Read an excerpt from FRANCIS OF ASSISI: THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF A MEDIEVAL SAINT by Andre Vauchez

FR. LARRY DUNHAM, OFM (Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America): This is our first Sunday to gather as a Catholic community to pray for our new pope, Pope Francis. The name he chose after St. Francis of Assisi certainly gladdens the hearts of all Franciscans.

One reason why everyone takes Francis to their heart is because he is not perceived specifically as a Catholic Saint, he’s not perceived as specifically belonging to Christian people but he seems to be someone that appeals to all men and women regardless of their religious background or lack thereof.

Francis considers himself to be a brother to everyone. He found God’s life not only in every man or women but in all creation so every living thing. And so he could preach to the birds and he could preach to the forest. He even found God in inanimate creation, the rocks and the fields, everything contained God therefore all of the environment is worthy of respect.

He had his own very special vision that kind of launched him. He’s praying in front of this icon, this icon cross in the chapel, in Italian San Damiano, but St. Damians and suddenly says the icon, the figure of Jesus speaks to him “Francis, go and repair my church.”

Francis left the city of Assisi, goes out and put on the garb of the peasants. This wasn’t a fancy habit this is what the poor wore. It had a hood for the elements. He had a rope just to hold it together so he simply clothed himself in the garb of the poor.

Our new Pope Francis has a reputation for service and love of the poor in Argentina, in Buenos Aires and taking the name St. Francis reminds the church of the poor who shall always be with us as scripture says, and the poor whom Jesus specifically lived among, reached out to, reached out to all people, but the poor were his special charges.

Francis who wanted to imitate Christ so perfectly, who wanted to walk in his very footsteps in everything he did, in everything he said of course would write a rule saying that’s what we are to do follow in the footsteps of Jesus as perfectly as is possible.

St. Francis, when he wanted to go on crusades and come to hopefully meet the Sultan, he did it again out of his conviction that the Sultan would be his brother and that he could cross the divides that separated them and he was able to do so. That interfaith dialogue made them really brothers. I really have hope that the Pope Francis taking the name of Francis of Assisi will re-invigorate the interfaith dialogue of our church, give it new spirit and a renewed purpose.

I do hope that Francis, Pope Francis can lead us to a simpler vision of following Jesus that we can focus less on the trappings and more on the poor themselves. That we can look to the way Francis did of pulling people into the church, that we’d be known for including and not excluding. That’s my biggest hope.

BOB ABERNETHY: Finally, since Jesus’s time, one of the most revered figures in all Christianity has been Saint Francis of Assisi. For the new pope to have chosen Francis as his new name may say a lot about his priorities.

Saint Francis was born in central Italy in the 12th century. There’s a basilica there where Francis heard Jesus tell him to rebuild his church. The opulence of that church today is just the opposite of the poverty Saint Francis chose. He had been born rich but gave up everything he owned, even his clothes, in order to live as he believed Jesus wanted—in poverty, caring for those Jesus called “the least of these.” Catholics today still cite that standard, referring to “a preferential option for the poor.”

To Francis, every living being was holy and valuable. He once kissed the hands of lepers.

He loved nature and all living creatures. He preached to the birds and spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. In his name many churches today bless the animals.

In his most famous prayer, Francis asked the Lord to make him “an instrument of thy peace.” He once tried to stop a battle between Crusaders and Muslims.

Peacemakers, mystics, environmentalists and champions of the poor—all of them might well be wishing Pope Francis will carry on the priorities of Saint Francis, as well as his name.

Read excerpts from The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day edited by Robert Ellsberg

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Bowery, the line forms early outside St. Joseph House. Four times a week, volunteers make gallons of soup from scratch and each day feed more than a hundred men.

MICHAEL GREENBERG (Catholic Worker Volunteer): People here personally emulate Christ. I’m not Christian, but I could really respect that.

POTTER: Donations keep the soup line going. St. Joseph’s takes no government money. Volunteers pray quietly before opening the door to those they call their guests, and they protect their privacy: No pictures allowed once the meal begins. St. Joseph’s is a house of hospitality run by the Catholic Worker movement, started in 1933 by Dorothy Day. Born in 1897 to a middle-class family, Day dropped out of college to become a journalist and activist in New York. She wrote for socialist newspapers like The Call and demonstrated against the First World War. She also fell in love.

