A lot of people think St. Francis of Assisi was just a hippie who preached the “serenity prayer” to animals. But did you know St. Francis actually preached on the fires of hell and didn’t say many of the sayings we attribute to him? It’s time to meet “the real St. Francis”!
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.
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And now, on to the topic of today’s show. Next week is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi. I’ve always loved visiting Assisi in Italy. Just a short drive away from Rome. It’s nice to get out. Whenever you go to Assisi, it’s just a wonderful reprieve from the hustle and bustle of Rome. You walk up the big hill and then you enter the church there. I’ve always enjoyed stopping by Assisi. I don’t like the tour groups. Always kind of make you go to the pottery factory down at the base of the hill. I think they have an in there. They kind of make you do that. That’s what I remember the last time that I was there. But I love it. And, of course, I love the Franciscan tradition. Love Saint Francis of Assisi.
What I don’t love though, is when people take Saint Francis or any other saint and co-opt them for their own purposes and turn the saint into a kind of ventriloquist dummy or a parody of who he or she really was. This happens to other saints, but I will tell you, Saint Francis is probably the number-one offender here… or sorry, the number-one victim, I should say, that this happens to. So, that’s why the subject of today’s episode is “Will the Real Saint Francis Please Stand Up?” It’s just so discouraged to me.
We’re going to go into the feast day next week. And it’s so hard because a lot of people, I think they imagine Saint Francis as basically like a hippie, clad in his brown robes, and he’d go around and preach peace to people all… he was just preaching peace and love all the time. And the people he preached to… it wasn’t even people; it was just kind of these wide-eyed, Disney animals. And he’s singing and they’re landing on his shoulder. And he was just encouraging kindness and peace.
And if you think about it, that’s kind of good for Saint Francis because the same thing happens to Jesus, right? I’m sure Saint Francis wanted to imitate Christ in everything he did. And so, Christ ends up being turned into a 1st-century hippie who went around preaching peace and love and joy and nothing controversial. So, people do the same thing to Saint Francis as well. They forget about the hard sayings of Jesus. They also forget about the hard sayings of Saint Francis as well.
When you ask people, “What was Saint Francis’ preaching style like?” They draw from a modern, sentimental view of the man that glosses over this individual who had an amazing conversion, who rebuked his former sinful way of life to radically follow the gospel. And he never forgot that. So, Thomas Celano, this was the individual who wrote the first biography about Saint Francis. This is what he says. He was one of his contemporaries. He wrote, “His words were neither hollow, nor ridiculous, but filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, penetrating the marrow of the heart so that listeners were turned to great amazement.” This guy didn’t preach light and fluffy stuff; he penetrated to people’s very hearts with his insights. And now, how did he do that?
Well, in Francis’ time, the training at universities for homiletics, or how to give homilies, it stressed you want to be scholarly, you want to be precise, but it just wasn’t very pastoral. So, the sermons that people gave were really dry or really harsh. They just didn’t really connect well with people.
There’s a wonderful 1962 film, The Reluctant Saint. It’s the story of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, who himself was a Franciscan friar. And the film, Maximilian Schell plays Saint Joseph. Ricardo Montalban plays one of the other religious brothers who thinks that Saint Joseph is actually possessed by demons to be able to do his miracles. So, Montalban is kind of the antagonist in the film. Of course, Ricardo Montalban, we all know him as, “Khan! Khan!” William Shatner shouting, “Khan” in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And so, the film is interesting. In The Reluctant Saint, there’s a scene where the Bishop is there, and there are other priests, and there is another priest giving a homily and everyone is totally bored by it. So, Saint Joseph of Cupertino lived in the 17th century. So, even there, everyone’s totally bored.
And Saint Joseph’s speaks to the Bishop and he explains the Trinity, what the other priest was trying to explain, but he explains it in a simple, more elegant and pastoral way. And that’s because Saint Joseph, he wasn’t really educated. The movie talks about how he barely passed his tests, that he studied the one thing, there’s only one thing he knew, and it was the one thing he luckily happened to be tested on in his exam to become a priest. So, that’s why the patron saint of nervous test-takers is Saint Joseph of Cupertino.
