All of life was a pilgrimage for St. Francis of Assisi. It only made sense, 800 years after his death, that I would go on my own pilgrimage in search of him.
It was 7:30 a.m. in Assisi during the third week of March, and I was standing with hundreds of pilgrims waiting in lines. Beside me, a man named Francis was tracing his lineage out loud—a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather all named Francis, after the saint. On my other side, a young Italian woman introduced herself as Chiara, or Clare in English, and told me that she lived in Gubbio, the town made famous as the place where legend claims St. Francis tamed a wolf. “We really do have wolves in Gubbio,” she insisted.
I had traveled from the Holy Land in wartime to be here, crossing the border into Egypt when my original flights were cancelled to catch a flight to Rome. I had rescheduled my travels repeatedly until I had no choice but to take the leap. For a single month, between Feb. 22 and March 22, the skeletal remains of St. Francis would be exposed for public viewing for the first time since 1230, the year in which they were placed in a crypt in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. We were all here to meet a man who had died centuries ago, a saint who is still very much alive. School groups, a group of Hindu pilgrims in flowing maroon robes, French pilgrims singing—Seigneur, fais de moi un instrument de votre paix—as they filed inside. We likely would never have this chance again.
St. Francis has been called many things: a peacekeeper, an ecologist, a poet and troubadour, a lover of animals, a universal brother, the patron saint of Italy, a prophet for interreligious dialogue. A common nickname for him in Italy is Il Poverello, a little saint with and for the poor.
Yet as I stood waiting to see him, surrounded by pilgrims who had traveled from all over the world, it struck me that I still had more questions than answers about Francis. It is as though we are still catching up to him, trying to discover the world as he saw it.
We walked quietly into the lower basilica, passing beneath the rose window and processing among low vaulted ceilings. The saint’s relics were in a glass case, and his body was laid out face up. I touched the glass, and I felt a shock of emotion as I met him.
It was an encounter.
Today, Assisi remains a medieval town in the heart of Umbria, perched on a hilltop and full of narrow alleys, stone houses and a sky punctuated by church steeples. The town looks over the village of Santa Maria degli Angeli below in the valley, where Francis and his first companions were based, and the mountains above lead to Eremo delle Carceri, where Francis retreated to pray. The Basilica of St. Francis stands at the very edge of Assisi. On my first day, I stood in the upper basilica and followed the frescoes by Giotto, one after another, serving both as guide and biography of the saint.
I thought about where I should begin his story. I could start with his early life of wealth and frivolity, when, according to his first biographer, Thomas of Celano, he “lived miserably wasting and passing his time.” Or tell of his journey to battle as a soldier, and his imprisonment and illness, which seemed to have brought about a spiritual crisis.
Yet 800 years after his death, it felt natural to start at the end of his life, which in turn circles back to a beginning. Shortly before his death—known among Franciscans as his transitus—sick and nearly blind, St. Francis dictated his Testament, pointing us with his own words to where to start.
The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them, and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world.
Francis begins his own story of religious life with his ability to see the leper. The first time I read his Testament, I noticed only this moment of compassion. The leper is not healed, but Francis is transformed by the encounter.
It took a conversation with Daniel Horan, a scholar of St. Francis and director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind., to point me to the words essential for understanding the conversion of St. Francis: “I delayed a little.”
“Too often, we rush to this immediate conversion, and we skip over the fact that he remembers that [his conversion] took him time,” Dr. Horan told me. “‘I delayed a little.’ He wasn’t ready yet, but something had already begun in his heart.”
It would take several years for Francis to fully understand his mission, and he spent the entirety of his life unfolding into it. Dr. Horan told me that this gradual conversion should give us hope. That’s how God works in the lives of most of us. It takes time to experience conversion. The meeting with the leper happened in an instant, but Francis was still meditating on its meaning until the end.
For Ilia Delio, O.S.F., the founder of the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture, it is important that we pay attention to the fact that Francis was changed through a meeting with a person. The belief that God is not to be found outside of the world but in it still animates Franciscan spirituality today.
“He began to see the world not just as a place, but as a cathedral, where you can find God in everything,” she told me. “Everything bears witness to the living presence of God.”
I was discovering that a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Francis could not be just traveling to a place. To follow Francis is to seek a more open heart.
It begins with an encounter.
