St. Francis of Assisi: 800th anniversary of the stigmata
By Father Bobby Barbato, OFM Cap.
“Henceforth, let no man trouble me, for I bear the brand marks of Jesus in my body.” (Gal 6:7)
These words of St. Paul are meant to remind us how important it is to be formed by the passion and death of Jesus and enter into His resurrection. They remind us, too, that following Christ is something that involves not only our minds and our hearts, but also our bodies. When we fast, pray and do acts of mercy and compassion, we use the bodies God has made to express our love of God and neighbor.
In the history of the Church, however, there has always been the temptation to leave our bodies behind, or to consider them and everything else material as evil. We have to be reminded what it says in the Book of Genesis: “God saw everything He had made and He found it very good.” (Gn 1:31)
During the lifetime of St. Francis, there were various movements that embraced dualism, proclaiming that the spiritual was good and the material was bad. The saint from Assisi was tempted to follow these groups, but always remembered the profound truth found in the Gospel: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). While Francis did not deny the reality of sin and the ways our bodies could be used for evil, he reminded his followers:
“Consider, O human being, in what great excellence the Lord God has placed you, for He created and formed you to the image of His beloved Son according to the body and to His likeness according to the Spirit.”1
Francis embraced the faith of the Church, which reminds us that we have to use our bodies, made in the image of God, as part of our journey back to the Father. The Lord Himself confirmed Francis’ conviction that our bodies also are part of God’s plan when a wondrous thing happened: God imprinted on Francis’ body the marks of the passion of Jesus Christ, often called the stigmata. God has done the same in various times in the history of the Church, most famously in our own times with St. Pio (Padre Pio). St. Francis, however, is believed to be one of the first to receive this gift, in September of 1224.
In regard to this miracle, it is important to understand that St. Francis did not receive the marks of Christ’s passion as some sort of reward or a gift only for himself. Although humility made him try to hide the marks, after his death they became public knowledge. The Lord wanted to speak to the world through the saint’s stigmata. As we celebrate the 800th anniversary of this marvelous event, the Lord still speaks to us through it.
In meditating on this event, it is essential to know the circumstances of St. Francis’ life as he received the stigmata. It was toward the end of his life, when he was facing a great crisis. Since his conversion in 1206, Francis had tried to live as intensely as he could the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In this he attracted followers, and in 1223 his religious order, the Friars Minor, had become a large and important group, receiving approval from Pope Honorius III for their Rule of life. It was in that same year that Francis of Assisi organized the first Christmas crib at Greccio. That year should have been a moment of joy and affirmation for the Poverello, as Francis was known, but instead he found himself in a spiritual and emotional crisis.
There were many causes for this. He had been to the Holy Land, where he had had his famous encounter with the sultan of Egypt. He returned not only with wonderful memories but also a painful disease. His eyes were affected by a virus that made him sensitive to light, so much so that daylight and even firelight were becoming painful to him. His body was also worn out by his many travels, fasts and exposure to the elements. His health, which had never been very strong, began to break down dramatically.
However, much harder for him were developments in the order he founded. Francis, who had not planned to found an order, tells us that “the Lord gave me brothers.” His Gospel way of religious life had blossomed and grew rapidly. In 10 years the small group of 12 friars had grown to a religious order with several thousand members. Such growth did not come without growing pains.
Francis’ vision of Gospel life was very radical, which inspired many young people to follow him. From the earliest days Francis had been the center of the new movement, and many who came to follow him hung on his every word. However, as time went on changes needed to be made. What was possible for a small group from Assisi needed to be adapted to the needs of a burgeoning religious order spread throughout Europe. Some of the adaptations Francis himself approved, but others were not to his liking. He felt that the very order he had founded was being taken out of his hands, and despite his poverty and humility, he found this very difficult.
So it was in the fall of 1224, 800 years ago, Francis and a few of his close companions went up a high mountain, La Verna, so that he could spend time in intense prayer and ask the Lord to guide him through his disappointment and depression. La Verna was a mountain given to Francis by Count Orlando and it was a wild and lonely place, one of Francis’ favorite places of prayer.
While he was there, Francis centered his prayer on how best to live the passion and death of Jesus Christ. Francis asked the Lord for two things: he wanted to feel in his body something of the pains that Jesus had undergone, and to feel in his heart the love that led Jesus to accept His passion for our sake. The saint prayed intensely, spending most of his time alone in a hut separated from his brothers by a large chasm. He needed to focus on God and God’s will for him.