So, the same thing happened with Saint Francis in that he never went to a university to get this kind of homiletic training. Instead, his preaching came from his own conversion experience. It was deeply personal. And the way that he would preach, it was energetic, he would sing, he would dance, he would weep. He was filled with so much energy and vibrance when he preached to people.
Historian, Mark Galli, who’s written on Saint Francis, he said, “Francis imitated the troubadours, employing poetry and word-pictures to drive the message home. When he described the nativity, listeners felt as if Mary was giving birth before their eyes. In rehearsing the crucifixion, the crowd, as did Francis, would shed tears.” In fact, this was some advice that Saint Francis gave the preachers in his order. And they needed permission from him to be able to preach because it was so important. Remember that when we talk about the number-one fake quote that is attributed to Saint Francis. He told them, “The preacher must first draw from secret prayers what he will later pour out in holy sermons. He must first grow hot within before he speaks words that are in themselves cold.” As a public speaker, I really resonate with that by the way, that if I’m going to go even address, if I don’t believe what I’m selling, it’s going to sound terrible. It has to light a fire in me before it’s going to light a fire in anybody else.
Ugolino Brunforte was someone who collected some of the earliest traditions about Saint Francis. And this is what he said happened when Francis gave a sermon once in Assisi. He writes, “Saint Francis ascended the pulpit and began to preach in so wonderful a way on holy penance, on the world, on voluntary poverty, on the hope of life eternal, on the nakedness of Christ, on the shame of the passion of our blessed savior, that all those who heard him, both men and women, began to weep bitterly, being moved to devotion and compunction. And in all Assisi, the passion of Christ was commemorated as it never had been before.”
Now, you might think, “Well, maybe he was just really motivational,” that he was someone who just wanted to motivate people and encourage them and he was very positive. In fact, there’s a fake quote. If you go to like azquotes.com or famousquotes.com, whatever it is, I’d say like 95% of them are fake. Here’s one I’ve seen on memes and cards on social media attributed to Saint Francis: “Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible. And suddenly, you’re doing the impossible.” Father Horton who runs the Fauxtations blog that was instrumental in my research for what the saints never said, he said that, “This only sounds like Saint Francis’ quote if your idea of Saint Francis is a 13th Century Zig Ziglar. In other words, it fails the ‘sound right’ test.” And I note in my book, there’s a better quote that is real from Saint Josemaria Escriva. He said, “With God’s grace, you have to tackle and carry out the impossible because anybody can do what is possible.” So, if you’re going to use a quote that sounds like a Zig Ziglar motivational quote, use at least a real one from a saint please.
But he didn’t just go around saying this kind of light and fluffy motivational stuff; he talked about penance, conversion. And why do you need penance and conversion? Because if you don’t, you’re going to burn in hell. Saint Francis of Assisi was a hellfire. He preached hellfire and brimstone. Here’s what he said. He said, “Blessed are those who die in penance for they shall be in the kingdom of heaven.” And what does he go on to say? “Woe to those who do not die in penance for they shall be children of the devil whose works they do. And they shall go into everlasting fire.” So, he did not sugarcoat the reality of damnation. That was important for him to preach so that the joy of conversion was even more joyful. What he said to his followers, he said, “Oh, how holy and how loving, gratifying, humbling, peace-giving, sweet, worthy of love and above all things desirable it is to have such a brother and such a son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who laid down his life for his sheep.”
And so, preaching was very important to Saint Francis. And his religious brothers who wanted to preach, they needed permission to be able to do so to make sure that they were equipped and ready to do that. Those who could not formally preach, who weren’t ready to do that, he encouraged them to preach by their deeds even if they couldn’t preach with their words. That’s only because they weren’t ready to preach with their words yet. Notice what might be coming from this. You guessed it. The number-one fake Saint Francis quote. It is: “Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.” So, I don’t know where this quote came from. Mark Galli writes in Francis of Assisi and His World, “No biography written within the first 200 years of Francis’ death contains the saying. It’s not likely that a pithy quote like this would have been missed by his earliest disciples.” There’s no evidence he ever said this. You go back, you can see that he told his religious brothers, he told them, “You can preach by your deeds. If you’re not able to preach with your words.” But that is not the same thing as saying, “Preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words.” In fact, it’s the opposite meaning.
