Archbishop Viganò: Let St. Francis of Assisi inspire us to reject the vanity of earthly things

Venerable Pontiff Pius XII, on June 18, 1939, proclaimed St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena patrons of Italy. In his memorable speech, he called the Poverello “the most Italian of Saints, the holiest of Italians.” Therefore, allow me to share with you a brief meditation on this great Saint, in order to better understand what are his virtues from which to take example and model.

First of all, let me say what St. Francis was not. He is not that anarchic and ephebic youth birthed by director Zeffirelli, despite the fact that thousands of priests, religious and nuns have drunk from that effeminate and pacifist model. St. Francis has nothing to do with Sweet Feeling, as melancholy and insulting as it is appreciated by modernists. He is not that ecumenical friar who meets the Grand Sultan to dialogue without converting. Neither is he that ante litteram flower child so beloved of leftist intellectuals and street priests, nor a forerunner of pacifists at St. Egidio, or an inspirer of old and new pauperisms. He is not, in short, a “conciliar” saint, even if that precise model – false and ideologically manipulated – is referred to in the choice of the name of the one who occupied the Throne of Peter. There is thus an icon, indeed I would almost say an archetype to which the Saints should be traced in order to please the followers of the Council. If there have been those who have with impunity called St. Pius X a precursor of Vatican II, you can well imagine that even the Poverello of Assisi could not escape this sort of ideological makeup.

Let us see what Francis was instead, as we know him from the chronicles and testimonies of his contemporaries. He was a young runaway who understood how the goods of this world were a hindrance toward holiness, and who chose to unite himself to Lady Poverty, the bride of him who to high cries / disposed her with blessed blood, as Dante recites (Par XI, 32-22), living the evangelical counsels in the Rule of the Seraphic Order. Francis was thus poor, of that holy poverty which is neither miserable nor abject, but noble and proud, because it is confident of the help of Providence. He was a tireless preacher of the Gospel. In 1219 he went as far as Cairo, to the court of al-Malik al-Kamil: on that occasion he wished to face the trial by fire to demonstrate the truth of the Catholic Faith and persuade the Sultan to convert and desist from fighting the Christians engaged in the Fifth Crusade. St. Francis was a promoter of the decorum and dignity of the Liturgy. In his writings we read a thousand recommendations on the respect and adoration due to the Blessed Sacrament, and we know that he spared nothing to purchase pyxes and sacred vessels to donate to poor churches. An antiphon of the Order’s own calls him Vir catholicus et totus apostolicus, and recalls: Ecclesiæ teneri Fidei Romanæ docuit, presbyterosque monuit præ cunctis revereri, he taught to profess the Roman Faith and admonished to reverence priests before anyone else. His veneration for the Ministers of the Most High was such that it led him to refuse to receive the Priesthood considering himself unworthy of it.

It was the Seraphic Order that instituted the Mounts of Mercy and the “frumentari monti” to take the poor away from the usury practiced by bankers and the speculations of merchants: quite a different way of conceiving the economy according to the Gospel than the reckless investments of those who today wear the Franciscan habit…

In short, Francis was the heroic example of those virtues that in an age of crisis and war would reform the Holy Church. This is why Dante shows us united by the reforming mission and evangelical poverty St. Francis and St. Dominic: The one was all seraphic in ardor; / the other by wisdom on earth was / of cherubic light a splendor (Par XI, 37-39). Perhaps someone will still remember, silent and smiling, the begging friars passing through the streets with their sacks on their shoulders, begging for bread left over from the bakers at the end of the day: that discreet and admonishing presence was the last trace of love for Sister Poverty, now erased by the iconoclastic fury of the Council. Today, Franciscans accumulate and squander riches through bold financial speculation operations, denying the essence of their vocation and the example of their Founder. But Franciscan poverty is not ragged misery: it is rather detachment from material goods, to be used for the poor and the Lord rather than for one’s own comforts.

In what, then, was St. Francis “the most Italian of Saints, the holiest of Italians”? We can say that he was the most Italian of Saints, because in him was shown that temperament proper to our people, made up of serene charity towards the poorest and the needy, that charity that so many Orders and Congregations have seen born over the centuries under the breath of the Holy Spirit. A character made up of charity and love for God, of solid and unblemished Faith, of daily witness by example. In Francis we also find that unshakable certainty in the eternal Truths, of that Rome where Christ is Roman (Par XXXII, 102) that still survives in our people despite the devastating action of the modernist hierarchy. He was also the holiest of Italians, for his life was an example and model of true humility, of holy poverty, of total abandonment to God and in God, to the point of receiving the Sacred Stigmata that assimilated him even in the flesh to the Passion of the Lord. He bore on himself the signs of the infinite Charity of Christ, before which every earthly good, every wealth, every pleasure disappears and is annihilated, and has a meaning only if oriented to the Good and to eternal salvation. Not pauperism, then, but poverty for self and all for Christ. Not ecumenism that bargains the truths of the Faith, but apostolic zeal for the conversion of distant souls. Not pacifism, but the pursuit of peace in justitia et sanctitate veritatis (Eph. 4:24), in the justice and holiness that proceed from the truth.

Today’s world, in rebellion against Christ and His saints, has built itself an idol in the guise of the Poverello of Assisi: a false and lying simulacrum like all idols, in which the soul of Franciscan poverty is removed, deprived of its first cause and ultimate end in God.

What is the constant we find in the works of God? The gratuitousness of Love that shows itself as perfectly and simply True. And what is the constant we find in the works of Satan? The price of hatred that manifests itself as obscenely false and deceitful. Satan offers us things that are not his: the riches of this world, power, success, consent, pleasure. And he sells them to us, bartering his junk for the treasure of our immortal soul, which does not belong to us and which we are instead bound to keep pure and holy for the moment of Judgment. But this reality — so obvious to those whose soul’s eyes are not blindfolded by the senses and clouded by sin or vice — also eludes those who think they are free and are instead slaves to themselves, to the world, to the devil.

If anything from the life of St. Francis still remains to be imitated in this misguided and treacherous world, it is the miracle of the action of sanctifying Grace in a soul totally oriented in God, illuminated by the light of His Truth and inflamed with His Charity. A soul that understands the vanity of earthly things and the absolute primacy of spiritual things. A generous soul, able to deprive itself of everything because it already has everything; ready to risk its life preaching Christ, because it knows that true life is Christ Himself. A soul that does not fear deprivation when it has already stripped itself of the superfluous because it has discovered the only Necessary.

Let us look to the example of this great Italian saint not only to rediscover with pride our common roots, from which may be reborn the tree of the Gospel that has made great and prosperous the Christian Civilization of our beloved Homeland; but also in order to rediscover in ourselves, children of this land blessed by God and by the presence of the See of Peter, that genuinely Catholic and Roman temperament, which has enabled us already in the past to see the Church of Christ reborn through the exercise of evangelical poverty, the profession of the true Faith and the practice of Charity.

+ Charles Mary, Archbishop

October 4, MMXXIII