Today marks the 800th anniversary of the death (transitus) of Saint Francis of Assisi, who is perhaps the most popular saint in the Christian calendar and whose popularity extends well beyond the bounds of Christianity (although perhaps not always for the best of reasons). In observance of this anniversary, Pope Leo XIV, has decreed a Jubilee Year of Saint Francis that began on January 10, 2026, and will conclude on January 10, 2027. This Jubilee Year of Saint Francis invites us to follow the example of Saint Francis of Assisi to become models of holiness of life and constant witnesses for peace. (During this Jubilee year, inspired by the “Pardon of Assisi” granted by Pope Honorius III to Saint Francis, a plenary indulgence is granted by the Pope to all faithful who make a pilgrimage to any Franciscan conventual church or place of worship dedicated to Saint Francis in any part of the world, under the usual conditions of sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion, and prayer for the Holy Father’s intentions).
Such extraordinary Jubilees are not new to Pope Leo. In 2003, when he was the Prior General of the worldwide Augustinian Order, Fr. Robert F. Prevost, OSA, (now Pope Leo XIV) proclaimed an Augustinian Jubilee to commemorate the 1650th anniversary (in 2004) of Saint Augustine's birth, the 700th anniversary (in 2005) of the death of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine (the first Augustinian friar to be canonized), and the 750th anniversary (in 2006) of the "Grand Union" of the Augustinians as mendicant friars. Because of the characters of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, the 13th-century communities they founded are the two many think of first when mentioning mendicant orders. But the Augustinians also were founded as mendicants and share in that special aspect of the charism of Francis and Dominic. "While constantly promoting our spiritual connectedness to Saint Augustine and the living of the Rule, the growth of our order was also clearly rooted in the development of the 'mendicant orders,' a movement that sought to respond to the needs of the church within the context of major change in the social and cultural reality of the thirteenth century."
Elaborating on the values of the mendicant movement, the future Pope stressed the mendicants' commitment to be "radical followers of Jesus in the style of the apostles (apostolic life)," which also involved "a rejection of materialism and of the accumulation of material goods that was found not only among the merchant class but also in the clergy and within powerful monastic communities." Other shared mendicant priorities included "preaching and the teaching of theology in the recently founded universities," a "commitment to evangelize urban society from within," and "fraternal life, in imitation of the early Christian communities, reflected in the community's life of prayer, in service to others, and also in the governance of the community" [Letter to the Augustinian Family on the 750th Anniversary of the Grand Union, November 27, 2005, Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual Tradition That Formed Me (Image Penguin Random House), pp. 172-174].
The experience of the early mendicant movement situates Saint Francis well within the context of the medieval society he inhabited, a society so seemingly in harmony (unlike ours) with its natural surroundings, simultaneously (like ours) filled with conflicts of every kind - class conflicts, social conflicts, political conflicts, military conflicts, and, of course, religious conflicts, (both intra-religious and inter-religious).
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (1181-1226) - Saint Francis of Assisi, il poverello - having experienced a profound personal conversion and call from Christ to rebuild his Church, adopted a radically poor lifestyle in an extremely intense identification with Jesus, and then attracted thousands of followers, forming the various branches of the Franciscan religious family, which survives today.
The story of Saint Francis is always, first, the story of Francis himself, of his heroic effort to identify totally with Jesus in a life of extreme self-abnegation and service to others. Francis' sanctity seems to have been almost universally recognized in his own lifetime (as well as ever since), and his unique identification with Christ appeared to have been confirmed by the miracle of the stigmata, a spiritual phenomenon which was then new and unprecedented in the Church.
The story of Saint Francis is also, secondly, that of his followers, those who came to form the three Franciscan mendicant orders, devoted to living according to his Rule with greater or lesser severity. There is always a temptation when telling the story of Francis to create an inherent conflict between Francis' radical following of the Gospel in extreme poverty and the Church's efforts to mitigate Francis' extremism through her compromises with the lived experience of human frailty. There is truth to this traditional trope, although of course it is also an extreme oversimplification. As his contemporaries already recognized, Francis represented something unique, a following of Christ so intense that it merited the stigmata, and so extreme that it could only be lived fully by. him. Others - above all his fellow mendicants - might seek to imitate him, but their imitation will likely always remain partial. But that is not the same as insincerity or falsehood, but rather a recognition of diverse human capacities (expressed institutionally in the different mendicant orders) and Francis' own unique gifts.
An important charism common to all mendicant orders - and, indeed, of central significance to all Institutes of Consecrated life and Societies of Apostolic Life - is community. On this Pope Leo, when he was Augustinian Prior General, had plenty to say: "Our communities must be promoters of dialogue, compassion, and understanding. Then, on the basis of a capacity to create human relationships of friendship and fraternity, it is necessary to live our vocation not only within the security of our houses and monasteries but also outside of these, where we are called to be a force that, within this world of ours and of the very Church, transmits clearly to others th message that there exists an alternative to the division and to isolation that afflict so many in the world today." [Homily at the Basiclica of Santa Maria del Popolo on the 750th Anniversary of the Grand Union of the Order, March 25, 2006, Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual Tradition That Formed Me (Image Penguin Random House), p. 187].
Photo: Pope Leo XIV prays at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Photograph by VATICAN MEDIA /Catholic Press Photo. Credit: Independent Photo Agency / Alamy Live News.
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