The Church of San Damiano
On my second day in Assisi, I followed a trail downhill, past groves of olive trees glistening silver in the sun, until I arrived at the Church of San Damiano. If there is a physical place associated with the early years of Francis’ conversion, it is this stone church, which had fallen into disrepair by the time Francis arrived in the 13th century.
What happened next is well known. It was still the early years of his conversion, after Francis had come back from battle. He was searching for God, still unsure of his path.
In the crumbling Church of San Damiano, Francis kneeled in front of a crucifix and felt a wave of consolation. He heard Jesus speaking from the cross: “Go, Francis, and repair my church, which, as you see, is all in ruins.” He took the words literally. He set about gathering donations to rebuild that very church.
I walked through the humble courtyard, into the church complex composed of the same pale stone as the houses in Assisi. I reached the heart, where St. Francis prayed. A copy of the crucifix Francis heard speaking hung from the ceiling, with Jesus looking down. Jesus is peaceful on the cross, luminous and serene, his head crowned in a gold halo of glory.
Repair my church.
“It was the cross of San Damiano that was the entrance point into his vocation, his mission to rebuild the church, and he spent his entire life unfolding that mission,” said Sister Damien Marie Savino, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist and a visiting professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. “He never departed from the centrality of the cross.”
To rebuild by listening to Jesus on the cross would inversely mean stripping away power, wealth and comfort in order to make room for God’s invitation. Francis and the friars who soon joined him would pattern their lives on the example of Jesus and the teachings of the Gospels: to sell all that they had and give the money to the poor, to take nothing for the journey and to take up the cross. This absolute poverty was not only giving up material goods. It was letting go of anything that got in the way of giving and receiving love.
St. Francis would return to San Damiano throughout his life. A young woman named Clare would leave her family against their wishes and join him, founding the community of the Poor Clares there, the first woman in the church to write a rule of life that received papal approval. Together, they would rebuild the church from within.
I prayed with the Jesus who spoke to Francis and is still speaking to us, in the very church that Francis rebuilt.
The Porziuncola
To follow Francis is to be on the move, in villages, in fields, among trees. I traveled just over two miles down into the valley below Assisi. In the village of Rivotorto, I saw reproductions of the small stone “hovels” where Francis lived in his first years of religious life. Others soon joined him, and together they lived in simplicity, working for their food. Thomas of Celano reports that Francis used to say, “It’s easier to get to heaven from a hovel than a palace.”
After they could no longer live in Rivotorto, Francis and his companions needed a new home. Again, he would rebuild a crumbling church. He acquired the ninth-century church known in Italian as the Porziuncola, named for the “little portion” of land it was on. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it was here that Francis would base his growing movement. Here St. Clare would join Francis after she escaped from her family. Here Francis would live with the brothers who came to join him—Brother Bernard, Brother Peter, Brother Giles, Brother Leo and others—until by the end of his life, thousands had joined the new order. Here Francis would meet Sister Bodily Death.
Today, the massive dome of the Papal Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels towers over the town square. When I walked through its monumental doors, I smiled when I was faced with the most St. Francis-like of sites: a tiny church inside. The Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels was built directly over the tiny Porziuncola restored by St. Francis, so that today visiting pilgrims find a church within a church. I couldn’t believe how small it was. Pilgrims waited patiently in line, as few could fit in the church at once. Inside, a fresco of the Annunciation by Ilario da Viterbo captures the angel kneeling before Mary. The humble stone walls remain. It is a visual testament both to the simplicity of the Franciscan charism and to the incarnation, God entering the world as an infant. This smallness would always be dear to St. Francis.
Today the tiny Porziuncola is a parable of hope. It reminds us that we all have a “little portion” to cultivate in the work of the kingdom. Sister Savino told me that in Franciscan spirituality, the Porziuncola is both a physical place and a spiritual path. Like Francis, each one of us has a spiritual “little portion” within us that we nurture and reserve for God. This space informs what we are drawn to in the created world, and in turn our vocation—the outer little portion that is ours to foster in the work of the kingdom.
The Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist have farms where they invite children to garden and assign them a “little portion” of earth that is theirs to cultivate. When I asked Sister Savino what “little moment” in the life of St. Francis spoke to her, her answer surprised me.