ROBERT ELLSBERG (Publisher, Orbis Books): She was very young. She found she was pregnant. He said he would leave her if she didn’t have an abortion, so she did and then he left her anyway.

POTTER: Robert Ellsberg got to know Day near the end of her life and edited her letters and diaries.

ELLSBERG: People have an idea that she was somehow sort of scary, because she looks so serious in so many pictures. The funny thing is that anybody who knew her, the primary thing you remember about her, her characteristic, was her laughter and how funny she was.

POTTER: In her late 20s, Day lived with a fellow radical whom she adored but who opposed both marriage and religion. Then she learned she was pregnant again, and that changed everything. Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism at the age of 30 and was baptized in this church near her home in Staten Island. She turned to God, she said, in gratitude and joy over the birth of her only child. She broke off with the baby’s father and raised her daughter alone, still working as a journalist but searching for a way to connect her social values to her deepening faith. The answer was to start the Catholic Worker, a newspaper priced at a penny that’s still published today, and that provided funds for a growing movement to help the poor.

Dorothy Day interview in 1971: If your brother is hungry, you feed him. You don’t meet him at the door and say, “Go be thou filled,” or “Wait for a few weeks, and you’ll get a welfare check.” You sit him down and feed him. And so that’s how the soup kitchen started.

POTTER: Jane Sammon joined the Catholic Worker movement near the end of Day’s life.

JANE SAMMON (Maryhouse): Here was a group of people who really, really were talking issues about the poor, but they were also living among people who were poor. They weren’t just speaking about it from a distance. They were willing to risk suffering for their belief, going to jail perhaps.

POTTER: Day herself was arrested and jailed multiple times. This iconic photo of her last arrest at the age of 75 while supporting striking farmworkers hangs in the Catholic Worker newspaper office in New York. She led anti-war demonstrations for decades and refused to pay taxes. For Day, the Catholic Worker wasn’t just about good works. It was meant to be revolutionary.

Dorothy Day interview in 1974: The Catholic Worker is essentially a school, you might say. I mean, it’s a place where you…where you…a lot of young people come to us…It’s a pacifist, anarchist movement, and they come to us to learn more about this point of view of beginning a change from the bottom up, rather than from the top down—through unions and credit unions. You do away with banks by credit unions…you do away with interest, you do away with…by mutual aid. You do away with possession of goods by sharing.

POTTER: Dorothy Day spent her final years at this Catholic Worker house in Manhattan, where she died in 1980. Now, she’s on the road to sainthood, with the unanimous support of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Moderator at US Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in November 2012: All those in favor of supporting moving forward, please indicate by saying aye.

Bishops: Aye.

Moderator: Opposed?

Cardinal Timothy Dolan (USCCB President): Thank you, good to hear.

POTTER: New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan is leading the cause, calling Day a saint for our times.

CARDINAL TIMOTHY DOLAN (at press conference): So there was sexual immorality, there was a religious search, and there was a pregnancy out of wedlock and an abortion. Her life, of course, like Saul on the way to Damascus, was radically changed when she became introduced to Jesus Christ and his church, and after that she became an apostle.

POTTER: Day already has her own stained glass window in the church where she was baptized. Her image has been made into icons. But some in the Catholic Worker movement are leery of the push for sainthood.

SAMMON: The fact that Dorothy Day had an abortion, to say, well, now she’s going to be labeled the right-to-life saint—to me these diminish this beautiful spirit that was larger than any one particular part.

JOANNE KENNEDY (Managing Editor, The Catholic Worker): I don’t want her to be the saint who had an abortion. I want her to be the mother of one and the grandmother. You know, that’s who she was.

POTTER: Joanne Kennedy is managing editor of the Catholic Worker.

KENNEDY: You can’t know Dorothy Day and not know about her pacifism and her commitment to the works of mercy, although that gets a little more play. But her pacifism gets almost none.

CARMEN TROTTA (Catholic Worker Volunteer): The thing that primarily drew me to the Catholic Worker initially was that there was a Catholic entity that was seriously, but seriously anti-war. It doesn’t appear that some of the bishops who want her to be a saint—it doesn’t appear that they care for her.

POTTER: Day didn’t care all that much for the Catholic hierarchy, either. She was a faithful, traditional Catholic whose life was steeped in prayer, but her longtime friends say she was also an independent woman.

PATRICK JORDAN (Former Editor, The Catholic Worker): She said there were so many popes and abbots and bishops who, they were—those were not the models to follow. The models were the saints, and it was the saints who constantly replenished the church—the saints and the sacraments.

SAMMON: She’d say, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

ELLSBERG: What particularly she didn’t like about it was this idea, I think, of being, you know, treated as some exceptional person who would let other people off the hook.

POTTER: Those who knew her best say Dorothy Day wouldn’t care one way or another about being canonized.

JORDAN: The important thing wouldn’t be that. The important thing would be how well are we doing the work that we’re supposed to be doing, you know? How well are we living a gospel life?

ELLSBERG: There are certain kinds of people, like a Dorothy Day, who kind of stop us in our tracks because they represent something new. They represent a way of being faithful in response to the particular challenges of our time, and they kind of invent a new way of being faithful to Christ, and I think Dorothy Day certainly did that.

POTTER: She also left a legacy. There are now more than 200 Catholic Worker houses all over the world, more than when she was alive, each one independent, serving the poor, and passionate about peace.

KENNEDY: I just truly believe that she remains with us and through her grace and the Holy Spirit, grace of the whole communion of saints that looks out for us, which is absolutely the only way that we continue to survive, we’re just led.

POTTER: The path to formal sainthood can take decades. For many who believe in what Dorothy Day stood for, she’s already there.

JORDAN: I have no doubt that she’s a saint. None whatsoever.

POTTER: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Staten Island, New York.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This week, the eve of All Saint’s Day, All Hallow’s Eve (October 31), also known as Halloween, as it was celebrated at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington. Each year the friars there choose four saints to honor out of the roughly 10,000 Catholics venerate, and the Dominicans’ vigil has become a big draw for priests, nuns—whom Catholics call “religious”—and especially college students. Our guide several years ago was Brother James Cuddy, now Father Cuddy, chaplain at Providence College in Rhode Island.

Brother JAMES CUDDY, O.P. (Dominican House of Studies): On the most basic level, I think you can view saints as being older brothers and sisters or those who have professed the same beliefs as you, these men and women who have lived these heroic lives of virtue and have, you know, given an example of how to live the Christian life. But more than that, it’s our faith that says that the church is all one body, whether it be those of us who are here on earth now, or those of us who have gone before. And so we believe that the saints are in heaven now praying for us and urging us on so that we might join them some day.

There are some saints who are more popular today than others. The Blessed Virgin Mary we actually call the Queen of the Saints. Certainly, we can point to Saint Francis as being extraordinarily popular; Saint Anthony of Padua for anyone who loses their car keys. There’s also devotion, great devotion to some more contemporary saints—Blessed Teresa of Calcutta or Saint Padre Pio.

Each year when planning this liturgy, brothers will get together, Dominican brothers will get together and try and identify certain saints that represent a good cross-section of the church.

UNIDENTIFIED DOMINICAN FRIAR #1: (reading prayer) To this glorious saint, I know by experience, to help us in all. And Our Lord would have us understand that…

Brother CUDDY: So you’ll have some men and some women, some who were priests and religious and some who were lay people, some who were martyrs, and some who just lived extraordinarily holy lives.

We have patron saints, you know, a saint who is particularly associated with a certain cause or a certain group of people.

You hear a reading from scripture…

UNIDENTIFIED DOMINICAN FRIAR #2: (reading from Scripture) Therefore you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.

…followed by a reflection given by one of the Dominican brothers, sort of like a homily. And after that there will be some more chant—a Slavonic chant and Gregorian chant.

Brother CUDDY: That’s followed by the Litany of the Saints, when all of the attendees are in procession walking towards our reliquary, our collection of relics from the saints, and all the while we’re chanting, asking for the intercession of all of the saints.

Pope John Paul II, who many consider to be a saint and might one day be a saint, said that they’re the source and origin of renewal during every difficult time in the history of the church. And so not only are we pointing to these different saints and celebrating all of the good things during their lives, but we’re hopefully encouraging one another to become the saints of this age.

ABERNETHY: Brother James’s reference to St. Anthony of Padua and car keys has to do with the 13th-century Franciscan’s reputation as a finder of lost things.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Saints have been part of the Roman Catholic Church for centuries as heroes, patrons, intercessors and spiritual companions. But the path to sainthood is never an easy one.

