On the Road with Francis of Assisi (17 page)

At the time of the original wine miracle, the gravely ill Francis was living in an “infirmary” cell his friars had built for him along a forest path above the sanctuary. We ask to see it, but Brother John, shaking his head, points to a barrier of orange netting blocking what used to be the path and is now a flight of wide stone steps leading up the hillside. “Closed,” he says. I look so crestfallen that he relents, and scooting under the netting, the three of us climb up what is known as the Via Crucis or Avenue of the Procession, to emerge onto a plateau snuggled against the sheer rock face of the mountainside. It is a veritable Franciscan treasure chest.

There, straight ahead, is the Sacro Speco, a narrow cleft in the towering rocks where Francis repaired to pray. He is said to have felt closest to Christ in such rock clefts, believing they were created by the earthquake that rocked Jerusalem after Christ was crucified. Near it is the cell the friars built for the ailing Francis by piling the easily dislodged square rocks from the cliff behind it. Inside the cell, and preserved behind an iron grille, is the rough-hewn wood bed where Francis was confined during his sickness.

Close to the infirmary cell is the Oratorio di San Francesco, a tiny stone chapel his friars built so that the bedridden Francis could join in their prayers. The gate to the chapel is locked, but clearly visible on the wall is a fresco of a prone Francis about to receive the miraculously healing glass of water-to-wine from one of his friars. And just outside the chapel is a cross-topped column of stones, la Colonna dell’Angelo, where one night, in his suffering, Francis heard an angel sing.

To have missed this moving and utterly authentic panorama of Francis at Sant’Urbano would have been devastating—but there is a reason the plateau is blocked off. The mountain is moving and spewing its rocks and trees down on the plateau, which accounts for the various pieces of heavy machinery scattered about. Workmen on the cliff above the plateau are stabilizing the mountain’s fragile face by cutting down the trees whose roots split the rock and are also adjusting the guy wires and heavy netting they hope will hold the cliff together.

Brother John has to leave us hurriedly for noon prayers, and one of the workmen takes a break to show us a towering chestnut tree, known as la Castagno di San Francesco. The tree is part of the Francis legend at Sant’Urbano and is believed to have grown from a staff Francis planted in the ground to celebrate his recovery. That the tree is said to be eight hundred years old tweaks the skeptical mind, but why not? It is enormous—and plentifully healthy. The ground around it is strewn with big, glossy chestnuts, which, under normal circumstances, pilgrims would have spirited away as living relics. Because we are the only visitors to the plateau, the workman fills our pockets with the miracle chestnuts to take home.

We go back down the stone steps of the Avenue of the Procession, imagining the medieval friars mounting the steps, as they were wont to do, carrying flaming torches and singing praises to the Virgin Mary and Francis. A local story holds that on one night in 1704, angels were seen climbing the steps to pay tribute to Francis and his spiritual legacy.

The medieval biographies do not make clear where Francis journeyed next on his way home to Assisi, but one of his modern biographers suggests Francis and his friars paused at the spectacular falls of Marmore in the River Nera Valley. Only five miles or so from Terni, the five-hundred-foot-high falls were created by the Romans in 271
B.C.
as part of an elaborate engineering project to drain the perpetual flooding of the Rieti Valley. Twenty-three centuries and many alterations later, the falls power hydroelectric stations in the industrialized Terni basin—and are turned on and off by a switch.

Francis and his friars would not have thought of the falls as a power source, nor even, perhaps, as a gift from God since they were created by man. But he would have reveled in the beauty of the shimmering cascades of water crashing down the travertine sides of the mountain and been grateful for the shelter provided by the many natural caves in the area. We are grateful, too, not for the shelter of caves but for arriving at the falls on a Saturday afternoon in October when they are turned on.

We set out on an ancient footpath up the right side of the cascade, which has long since been designated a nature trail or
sentiero natura.
If Francis walked anywhere, it was along this path, through the more than two hundred species of plants and forests of maple, beech, and holm oaks. Immersed in such natural beauty, I can well understand why Francis instructed his friars not to cut down an entire tree but to leave enough so that the tree “might have hope of sprouting again.” As we pass through groves of wild cyclamen and lavender, I can also understand why he insisted that any friar planting a vegetable garden leave space for “sweet-smelling and flowering plants.”

Wild boar, wolves, and wildcats are said to live again in this protected forest at Marmore Falls, and I keep my eyes peeled as we walk along. But I feel so close to Francis at this point that I know exactly what to do if faced with a wolf. I’ll just tell it to come, sit down next to me, and be a good wolf. And it will.

Considering Francis’s affinity to all living things, it is little wonder that the birds flocked to hear him speak along the road near Bevagna. From here it is only eight miles or so to Assisi, an easy walk for Francis and his friars as they completed their journey from Rome. What they did not anticipate, however, but certainly must have welcomed, was the very different atmosphere that would greet them.

The Pope’s stamp of approval on his Rule and the permission to preach transformed Francis and his friars from objects of ridicule to sought-after speakers. The local clergy gave Francis the church of San Giorgio, where he’d had his rudimentary schooling, but San Giorgio wasn’t big enough. So many people clamored to hear him from the Sunday pulpit that the venue had to be changed to San Rufino, Assisi’s new cathedral. Every Saturday night Francis walked the thirty minutes or so from, at first, Rivo Torto and later the Porziuncola to spend the night in a hut in the canons’ garden so as to be ready to preach the next day.

Remarkably, there is no record of what he actually said. It fell to his more modern biographers, like the highly respected Paul Sabatier, a nineteenth-century French Protestant pastor turned biographer, to imagine the charismatic power of Francis’s words. “He spoke as compelled by the imperious need of kindling others with the flame that burned within himself,” Sabatier writes. “When they heard him recall the horrors of war, the crimes of the populace, the laxity of the great, the rapacity that dishonored the Church, the age-long widowhood of Poverty, each person felt taken to task in his or her own conscience.”

Francis also continued to instruct his friars in humility and obedience. The
Little Flowers of St. Francis
describes the trial of Brother Masseo, a handsome, silver-tongued man who always managed to secure the most tasty alms. Lest Masseo become cocky, Francis decided to add contemplation to his education and, for a period of time, ordered Masseo to be Rivo Torto’s cook, porter, and almsgiver, which required him to eat his meals outside and alone. