The Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi

My Breviary was printed in 1865 with the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Mechelin in Belgium. It is a choral book made for the conventual celebration of the Office with a full supplement of proper Offices for the Minorites; evidently, it was a Franciscan book.

For today, the "Solemnity of Our Seraphic Father Francis", and the octave that follows, the medieval hymn Proles de coelo is sung at Vespers. Written by Julian of Speyer in Paris just four years after Francis's death, the hymn follows an older melody commonly sung in the proper Offices of saints prior to the 17th century, including the feasts of Saint Anne and Saint Stephen of Hungary.

Regardless, it is a beautiful melody and offers a welcomed break from the rite of Iste Confessor the Common of a Confessor, non-martyr.

1. Proles de caelo prodiit, novis utens prodigiis: caelum caecis aperuit; siccis mare vestigiis. 2. Spoliatis aegyptiis, transit dives, sed pauperis nec rem nec nomen perdidit, factus felix pro miseris. 3. Assumptus cum Apostolis in montem novi luminis, in paupertatis praediis Christo Franciscus intulit: 4. Fac tria tabernacula Petri secutus studia, cuius exemplo nobili sponte reliquit omnia. 5. Legi, Prophetae, gratiae gratum gerens obsequium, Trinitatis officium Festo solemni celebrat. 6. Dum reparat virtutibus hospes triplex hospitium: et beatarum mentium dum templum Christo consecrat. 7. Domum, portam et tumulum, Pater Francisce, visita, et Hevae problem miseram a somno mortis excita. Amen

1. A son came forth from heaven, performing new miracles, opening the heavens to the blind, crossing the water with dry feet. 2. The spoils from the heathens made him rich, yet from the poor never did he fame or goods demand, he was a blessing to the destitute. 3. Together with the disciples he was accepted onto the mountain of light and in his preachings on poverty, Francis followed Christ: 4. "Make three tabernacles", following Peter's vow, whom neither the power nor the omen of this name deserted. 5. Paying grateful allegiance, ye Prophets, to the law of Grace, he celebrates the ceremony of the Trinity with the holy feast. 6. While he as host restores to the virtues the threefold hospitality, and when he consecrates to Christ a temple of the blessed minds. 7. O Father Francis visit our door, house and grave and redeem Eve's poor descendants from sleep's eternal dream. Amen.

Is the Pope a Medieval Heretic?

No, not a material heretic. A medieval heretic.

Behind Amoris laetitia and the general Communion-for-public-adulterers movement lies the seemingly modern belief that all of Man's actions revolve around the need for sex and, therefor, the Church's discipline should accommodate this mild short coming. After the sexual revolution and the pill and its other cheaper siblings Mankind will do what it will and the Church must charitably find a way to live with the fact that a complete discipline according to the Gospel is impossible. It's all quite bad and quite morose, but you may not know this idea is quite old, too.

Popular devotion and piety in the middle ages focused on pilgrimages, liturgy, votive Offices, Requiem Masses, reliquaries, and miracles. Formal theology and Church administration, however, took a decidedly different and less sanguine route. A popular opinion eventually arose among some theologians that Man, in his fallen and sinful state, could not truly live the Gospel completely, even if assisted with the help of sanctifying grace after washing in the laver of Baptism. Before Calvin stated Man was so wretched and sinful that he could not be saved unless God especially willed it, Pope Innocent III effectively said the same thing in a tract he wrote as Lothar di Segni. A frustrated Church combating the demands of a virile and warrior-ruled age threw her hands up in despair and some bishops even licensed brothels (!) in hopes the resident women would eventually become Magdalens. The same Pope Innocent who thanked God for allowing him to live in an age when the Church was triumphant seemed perpetually pessimistic toward the same Divine Institution's ability to convert hearts.

Then came Saint Francis, whose jarring poverty and detachment from the world culled anything other than the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. His disinterest in property, his pure focus on salvation, and his naive desire to live the precepts of Christ's Church to their fullest shocked paupers and prelated alike. Innocent permitted Francis to turn his friendships into a temporary brotherhood and by the time Francis died they had become a property-owning, fully-fledged religious order, unlike the small community the deacon from Assisi desired. A true Minorite did not smell like the sheep; he smelled far worse.

Which brings us to our age, when the Churchmen have revived this downtrodden medieval disposition and attempted to smell like the stench of modern sexuality. Is not Francis the cure to Francis?

St. Francis: Where Reform Begins

The courtyard of the Lateran Cathedral is unassuming, little more than an expanse of grass and brick stretching fifty yards in each direction. To the west is the baroque facade to the Cathedral, to the north is the apse of the Great Hall of the original Lateran Palace, built before the age of Constantine and which held five general councils during the Middle Ages. Like all medieval piazzas and squares, the courtyard became a general market by day and a public forum by night; from the middle of the first millennium until about 1000, the citizens of Rome would attend the funeral of the recently deceased pope and immediately elect his succession by popular acclamation. It was here in 1210 that a Roman ambulating through the day's vegetable, fish, and meat offerings might happen upon a barefooted man dressed in sackcloth preaching a sermon to pigs.

The early life of Saint Francis of Assisi took place during an unimpressive spiritual point in Church history. Three crusades had been waged; the archbishop of Constantinople formally rebuked his Communion with Rome; Saladin had retaken Jerusalem; and aside from Innocent III, the Roman Pontiffs generally spent their time helplessly trying to convince the kings of Europe to undertake another expedition to the Holy Land while the cardinals inelegantly juggled the concerns of the foreign masters. And a young ex-soldier named Giovanni Pietro "Francesco" di Bernardone seemed happily unmoved by any of it.

Francis was moved by the detachment of living in poverty, stripped of the elegant clothing his father's business, silk trading, afforded him. Contrariwise to Brother Sun, Sister Moon Francis did not convert his living standard to Christ in an instant, but after the experience of begging for food while a pilgrim. He cultivated a life in the world and apart from its passions with friends he knew for years. In 1205 he received a vision commissioning him to "rebuild the Church." As a man who understood the parochial nature of the Church, he and his beggar-brethren he gathered to himself restored the downtrodden church of San Damiano. It was only after going to Rome five years later that this vision was understood more broadly.

Francis attracted a substantial following to his vagrant, mendicant manner of living and praying. Poorly dressed and probably smelling quite rancid, he made his way to Rome to ask Innocent III to bless his nascent order. He walked through the markets and trading posts in the Lateran square, through the Constantinian basilica, to the apse where a short man from Segni, ornamented in cope and crown, held court. The pope beholding Francis's deportment and hearing him speak incongruously told the visitor from Assisi to "save [his] sermons for the pigs." After finishing court Pope Innocent walked through the courtyard to enter the then-larger Lateran Palace only to see the man he ejected in fact preaching to the pigs as he had asked. Innocent arranged for Francis to pay another visit the following day, which was preceded by the now renown dream in which the Pontiff saw Francis bolstering the collapsing Lateran.

The Minorites proliferated as men sought to be like Francis, although the desire to be like Francis rather than follow his way, as was normally the case among founders of orders, proved to be a lasting defect of his following. Francis was ordained to the diaconate so he could lawfully read the Gospel and preach to the faithful in churches. He even returned to battle, so to speak, in preaching to Malik al-Kamil, the sultan, in hopes that he would convert and end the Crusades.

At the end of his life Francis became the first stigmatist, something not lost on the people of the age, whose devotion to the sufferings of Christ (cf. Five Wounds devotion) contrasted with the distance at which prelates lived from people. Bishops may well have been selected among learned monks, but they were just as often selected among second born gentry. In suffering with Christ Francis credibly touched the faithful and encouraged reform where most clergy, even the good, failed. And in begging with his friends and rebuilding a local parish he aided in rebuilding the broader Church. And today he is honored in Rome, not at the tomb of Saint Peter, now the symbolic center of the Church, but in the head local Church in Rome, the Lateran Cathedral, where in the north side stands a chapel to the Saint. It is baroque, but quite plain; its pediment and porticos merely meant to frame images of Francis dying and of the Five Wounds of Christ which Francis shared.