REV. JAMES MARTIN, S.J. (Author, My Life with the Saints): The lives of the saints show us that, you know, God makes holiness out of all sorts of different materials.

LAWTON: Many religious traditions honor people who are considered especially holy.  But the Catholic Church has a uniquely complex system for declaring someone a saint. It’s a multistep canonization process that has evolved since the thirteenth century. Father James Martin is author of the book My Life with the Saints.

MARTIN: The Catholic Church has a more complicated process than anyone else on almost any topic, basically. I think it’s important for people to know that when we hold up someone for public veneration, or as an example, that their life has been thoroughly investigated.

LAWTON: The process usually begins in the region where the potential saint lived or is buried. After local Catholics show a particular devotion to the person, the bishop opens an investigation into the case or “cause” for sainthood. A point person called a postulator oversees the cause. According to the rules, there should be a five-year waiting period after the person’s death. But in the cases of both John Paul II and Mother Teresa, that waiting period was waived.

MARTIN: Some people have argued, you know, why rush them? You know, what’s the rush? I mean, they’ll be a saint in ten years, or 20 years, or 30 years, so why not let the process sort of go its normal route? On the other hand, people say, “Well, you know, the pope is responding to the desires of the people,” which is what people always want the Vatican to do.

LAWTON: At the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., Father Gabriel O’Donnell is a postulator. He actually went to postulator school at the Vatican. O’Donnell shepherded the cause for Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus. That cause has advanced several stages in the process. O’Donnell has now begun work on a new cause for Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of nineteenth-century author Nathaniel Hawthorne. She cared for low-income cancer patients.

REV. GABRIEL O’DONNELL, O.P. (Dominican House of Studies): The first thing you have to do is research anything the person has written or published, and then you begin studying anything they have left behind in terms of documentation.

LAWTON: It can be a tedious, arduous process, which includes interviewing people who knew the potential saint or were affected by his or her work. The church teaches that in order to be a saint, someone must have lived a life of “heroic virtue.”

MARTIN: A life of holiness, basically, a life of charity, Christian charity and love, service to the poor often, but, you know, the person has to be holy on a personal level beyond just doing, you know, great deeds, beyond just founding a religious order or being pope or something like that.

O’DONNELL: But you’re also looking for the flaws, because the whole idea of the saint is that they’ve overcome their difficulties, you know, not that they didn’t have any. One of the things that the church is very strong about is that if you can find anything negative you have to make that known.

LAWTON: There even used to be an official role for someone to argue against the cause. It was known as “the devil’s advocate,” although the position was eliminated in 1983. The evidence, usually thousands of pages, must be assembled according to the Vatican’s strict set of guidelines or norms.

O’DONNELL: Page after page of norms and you have to follow each step carefully. If you miss a step the whole thing can be thrown out as invalid, and it’s happened to some causes.

LAWTON: If the evidence is approved, the person is declared “venerable”—worthy of consideration. A special Vatican office, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, takes over the cause, and the search begins for a miracle attributed to the intercession of the potential saint after his or her death. In Catholic teaching, the miracle is confirmation that the person is indeed in heaven.

O’DONNELL: The point of the miracle which fascinates many people but also puzzles them is that if the church is going to declare this person to be blessed or a saint, the church is looking for some sign from God, so it’s what we call the “digitus dei” or the finger of God says yeah.

LAWTON: Any reported miracles are subjected to rigorous review by a panel of scientists and doctors.

MARTIN: The Vatican’s bar is very high. So the miracle, which is usually a medical miracle or a healing, must be instantaneous, right? It must be non-recurring. It must be not attributable to any other treatment, basically, and it must just be the result of praying to that one saint, so—and it must be medically verifiable.  The doctors and scientists basically don’t say this is a miracle or not. They say to the Vatican, “This is inexplicable.”

LAWTON: It’s up to the pope to declare it a miracle, and if he does so, the person is eligible for beatification, although martyrs—those who died for the faith–may be beatified without a verified miracle. In beatification, the person is given the title “Blessed.”

MARTIN: It’s a recognition of the person’s holiness and importance for the worldwide Church, and of course canonization is a much more sort of broad stamp of approval by the Church. But even “blessed”—I mean someone like Blessed Mother Teresa, you know, is already being venerated worldwide, as she was in her lifetime.

