by Wendy Murray
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.