“It’s his picking up worms,” she said. “I just find it very compelling that Francis made it a practice to pick up worms from the road and put them in a safe place so that they wouldn’t be stepped on by others. He had a special identification with worms and loved them as creatures because they reflected back to him that Christ was portrayed in the Scriptures as a ‘worm and no man.’”
She said that often, when she gave talks about the dangers facing the environment, listeners became overwhelmed. “What can we possibly do?” they ask her.
“Sometimes I think,” she told me later, “we would do well to follow St. Francis in picking up worms, physically and spiritually—worm by worm.”
Eremo Delle Carceri
It was early morning when I set out to the Eremo delle Carceri, the Franciscan hermitage in the mountains where Francis and his companions retreated to pray. The path up the mountain begins just outside the city walls, climbing past olive groves, ascending into denser forests. Blue and yellow stripes on the side of the path mark the Franciscan Camino, hiking trails in the saint’s footsteps that run across Umbria. As I met other walkers, they called out, “Buon camino!”
I finally arrived at the sanctuary, built a steep 800 meters above sea level on St. Francis’ beloved Mount Subasio, an hour and a half later. The Eremo delle Carceri remains a true sanctuary, a series of stone edifices with terracotta roofs, windows that peer out at intervals and stone chimneys. Francis and his companions came here to pray in caves, and a small one now marks the place where he meditated in solitude. Yet it is the forests, the wind and the sound of birds, the sun filtering through the treetops that help us connect most to Francis. Here is a cathedral built by God.
I followed the paths until I found a quiet space in the forest, and I waited.
Centuries after his death, St. Francis’ love of the natural world still feels revelatory. The Franciscan sources radiate with his love of creation. He preaches to birds. He asks swallows to quiet down so he can finish a sermon. He speaks to a leveret (baby hare) caught in a trap and says: “Brother leveret, come to me. Why did you let yourself be caught?” He returns to the water fish that have been hooked and cautions them not to get caught again.
Today we are only just beginning to wake up to the deeper wisdom that St. Francis was preaching when he called the sun and moon “Brother” and “Sister.” In 2015, Pope Francis released his landmark encyclical “Laudato Si’,” a call to action to protect creation. Introducing the concept of integral ecology inspired by St. Francis, the pope wrote that “the cry of the land and the cry of the poor are one.” For St. Francis, his meeting with the leper, his encounter with Jesus on the cross, and his love of Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Sister Mother Earth were intertwined. To be “brothers and sisters all” means to enter into a reciprocal relationship of love with the entire world, including creation.
Séverine Deneulin, an expert in development ethics and the acting director of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute at the University of Oxford, told me that St. Francis was a prophet. “When he talks to animals, when he talks to the elements, to Brother Fire and Sister Moon, it emphasizes this web of life in which we are all connected,” she said. “Francis, in his life in the 13th century, foresaw what scientists are saying now—that the moon affects the waves. Today we discover the insights that he already had in his very limited knowledge of the time.”
Now we are learning more about how plants and animals communicate, about our interdependency as species and about the havoc we wreak when we adopt theologies that encourage us to dominate.
“What harms human beings harms the water, harms animals, harms the forest,” Dr. Deneulin said. “Whatever harms the animal world, whatever harms the water, the biome, the flourishing of rivers, it harms us humans. And now you see that everywhere.”
Dr. Deneulin said that when we think of Catholic social teaching, we must now consider creation also to be among the poor. We are called to give nature a voice. “Nature talks to us,” she said. “So how do we spend time listening to nature? Listening to the tree that is being cut, the bees dying because of drought, and then bringing these voices into public debate?”
I sat among the ancient holm oak trees, protected by Franciscan friars for generations on the mountain that St. Francis loved. I listened to Brother Wind.
Gubbio
The hardest thing about following Francis was not that I was being asked to explore the past. It’s that I was being forced to confront the present. As I made my way across Umbria, the world was mired in a climate crisis and at war. Pope Leo XIV had warned in January that “war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.”
On my last day in Assisi, I caught a bus to Gubbio, a medieval town about 30 miles away. Today, Gubbio is full of piazzas, palaces and winding streets. Yet in the popular imagination, it will always be associated with one story. According to legend, a wolf was terrorizing the people of Gubbio, and they appealed to Francis for help. When he arrived, he met the wolf and called him Brother. He understood that the wolf was not evil, and that the real reason the wolf was acting violently was because he was hungry. Francis drew up a peace pact between the wolf and the people of Gubbio. From then on, they made sure that he was fed, and he lived among them, beloved until he died.