I tried to track down this quote. The oldest source I could find, the oldest source I could find was Daisy Osborne’s 1990 book, Woman Without Limits. And so, she describes a story about how, she doesn’t cite any sources by the way, so it’s probably apocryphal, about how Saint Francis and his disciples went to a village to preach the gospel, but they didn’t end up preaching; they ended up showing, “love to the needy, friendship to the lonely and compassion to the unfortunate.” When one of the disciples lamented that not a single sermon had been delivered, Saint Francis allegedly replied, “Oh, but yes. We have been preaching the gospel the whole day.”
So, when it comes to this quote, “Preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words,” I think some people think that this means preach the gospel in word and deed or live the gospel that you preach. And that’s fine. Although, there is actually a better authentic quote. Saint Teresa of Avila did say, “We must all try to be preachers by our deeds,” but that’s not what it means. It’s the clause “if necessary.” Preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words. That’s what’s problematic.
Imagine if I said, “Love your spouse. Use words, if necessary.” Well, that’d be weirdly. You should love your spouse, and you shouldn’t shrink from words. In fact, some people, their love language is words of affirmation. My wife’s love language is words of affirmation; and that’s not my love language. So, when I forget to do that, we can have marital discord and strife. So, check your spouse’s love language. There’s nothing wrong with words; just don’t make your love only be words. Or imagine if I said, “Build a fire. Use wood, if necessary.” What does it sound like I’m saying to you? It sounds like I’m saying, “Build a fire, but only try to use wood as a last resort. It would be really great if you could not use wood.” But the thing is words, they’re not some inferior tool that we use to share the gospel; they’re essential.
We can do good deeds. Good deeds are important and they’re necessary. In the early church, pagans were amazed by Christians who did good deeds like rescuing infants that had been abandoned, helping plague victims who the authorities had abandoned, that Christian charity and generosity. Even Emperor Julian the Apostate said, “Our people know they get help from the Christians when they get no help from us.” But good deeds alone can’t communicate the Christian faith because there are other people who do good deeds who are not Christian. Our faith is more than just being good person; it’s about conforming ourselves in the image of the good person himself, the one who is only good by nature, God, who has become man, the man, Jesus Christ. So, we have to preach that.
And there’s nothing wrong with preaching. You don’t want to be preachy, but we forget that Jesus was a preacher. It said, “the crowds were astonished at what he said,” in Matthew 7:28. In the gospels, it says in Matthew 4:17, after he heard that John the Baptist had been arrested, Matthew tells us, “Jesus began to preach, saying ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'” Luke 4:43, Jesus said, “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to these other cities also for I was sent for this purpose.” So, there’s nothing wrong with preaching the gospel, as long as you’re not preachy or hypocritical or grating to listen to.
Now, let me go through some examples of Saint Francis quotes that are apocryphal. Here’s the other one: the Serenity Prayer. You ever heard this one before? “Lord, grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to deal with the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It’s the AA prayer, the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer. And it’s not from Saint Francis. The earliest version of it can be traced back to Reinhold Niebuhr. Wrote it down, the Serenity Prayer. But it appears to come from a… The earliest mention of it is in a 1927 Christian student newsletter that attributes the following prayer to the Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. It says, “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped and the insight to know the one from the other.” So, that’s from 1927. Apparently, a secretary at Alcoholics Anonymous noticed it in a 1941 New York Herald Tribune obituary. And so, that’s where it ended up in AA and Alcoholics Anonymous. And then people started attributing it to Saint Francis as the Serenity Prayer. But he didn’t say it. It was probably Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian.
The other famous one that Saint Francis did not say would be the “Prayer of Saint Francis.” You’ve heard this one or you probably have sung this one at mass because of the 1960s, it was turned into a song. So, you’ve heard this or you’ve sang it. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me bring love.” Now, this particular prayer would not be sung at the Byzantine liturgy I attend because it’s not a part of that ancient tradition; it was written about 40 years ago. But I can’t remember the last time I sang it at a Western mass or Latin rite mass because we haven’t had singing because of COVID, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when some of those songs, they kind of sound like TV jingles. I’m not as big a fan of them. I prefer hymns and music that have a much older pedigree. Before 1950 or even before 1900, go to the 19th or the 18th century. That’s what I would prefer.