LAWTON:  For a declaration of sainthood a second miracle must be verified, and it must have taken place after beatification. That can take many more years. The first American citizen to be proclaimed a saint was Frances Xavier Cabrini, who was canonized in 1946. Mother Cabrini was born in Italy but came to the US in 1889 to help Italian immigrants. Every year, some 80,000 people come to her shrine in New York, where a wax figure lies over some of her remains.

SISTER THOMASINA LANSKI (St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine): She is a person who had many struggles, many faults, many failings, but her life was centered on God.

LAWTON: Sister Thomasina Lanski is administrator of the shrine. She says like all saints Mother Cabrini plays several roles for Catholics.

LANSKI: People actually can come, we have her relic, and they can be blessed by her, and I think it’s important that when people come to pray to Mother Cabrini they’re praying for her intercession. We never worship her. We worship the Lord, and we talk always about prayers through Mother Cabrini to be answered by the Lord. We never say the prayers are answered by Mother Cabrini.

LAWTON: Father O’Donnell says the concept of intercession is often misunderstood.

O’DONNELL: The idea of a saint is that he or she is before the throne of God in heaven and that one asks them, you know, to intercede and pray for us. So we’re all praying to God together, because we believe that they are with God. They’re the friends of God, and it’s not bad to talk to some of somebody’s friends, you know?

LAWTON: Are there people who might be saints, but just not recognized?

O’DONNELL: Oh, sure. Oh, my gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I could name my own parents, at least my own mother, I don’t think my father would. You meet saints all the time. But they’re never going to be beatified, you know, or canonized. No, there—it is quite amazing how many people live heroic lives. Quietly.

LAWTON: Father Martin says he prays to saints every day. He keeps what he calls his “wall of fame,” with pictures of saints and potential saints.

MARTIN: Some of my favorites are Mother Teresa is here as a real example of working with the poor. Joan of Arc, I think, is someone who is true to her vision. Dorothy Day was an apostle, really, of social justice here in New York. Here’s St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order over there. When I’m sick I pray to St. Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes. When I pray for humility I pray to Therese of Lisieux. So they each sort of have different roles, as it were, in my life. These are really the ones I look to as my heroes, really, my spiritual heroes.

LAWTON:  He says it’s spiritually encouraging to learn that saints were real people.

MARTIN: By putting the saint on a pedestal, sometimes literally, we remove them from our own lives, and we make them less meaningful, and it sort of gets us off the hook. We say, “Let’s leave the tough Christianity to them.”

LAWTON: Martin acknowledges that for some Catholics veneration of the saints can border almost on the superstitious. But he believes a bigger problem is dismissing them altogether. In an era of skepticism and scandal, many Catholics believe saints can help attract people to faith.

O’DONNELL: I find that when I’m preaching or talking in a parish or talking to people in general about this, they’re pretty receptive to saints, even if they’re not so receptive to the hierarchy or a priest or something. The holy person, the holy man, the holy woman—this fascinates people still, and I think it draws them.

LAWTON: And the Church teaches that’s the way it’s been for centuries. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: But, Kim, I gather that not everyone is totally enthusiastic about John Paul’s beatification.

LAWTON: There has been some controversy. Advocates for people who were abused by priests say it really sends a bad message for the Church to be beatifying, to be granting honor to someone that presided over the Church at a time when sex abuse crisis was really spiraling. There are questions about what John Paul knew, how much he could have done and didn’t do to prevent the crisis, to punish some of the priests who were involved, and so they’ve raised objections on that grounds. Other people have talked about the timetable. It was a very fast–tracked process, and why not let it take its normal route to sainthood? So there has been some controversy, but the Church says that it’s just responding to the groundswell of support for John Paul II, which is how any sainthood process begins.

ABERNETHY: But that said, there are messages that are sent by who is put on this track and how fast it is.

LAWTON: There are several people who question whether political influence is involved in the process. The fact that some people do seem to get fast-tracked and others—the late Pope John XXIII, who did the Vatican Council, or the slain Archbishop Oscar Romero, very popular as well—but their cases haven’t been fast-tracked, and so there are people who look at that and say, why these guys and not these guys?

ABERNETHY: And John Paul II, when he was pope he presided over a lot of saints.

