our baptism by which we bear the image and likeness of Christ. As He has done for us, so we must do for Him: be as generous and humble with God as God has been with us. To priests, he wrote that since the Lord puts Himself into your hands and you touch Him daily, do you refuse to recognize that you must come into His hands?
In his letters and other writings, Francis frequently refers to the need to show great respect for the most holy body and blood of the Lord who gives himself completely to us. In the first place, anything that relates to the sacrifice of the Mass must be clean. In his letter to the Franciscan clergy, he urges negligent priests to “consider how very dirty are the chalices, corporals, and altar-linens upon which His Body and Blood are sacrificed.”
He repeats this exhortation in his letter to the friars in charge of Franciscan houses urging them to “humbly beg the clergy to … hold as precious the chalices, corporals, appointments of the altar, and everything that pertains to the sacrifice.” And in his letter to all the friars of the order, he urges once again that all vessels and liturgical items, including the books that contain Christ’s holy words, be treated with the reverence due them.
In all of this, Francis is reflecting not only his own reverence for the body and blood of Christ, but also recent Church attempts to address what appears to have been a widespread laxity when it came to honouring the Eucharist.
St. Francis also instructs the friars to make sure that the Sacrament be placed and locked up in a precious place, in accordance with the 4thLateran Council (this was an era in which there were as yet no tabernacles). His concern was that when everything concerned with the Eucharist is not properly done, it leads to a weakening in the sense of the real Presence (and vice-versa). In an admonition to the friars, he insists that we must see the “sacrament sanctified by the words of the Lord upon the altar … according to the Spirit and the Divinity.”
Francis remarks how this awesome and exalted humility and humble awesomeness is, unbelievably, extended to us every day. In his own words, “O how holy and how loving, gratifying, humbling, peace-giving, sweet, worthy of love, and above all things, desirable: to have such a Brother and such a Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,” who offered himself and still offers himself for us.
The stigmata received by St. Francis two years before his death represent for me a powerful expression of his Eucharistic witness. On the one hand, the stigmata make us think spontaneously of the blood of Christ, his bleeding wounds. But on the other hand, the blood obviously flows from his body. When we remember that Francis preferred to speak in concrete terms, not of the Eucharist, but of the Body and Blood of the Lord, then in some way the Lord is honouring that by conferring on him this incredible grace of crucified union with him, both on the Cross and in the Eucharist.
St. Bonaventure, in his Life of St. Francis, describes Francis as being more inflamed than usual with the love of God as he began a special time of prayer at La Verna in September of 1224. “His unquenchable fire of love for the good Jesus,” Bonaventure writes, “was fanned into such a blaze of flames that so many waters could not quench so powerful a love” (see Song of Songs 8:6–7).
Bonaventure goes on: “While Francis was praying on the mountainside, he saw a Seraph with six fiery and shining wings descend from the height of heaven. And when in swift flight the Seraph had reached a spot in the air near the man of God, there appeared between the wings the figure of a man crucified, with his hands and feet extended in the form of a cross and fastened to a cross. Two of the wings were lifted above his head, two were extended for flight and two covered his whole body.
“When Francis saw this, he was overwhelmed and his heart was flooded with a mixture of joy and sorrow. He rejoiced because of the gracious way Christ looked upon him under the form of a Seraph, but the fact that he was fastened to a cross pierced his soul with a sword of compassionate sorrow.” When the vision disappeared, writes Bonaventure, Francis was left with a “marvellous ardour” in his heart. At the same time, there “was imprinted on his body markings that were no less marvellous.” These markings were the stigmata, the wounds of Christ crucified. Apart, possibly, from St. Paul, Francis was the first in the history of the church to be known as stigmatic.
The Seraphs in the vision of Francis refer to the angels closest to God, burning with love as they bow before God, shouting, “Holy, holy, holy!” Their fiery wings suggest the flaming intensity of God’s love that Christ communicated to Francis, which, in turn, set Francis’ heart afire. The word seraphic is often used to describe Francis’ passionate style of relating to God and is often applied to the Franciscan Order, which is sometimes called the Seraphic Order.
Then we can think of “the gracious way that Christ looked upon him.” This is something of a repeat of the vision Francis had in the beginning of his spiritual life in which “Jesus appeared to him fastened on a cross. Francis’ soul melted at the sight, and the memory of Christ’s passion was so impressed on the innermost recesses of his heart that from that hour whenever Christ’s crucifixion came to mind, Francis could scarcely contain his sighs . . .” (Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis).
In themselves, sickness and suffering are tragic and senseless. But Christ has sanctified even the wounds of human nature. This terrible scourge can be changed into a blessing by being united to the sufferings of Christ. Many people feel that this sublime privilege does not count for them. They are not good enough. Their sickness is not that important. They believe it is a punishment. But Christ wants to take your individual suffering and unite it to his.
Of all the statements about our continuing Christ’s life, none is more astounding that this: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24). Francis received the highest proof of Christ’s love and need of him when his body was literally put on a cross with Christ by the reality of the five wounds of the stigmata.
We ask St. Francis to obtain for our parishes something of the grace of Eucharistic love and devotion which he had. As our second saint on the litany or cenacle of Eucharistic saints to help the revival of the Eucharist in our parishes, he reflects and ratifies the Eucharistic realism of St. Ignatius of Antioch, our first saint. If we truly realize in faith that the Real Presence is real, all of the strength and power, passion and tenderness of Francis with regard to the Eucharist flows, as water from a fountain.