On the Road with Francis of Assisi Read Online Free PDF

including the Pope. One particularly gruesome incident would occur in July 1216, when Pope Innocent III died suddenly of an embolism in Perugia while on a countrywide tour raising recruits for the Fifth Crusade. Pending the funeral rites, his body was locked for safekeeping in the cathedral, where it quickly began to rot in the heat. Upon hearing of the Pope’s death, Francis hurried to Perugia, to discover not only that the body was decaying but that thieves had broken in and stripped the body of all its clothes and Papal trappings.
    My husband and I enter the duomo with some trepidation—two other Popes, one of whom was poisoned to death, are buried there—but its vast, Baroque space seems benign. Mass is being said in a side chapel, and we linger, listening to the music of the liturgy. The cathedral has been rebuilt since the time of Francis, so there is no physical remnant of him there, but there is a great deal of Franciscan history.
    Soon after Pope Innocent III died—and rotted—there, Francis was propelled by another dream to return to the duomo to meet with the new Pope, Honorius III. In this dream, which Francis had at the Porziuncola, his tiny chapel near Assisi, Jesus instructed him to ask the new Pope for a favor that would please God and bring salvation for humankind. Honorius was startled and his college of cardinals highly resistant when Francis asked the extraordinary favor: the Papal pardon of sin and remission of punishment to every single person who came to confess at the Porziuncola. Such a Papal indulgence was the carrot the Church offered to those who went off on the Crusades to slay the heathens, and its persuasive value would be severely diminished if redemption were available locally. But Francis persisted and the Pope finally relented, albeit with a restriction. Instead of the indulgence being granted to penitents every day, as Francis asked, it would be limited to one day a year, August 2. Francis returned home in ecstasy, saying, “I shall send them all to Paradise.” Who knows whether he succeeded, but the Porziuncola Indulgence started bringing thousands of penitents to Assisi on August 2; one chronicle in 1582 numbered them at over one hundred thousand.
    We leave Perugia for the comfortable villa we have rented just north of of the town, so different from the dungeon where Francis spent that miserable year while his father negotiated for his release. Yet Francis’s biographers claim he remained cheerful throughout his incarceration, to the point where, Celano writes, “His grieving companions resented his happiness and considered him insane and mad.” Francis’s answer to their derision was to ascribe his joy to his conviction that someday he would be “venerated as a saint throughout the whole world,” a boastful prophecy that surely only confirmed their opinion that he was “insane and mad.” And perhaps he was.
    The Francis who returned to Assisi at the age of twenty-two was not the naïve young man who had ridden gaily to war the year before. He was sick, very sick, most certainly with malaria and some say bone tuberculosis. He was more or less bedridden for a year, suffering debilitating fevers. When he finally began to get around with the help of a cane, he was a changed man. He would remain frail for the rest of his life and need constant care.
    His ordeal in Perugia had diminished everything about Francis, including his sense of joy. During his recovery, Celano writes, “he went outside one day and began to look about at the surrounding landscape with great interest. But the beauty of the fields, the pleasantness of the vineyards, and whatever else was beautiful to look upon, could stir in him no delight. He wondered therefore at the sudden change that had come over him, and those who took delight in such things he considered very foolish.”
    Celano’s sentiment about Francis’s joylessness rings true, but his last clause smacks of revisionist biography, for Francis