Once I was traveling and I went to Mass at an urban church, a little jewel, run by Franciscans. I was younger, and I was moved to see the brown habits, the combination of simplicity and reverence. Since then I am always pleased to see the Franciscans. I have always sensed that the exterior poverty goes all the way to the core with them. That they inhabit jewels of churches and brocaded stoles as pilgrims and servants.
So I was privately thrilled to have a pope, if not a Franciscan, a religious who takes the name of Francis.
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We are starting to see hints of what "Francis" means to Francis, and it is more multilayered than we all originally thought.
The name of "St. Francis" brings up images of embracing material poverty and rejecting the trappings of material wealth, and bringing Christ directly to people who themselves live in material poverty.
I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that St. Francis's reason to embrace poverty was so that he could "relate better" to the poor people he was preaching to — or worse, so that they could relate to him. This idea reduces St. Francis's poverty to a show, something put on for effect: "Look, I am poor like you, I am one of you, therefore you should listen to me."
We should take St. Francis at his word:
When I was in sin, the sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure; but then God himself led me into their company, and I had pity on them. When I had once become acquainted with them, what had previously nauseated me became a source of spiritual and physical consolation for me….
When God gave me some friars, there was no one to tell me what I should do; but the Most High himself made it clear to me that I must live the life of the Gospel. … Those who embraced this life gave everything they had to the poor. They were satisfied with one habit which was patched inside and outside, and a cord, and trousers. We refused to have anything more.
…we were only too glad to find shelter in abandoned churches. We made no claim to learning and we were submissive to everyone. I worked with my own hands and I am still determined to work; and with all my heart I want all the other friars to be busy with some kind of work that can be carried on without scandal. Those who do not know how to work should learn, not because they want to get something for their efforts, but to give good example and to avoid idleness…. When we receive no recompense for our work, we can turn to God's table and beg alms from door to door. God revealed a form of greeting to me, telling me that we should say, "God give you peace".
The friars must be very careful not to accept churches or poor dwellings for themselves, or anything else built for them, unless they are in harmony with the poverty which we have promised in the Rule; and they should occupy these places only as strangers and pilgrims….
God inspired me to write the Rule and these words plainly and simply, and so you too must understand them plainly and simply…
St. Francis is known as a "man of the poor," in part because he voluntarily joined the ranks of the materially poor. It seems to have been an inward choice manifested outwardly, a sign of transformation, of separation from the materially wealthy world that he belonged to, of stripping off his old identity and taking on a new one. The symbolism embodied in a religious "habit" was made manifest in St. Francis, who literally renounced his old life by making a public act of stripping himself naked in front of his disapproving father.
But it seems to me, from comments that the Holy Father made to the diplomatic corps, that Pope Francis has something else in mind as well when he takes the name of St. Francis for himself.
As you know, there are various reasons why I chose the name of Francis of Assisi, a familiar figure far beyond the borders of Italy and Europe, even among those who do not profess the Catholic faith. One of the first reasons was Francis’ love for the poor. How many poor people there still are in the world! And what great suffering they have to endure! After the example of Francis of Assisi, the Church in every corner of the globe has always tried to care for and look after those who suffer from want, and I think that in many of your countries you can attest to the generous activity of Christians who dedicate themselves to helping the sick, orphans, the homeless and all the marginalised, thus striving to make society more humane and more just.
So far, so good. This is the plain meaning and connotation of "Francis." But then:
But there is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously. It is what my much-loved predecessor, Benedict XVI, called the “tyranny of relativism”, which makes everyone his own criterion and endangers the coexistence of peoples. And that brings me to a second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace. But there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.
So, here is my question.
We know what "St. Francis" is to the materially poor.
How does the St. Francis to the spiritually poor appear?
I myself was raised materially wealthy, but in comparative spiritual poverty. I know something, a little, about this.
And many people are raised in spiritual poverty that goes far beyond what I encountered: a poverty that not only fails to transmit the concept of divinity of God, but also fails to transmit the concept of humanity in persons. Abuse, hatred, exploitation, violent acts against the dignity of human beings are everywhere; and a quieter kind of deprivation that simply values objects more than people and communicates it in a thousand daily acts of obeisance to things.
It has always been a struggle for "respectable" people to acknowledge that physical, material poverty is not generally a punishment inflicted by God on the deserving, or even inflicted by the undeserving on themselves. It is a severe temptation among the comfortable of all stripes to assume that a poor man is poor because he did something to deserve it, or because he failed to do something and he should have known better. It goes that way for many types of physical poverty: the healthy love to blame the ill for making themselves sick through poor choices, the safe blame the endangered for endangering themselves.
When Francis and his followers embraced holy poverty, they became a sign of contradiction. They did not, I think, do so, each of them, in order to be a sign – I think they were doing so in order to become new men and women, in order to transform themselves inwardly by conforming their choices (tastes, even) to Christ, in response to a highly personal, inward call. But become a sign they did, as so many invisible transformations do. The sign of contradiction is simple and yet ancient as Job: here is someone both miserable and holy. Someone whose poverty is as self-inflicted as can be, and yet, undeniably, steeped in the love of God.
What can it mean to be "Francis" to the spiritually poor? Can this kind of poverty be embraced, the way that Francis of Assisi embraced the materially poor? Can spiritual poverty ever be a kind of holy poverty?
And don't go telling me that there's a big difference between the spiritually impoverished and the bodily impoverished, because the spirit is important and the body is not, or some such nonsense. We are not Albigensians here.
If we can say that the materially poor are poor because of a mix of choices (often forced, coerced, and not entirely free) and accidents that played out in a materially impoverished environment —
…then we can say that the spiritually impoverished are impoverished because of a mix of choices (often forced, coerced, uninformed, and not entirely free) and accidents that played out in a spiritually impoverished environment.
Is Pope Francis saying that he means to find a way to look to St. Francis to reach out to those of us who live lives that are wealthy, yet rotten at the core?
What can that be like?
It seems to turn St. Francis inside out, somehow, yet I am intrigued.
I keep thinking of one image. From Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture:
A story current within the Franciscan order told of St. Francis' desire to have friars distribute to all the order's provinces good metal boxes for their hosts, since these were all too often left scattered and neglected.
I picture the Franciscan friars, barefoot in their ragged brown cloaks, carrying and distributing these "good metal boxes" – whatever they were made of, they cannot have been cheap! — for proper safekeeping and display of the Eucharist.
Anyway, there is a paradox here that I cannot quite grasp. I think Pope Francis may be trying to remind us all that the "spiritually impoverished" are not to be written off by us, any more than are the materially impoverished. The "preferential option for the poor," perhaps, extends to those who dine well, carry designer bags, boast of the finest educations, and yet remain — invisibly — empty, fearful, and alone.
Spiritual poverty, the leperous sicknesses that permeate the culture of death, nauseates us, no?
So can we let God lead us "into the company" of those who suffer it? Risking by that our own infection?
Can we, there, discover pity and transformation?
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