LAWTON: He loved the saints. He felt they were important for the Church, and so he actually streamlined the process for sainthood when he became pope, and during his almost 27 years as pope he actually canonized almost 500 people and beatified another some 1300, and that’s more than all of his predecessors combined.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Last Sunday (October 14), the pope named six people saints, two men and four women. Among the crowd were 8,000 Australians there to honor one of those canonized, a nineteenth-century woman, Mary Mackillop, who devoted her life to education children in Australia’s vast outback. Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop is her country’s first saint. It’s not every day that an Australian becomes a saint and draws world attention, so Australia has been celebrating enthusiastically. There is even a sold-out musical of Mary MacKillop’s life, which included a brief excommunication because she upset the local bishops. Our reporter is Stuart Cohen in Sydney.

(from MacKillop the Musical): “And we declare her excommunicated. It is done.”

STUART COHEN, correspondent: Mary MacKillop the Musical was 10 years in the making, the creation of a part-time composer in the city of Melbourne. The effort to bring it to the stage accelerated two years ago as the likelihood of her canonization drew closer. Director Anthony McCarthy says Mary MacKillop’s life was well suited to be made into a musical.

ANTHONY MCCARTHY: There’s some quite dramatic liturgical, ecclesiastical moments in her life. She gets excommunicated, she gets forgiven, she has to go to the pope, she meets the pope, she comes back.

COHEN: Mary MacKillop was born to Scottish immigrant parents in 1842. She became a nun at 25 and dedicated her life to educating children throughout Australia’s isolated rural areas. She co-founded the country’s first religious order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, and opened dozens of schools across the country’s vast outback. In 1871, she was excommunicated, in part for exposing a pedophile priest. She was reinstated just five months later, and by the time she died in 1909, at age 67, her order had 750 nuns who were running 117 schools around the country.

MCCARTHY: I actually think that the production is serving a great historical purpose for the Catholic community and as well as the community at large.

COHEN: The members of the cast of more than 80 are all volunteers, with one exception—Mary herself, played by professional opera singer Joanna Cole. For her it’s the culmination of a lifetime of association with Mary Mackillop’s Josephite order.

JOANNA COLE: I was educated by the nuns from kindergarten right through to high school. I really like to portray Australian women and Australian heroines, and I think she’s a very special heroine for Australia to look at, a very special role model.

COHEN: Australians aren’t known for being an especially devout people. But when an Aussie is recognized on the world stage, the entire country celebrates. In addition to the musical, there’s a new postage stamp bearing a picture of MacKillop and a light display on Sydney’s famous Harbour Bridge with images of Mary and some of her quotes.

COLE: She was a visionary and a pioneer, and I think her story should be told from that point of view. I think we should be very proud of the fact that this fabulous woman was born here in Australia and had such an effect on us.

COHEN: The Australian government has even taken the unusual step of copyrighting Mary MacKillop’s name and image to protect the memory of the country’s new national hero from over-commercialization.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Stuart Cohen in Sydney.

Pope Benedict XVI’s first official visit to Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, came at a time when emotions in the local religious community range from devotion to ambivalence toward the pope. The stated purpose of the papal visit was to mark the 800th anniversary of the conversion of Italy’s patron saint. Little was said, however, about the rocky relationship Benedict has had with local friars over the past two years.

The pope’s eleven-hour pilgrimage on June 17 included stops at primary sites in and around Assisi associated with Francis’s life and mission. Between 1205 and 1207, in a sometimes tortured process, the future saint, then the twenty-five year-old son of a wealthy clothier named Pietro Bernadone, ultimately renounced his flamboyant lifestyle as “king of partying” (as Benedict put it), his bond with his father, and all associated worldly undertakings in order to embrace a life of simplicity, poverty, and devotion to the gospel.

Prior to his conversion, Francis had been known among townspeople and his peers as a poet, a warrior, and a lady’s man. His popularity had indeed won him the title “dominus” or king of the rowdy youth who prowled Assisi’s streets at night drinking and singing. This made his turn-around all the more shocking for the locals. Ultimately, the same qualities that endeared him to his partying friends inevitably commanded a following of many who embraced his radical expression of Christian fidelity.