So, how did the song go? “Make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me bring love.” I mean, I would rather be singing something like, “Blessed be the name of the Lord now and forever, now and forever, now and forever.” So, I hope I did that okay. I’m not a professional singer or anything like that. But when I sing that at the divine liturgy, I feel like I am amongst the choir of angels. What I want to sing at mass, the songs I want to sing, I want them to be songs that make me feel like I am with the choir of angels in heaven who are celebrating the mass with us. That’s what I want to be singing; not stuff that was written in mid ’60s.
Now, for some people, that builds up their faith. And you know what? If these songs build up your faith and edify you, that’s good. That’s great. That’s wonderful. But what I want to focus on here though, is that this prayer, regardless of where it might fit in liturgy, Saint Francis never said this. He didn’t say it.
Here’s the real backstory to the prayer. The “Prayer of Saint Francis,” the prayer of peace, it first appeared in the 1912 issue of the French Catholic devotional magazine, La Clochette. And it was only called a beautiful prayer to say during the mass. So, Augustine Thompson, writing in his biography of Saint Francis, he says, “Noble as its sentiments are, Francis would not have written such a piece focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me,’ the words, ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ never appearing once.” So, that’s what I like. When I want to sing in praise and prayer, I don’t want to focus on me; I want to focus on God, on the Lord, my King, who is the sovereign Lord of the universe.
Christian Renoux, he wrote an entire book on the prayer of Saint Francis. I love that you can get research online and you can find just on some subjects, you can find an entire book on one narrow subject. Isn’t that amazing, the amount of knowledge that we have today? Some of it’s trivial or pointless, but some of it, the depth of knowledge we have the access to at our fingertips, it’s truly amazing. So, he says that this beautiful prayer to say during mass, “Let me be an instrument of your peace. Where there’s hatred, let me bring love.” We don’t know who wrote it, but it was probably the editor of La Clochette, Father Esther Bouquerel, who probably wrote it. And it later became known as the “Prayer of Saint Francis.” How did that happen?
Well, at the end of World War One, in 1918, a Franciscan priest, Father Etienne-Benoit, He made a prayer card with the “Prayer for Peace” written on it, the one that was in La Clochette, And on the other side… One side had the “Prayer for Peace,” “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” And on the other side of the card had a picture of Saint Francis because Father Benoit was a Franciscan priest. And that’s where it all started. According to Renoux, the first translation in English that we know of appeared in 1936 in Living Courageously by Kirby Page, a disciple of Christ, minister, pacifist, and social evangelist. Page clearly attributed the text to Saint Francis of Assisi during World War Two. And immediately after, this “Prayer for Peace” began circulating widely as the “Prayer of Saint Francis.” So, it started in World War One, but then in World War Two, when you really want prayers for peace to make a comeback, that’s when it ended up hitting everyone and people attributed it to Saint Francis. Then in 1967, Sebastian Temple, a third order Dominican, set the prayer to music in a song we now call the “Prayer of Saint Francis,” or “Make me a Channel of Your Peace. But he didn’t say it.
However, if you want something that is similar, that more corresponds to the thought of Saint Francis, I recommend this prayer from a disciple of Saint Francis named Saint Giles. And so… Gills? Giles? G-I-L-E-S. Gilles? Giles? I hope I’m getting it right. This is the prayer of Saint Giles that I think is actually better and more in the Franciscan tradition. “Blessed is he who loves and does not therefore desire to be loved. Blessed is he who fears and does not therefore desire to be feared. Blessed is he who serves and does not therefore desire to be served. Blessed is he who behaves well toward others and does not desire that others behave well toward him. And because these are great things, the foolish do not rise to them.”
So, I hope this was a helpful introduction to the real Saint Francis you should get to know. G.K. Chesterton did a wonderful biography of Saint Francis and Saint Thomas Aquinas, actually. So, if you want to check out a good biography of Saint Francis and Saint Thomas Aquinas at the same time, I would highly recommend that book. I hope this was all helpful for you. Happy feast of Saint Francis, when it appears next week. So, I hope that it’s a very peaceful day for you. Thank you all so much. And I hope you have a very blessed day.
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