I walked past the town square and climbed until I arrived at the small church of San Francesco della Pace. Over the door, an inscription dedicates the church to God and St. Francis, bestower of peace. Today a small museum, the church marks the place where tradition says that the wolf lived the rest of his days in the heart of Gubbio. A stone sarcophagus on the ground identifies where locals say that wolf’s bones were discovered.
By that time, I had spoken to scholars, Franciscan brothers and the faithful about the wolf of Gubbio, which does not appear in the saint’s official biography. Some said that it was a legend. Others said that the “wolf” might have been a person nicknamed after the animal because he caused so much trouble. Still others saw no reason to believe that there was not an actual wolf in Gubbio. Yet everyone agreed that the story points to something true about St. Francis. He was always willing to take a risk, to see the good in every creature and to use compassion to find the root causes of violence. He believed in the possibility of change.
In 1219, Francis traveled to Damietta in Egypt, where the Crusaders were engaged in battle. There, he crossed over from the Christian camp to that of Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil on the opposing side. They met, speaking with one another. Today, scholarship has shown us that the sultan was also a remarkable man, one who offered hospitality to the saint and gave him an audience. Neither was converted. Yet this meeting would reverberate over centuries. Whatever they each had expected, in the end Francis and the sultan met one another as human beings. The historian André Vauchez wrote: “The encounter ended by challenging the received ideas each man had about the other and the other’s religion.” That alone was enough to change history.
I had unwittingly followed in Francis’ footsteps when I was forced to travel from Egypt to Italy because of war. Now, as I sat in the Church of St. Francis della Pace, I tried to consider what that encounter teaches in a time of polarization. It’s the risk of encounter that Francis took, of crossing the front lines in order to meet someone who was supposed to be his enemy, that still speaks to us now. He takes a step. Against the scale of a war, it seems to be inconsequential. But like so much in St. Francis’ life, its impact is still unfolding.
In 1986, St. John Paul II, “moved by the spirit of Saint Francis and Saint Clare,” convened the first World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, bringing together over 100 religious leaders from across Christian and various religious traditions to share their desire for peace. Claudio Betti, one of the founding members of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic lay movement known for its peacemaking, attended. The members of the Community of Sant’Egidio were so moved that they decided to hold an international meeting for peace each year to keep alive the “spirit of Assisi.”
“For St. Francis, peace is not easy,” Mr. Betti, who also serves as the director of Australian Catholic University’s Rome campus, told me. “It requires an investment. Think about the visit to the sultan. He had to go where war was waging. He had to walk through the lines of Crusaders and go on the other side. But in all of the stories of St. Francis, one thing is constant. He always knows that there is another way besides violence.”
In 2020, Pope Francis released his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” inspired by Francis’ teachings, inviting us to be “brothers and sisters all.” Before I left Bethlehem, I had visited Father George Haddad, a Palestinian Franciscan priest from Jenin. He is the principal of the Terra Sancta School in Bethlehem, a Franciscan Catholic school that educates both Muslims and Christians.
“Saint Francis’ message wasn’t just for the Christian world, but for the entire world,” he told me. “I always say to people: What is our vocation as Christians? It is to live our humanity. Humanity and Christianity must always exist together. And St. Francis always lived his humanity within his Christianity.”
Father Haddad reminded me that Francis greeted everyone with the phrase “Peace and all goodness!” It is a greeting Franciscans still use today.
“He didn’t just say this to specific people,” he reminded me. “That was the spirit that Francis carried to everyone. When he went to visit Sultan al-Kamil, he didn’t consider him to be an enemy. He considered him to be a brother.”
Greccio
A poet and troubadour, St. Francis loved to sing. Today he still inspires composers and gospel singers, iconographers and mystics. I wanted to visit a place that would help me to touch his sense of spiritual wonder. I had traveled from Bethlehem in the Holy Land to Assisi. Now I would take a pilgrimage to the Bethlehem Francis witnessed in Greccio.
I took a local train from Santa Maria degli Angeli, passing through the farmland and below the peaks of the Rieti Valley. When I disembarked in Greccio, I was the only person standing in a one-room, unmanned station. I checked a map, got my bearings and began to walk into the countryside.