The turnout in Assisi for Pope Benedict was underwhelming. The centerpiece of the day was the Mass in a courtyard below the Basilica of Saint Francis, which houses the saint’s tomb. A friar in attendance in the upper piazza said the numbers “weren’t even close” to what he and others had anticipated. In the lower piazza, where the pope addressed the crowd, some seats remained empty.

In November 2005, the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI issued a decree tightening ecclesial control of the primary holy sites of Francis. Benedict revoked both the autonomy granted the Franciscans by Pope Paul VI in 1969 and their authority to serve as hosts and ambassadors and made all events in Assisi contingent upon the approval of Bishop Domenico Sorrentino, whom Benedict dispatched to the diocese in February last year.

Benedict’s decree seemed to have been propelled by controversy surrounding Assisi after a peace summit convened there in 1986 by John Paul II. Critics at the time claimed the event created an atmosphere of confusion about the unique identity of Catholic belief. The Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Muslims, Shintoists, Buddhists, and others gathered in Assisi to pray for peace, hosted by the Catholic Church as part of the affirmation of the United Nation’s Year for World Peace.

Such a gathering of disparate religious elements praying together in a Christian pilgrimage town spawned fear within the conservative curia that the Catholic identity of their saint might be compromised. In 1986, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, serving as the Vatican’s doctrinal czar, was quoted as stating the Assisi gathering “cannot be the model” for interfaith dialogue. Since taking the papal throne, Benedict has had a strong hand in reasserting Catholicism’s exclusive Christian identity and avoiding any appearance of religious relativism. Francis, he said recently, “was above all a convert,” apparently in an effort to emphasize the saint’s own identification with Christianity.

John Paul II went on to sponsor two more interreligious summits in Assisi, in 1993 and 2002, and in 2000 Ratzinger’s office at the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, released a declaration endorsed by John Paul that tried to allay further confusion. The document, titled Dominus Iesus, reiterated the basic Christian assertion that humanity finds salvation only through Jesus Christ. This, in turn, prompted some outside the Christian camp to accuse the Catholic Church of intolerance. Ratzinger attended the 2002 event in Assisi, and the following year he wrote that it is “indisputable that the Assisi meetings, especially in 1986, were misinterpreted by many people.”

Last Sunday in Assisi, Benedict’s only mention of John Paul’s first interfaith event there was couched positively: “In the current context I cannot forget the initiative of my predecessor of holy memory, John Paul II, who convened here in 1986 representatives of Christian confessions and different religions of the world for a meeting of prayer for peace. It was a moment of grace, as I confirmed some months ago in my letter to the bishop of this town on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of that event [in September 2006]. [John Paul's] choice to celebrate that meeting in Assisi was inspired from the testimony of Francis himself, as a man of peace, to whom many from other cultural and religious positions look at with sympathy.”

Benedict said that in Francis’s hometown, the “city of peace,” he felt a duty to make a heartfelt appeal for peace. He wished “all armed conflicts that bloody the Earth may cease and weapons may go silent and so that everywhere hate gives way to love, offense to forgiveness and discord to union.”

During his visit to Assisi’s Cathedral of San Rufino, the seat of the bishop, Benedict also made an appeal to friars and sisters from all branches of Franciscans not to make themselves “islands” by isolating themselves from the larger Catholic community.

Francis remains among the Catholic Church’s most popular and most controversial saints. His popularity springs from his unbending devotion to simplicity, humility, and advocacy for common people and those on the fringe of society. He commanded the devotion of thousands during his short life. Therefore his movement proved beneficial, keeping lay people engaged in the Catholic Church. Since saints kept faith alive in the hearts of the people, Pope Gregory IX hastily canonized Francis in 1228, two years after his death. Canonization, however, requires that saints must be proven to have been heroically virtuous (among other things). In the case of Francis, he was indeed “heroic in virtue,” but only after the very messy beginnings of his wild youth. This prompted several rewrites of various versions of his life, which in turn have made historical examination of the saint contentious.

As Benedict concluded in Assisi: “His impassioned prayers reveal his way of living according to the form of the holy Gospel, his choice of poverty and to seek Christ in the face of the poor. His conversion to Christ reveals virtue that can apply to the grand themes of our time in the search for peace, the safeguard of nature, and the promotion of dialogue between all humanity. Francis is a true teacher in these things.”

Wendy Murray’s book, A Mended and Broken Heart: The Life of Francis of Assisi, is forthcoming next April from Basic Books.