Sometime around the feast of the Holy Cross (still Sept. 14 on the Church’s calendar), Francis was in intense prayer when he had a vision. He saw a seraph, the kind of angel described by the Prophet Isaiah: “Seraphim were stationed above: each of them had six wings: with two they veiled their faces, with two they veiled their feet, and with two they hovered aloft” (Is 6:2). While it truly seemed to be a seraph, Francis also saw what looked like a crucified man in the center of those wings. He was both overjoyed and frightened by this vision, and when it was over he discovered on his body the marks of the wounds of Christ in his hands and feet and side.
What did the stigmata look like? Most depictions of St. Francis show red holes in his hands and feet and a red scar on his right side (marking the place where Jesus’ side was pierced by the soldier’s lance). However, descriptions of the wounds by those who saw them after his death say there seemed to be the form of actual nails in his hands and his feet, with the nail heads on one side and the rest of the nails protruding on the other. (This is one reason some thought that these could not be self-inflicted wounds, as certain skeptics asserted.) Francis also had a wound in his side that would bleed and cause him pain.
Francis bore the wounds for the last two years of his life, until his death on Oct. 4, 1226. As noted, he tried to keep them a secret, hiding them from everyone except his most intimate companions. He did not want people to focus on him or think him more important than the Lord whom he followed. It was only after his death that the wounds were seen by an amazed group of both his own followers and public officials and others from Assisi.
From the beginning there was debate about what these wounds meant. Many obviously focused on Francis himself, especially on the saint as an “alter Christus,” another Christ. St. Bonaventure saw them as the stamp of God’s approval on Francis’ way of Gospel life (which some in the 13th century saw as not only r2adical but untraditional). He says: “The stigmata of our Lord Jesus were imprinted upon him by the finger of the living God, as the seal of the Supreme Pontiff, Christ, for the complete confirmation of the rule and the commendation of its author.”
While it is obvious that the stigmata were part of Francis’ own journey in following Christ, they were and remain important for Christian spirituality and our own following of Jesus Christ in the 21st century.
As in the time of St. Francis, there is the great temptation today to embrace a type of dualism, a radical separation of soul and body. This may express itself in various ways, either in a depreciation of the body or in a separation of the physical reality of our bodies from our perception of them and our identities. The stigmata of St. Francis remind us that our bodies, in all their gritty particularities, are indeed made by God and a vital part of His revelation of who we are created to be.
The stigmata of St. Francis are also a sign that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is something that can be lived in every age, place and time. Although many people say that Francis reproduced the life of Jesus, he in fact followed the Lord not as a first-century Jewish man but as a 13th-century Italian, in a particular place and time. It is true that Francis often said he wanted to follow in “the footprints of Jesus Christ,” but he did so within his own time and culture.
I believe Jesus gave St. Francis his stigmata to show us that the Gospel can be lived by each one of us now, and in fact it is vital that we continue to take Jesus’ words and call seriously and trust that the Lord will help us to make them real in 21st-century San Francisco.
At the same time, the stigmata are an important reminder that our salvation comes from the Lord, not from our own efforts. When Francis went up Mount La Verna, he felt that he was a failure. He was too weak in body to be able to do much preaching, and his order was not all that he hoped it could be. He felt disappointed, and in some ways betrayed, by others and even by his own weaknesses.
It was at this moment that the Lord revealed to Francis, by the imprint of the wounds of Jesus Christ, that it was not his efforts that mattered in the end. God gave Francis the sign that in the very moment of failure, the power of God is present. In many ways the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was a failure. From an earthly point of view He had been abandoned by His followers, attacked by the religious authorities, and betrayed by those who supposedly were the upholders of truth and justice. When we look on the crucifix, we see the sign of the greatest evil we human beings could perpetuate, killing the Son of God. Yet the power of God was present in that very moment. The wounds of Jesus are the sign that God’s salvation will not be thwarted by the power of sin. This was true not only for Jesus Christ, but for us as His followers.
The stigmata are not so important for what they tell us about St. Francis but what they reveal about Jesus Christ and the place of His Gospel in our lives. Still, the life of each saint is an encouragement to those of us who study and admire them. The stigmata of St. Francis have shown to countless generations the continuing power of God’s love for us all. Francis’ unique way of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to life was a grace for the Church of his time as well as for ours. In a time of cynicism and division, Francis of Assisi reminds that Jesus is not just some great historical figure, but a real living person who can help us overcome sin and selfishness not by avoiding the sufferings life can bring, but by embracing them with love.
As we celebrate the 800th anniversary of St. Francis receiving the stigmata on Mount La Verna in Italy, we ask that here and now we can share in the sufferings of Christ and also experience the love which led God to send His only Son into our midst.
Father Bobby Barbato, OFM Cap. is the rector of the National Shrine of St. Francis in San Francisco.