I continued for over an hour, meeting no one. Then I looked up to see a stone sanctuary built into a cliffside.
St. Francis was spending time in Greccio in the year 1223 when Christmas approached. He desired to experience the real mystery of Bethlehem, to see the poverty and smallness of the infant Jesus being born. A villager named John helped him prepare a manger full of hay and brought an ox and ass on Christmas Eve. Villagers, shepherds and farmers arrived to celebrate the birth of Jesus, carrying torches and singing praises all night long. It was so vivid that whenever Francis said the word Bethlehem he licked his lips, as though to taste it.
I climbed the stairs up the mountainside to enter the sanctuary. The chapel of the creche was still there, carved into the rock, and painted with two images side by side: Francis kneeling in front of the baby Jesus in Greccio, next to Mary nursing an identical swaddled Jesus in Bethlehem.
I closed my eyes and brought together the Bethlehem in Greccio and the one I loved in the Holy Land, naming my family, my church, my neighbors living through war out loud. For a moment, everything was connected.
I touched the nowness of Francis’ faith, of incarnation. Jesus is born in every place in the world.
That Christmas night St. Francis spent in Greccio would resonate throughout history in an unexpected way: in our nativity sets. Today, Christians all over make a Bethlehem in our homes on Christmas Eve, placing Mary and Joseph and the shepherds, singing when the infant Jesus is born.
Pope Francis would capture the mystery of Greccio perfectly in “Laudato Si’.” He wrote: “He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours.”
La Verna
The last years of Francis’ life were painful. Though the Franciscan Order had been officially approved by the papacy, there were disagreements among some of the friars in the order he founded. He was physically ill, weak and with an eye disease that left him nearly blind.
At the end of the summer of 1224, he retreated to La Verna, a wild and remote mountain in Tuscany. After a period of deep prayer, he received the stigmata. He never wrote about it, and for the rest of his life he tried to keep it a secret, telling only a few close companions.
I would spend the last days of my pilgrimage in La Verna, a full day’s journey from Greccio. It was remote and wild: ash trees, maples, beech trees, fir trees and old forest long protected by the friars. The mountain air was windy and cold, and yet the sky shone bright with March sun. The monastery complex stood sprawling across stone buildings, and over the entrance a sign in Latin was inscribed: Non est in toto sanctior orbe mons. “There is no holier mountain in the world.”
Instead of meditating in the chapel of the stigmata, I found Francis most intimately in the natural world. I descended the stairs outside into the Sasso Spicco, a deep cleft in a rock formation, surrounded by green moss and beech trees, where tradition says that St. Francis meditated on the Passion. Here he could place himself inside the wounds.
He had started his vocation in front of the cross, and it had taken him to La Verna.
“Francis spends his entire journey—from the time of his encounter with the leper to his ongoing conversion, seeking ever more intensely to conform himself to Christ, to live like Christ, to structure a community like Christ’s model,” Dr. Horan told me. “By the time he gets to La Verna at the end of his life, he has so internalized this that his body reflects that.”
Sister Bodily Death
At the end of his life, Francis retreated to San Damiano. There, nearly blind and in pain, carrying the wounds of the stigmata, he composed the “Canticle of the Creatures.” Sung in the Umbrian dialect, it is a song of praise to God through creation, an ode with Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Sister Water. All of creation sings God’s praise by being ourselves. In praising we point to Christ, who permeates everything.
“He composed the Canticle when he was diseased, when he was suffering,” said Andrea Ceccomori, an Italian composer who has set the Canticle to music. “For that reason I think that it’s the maximum expression of his love for the Lord.”
Rebuild my church. He was still obeying until the very end. The Canticle is a celebration of the transcendent mystery that unfolded in response: that in giving everything away, a space opens in which to receive God, and so to love everyone and everything in the cosmos.
Shortly before his death, Francis added a verse, praising Sister Bodily Death. He was on a pilgrimage and would meet her soon. He asked to be moved to the Porziuncola, his beloved little church. Today, the place where he died 800 years ago is called the Chapel of the Transitus. It is not an ending. It is a passage on a pilgrimage, from one life to the next.
“He went on a journey, a journey to joy,” Father Stefano Tondelli, a Franciscan friar, told me as we stood together just outside the place where Francis died. “He asks us to go on a journey too.”
This article appears in October 2026.
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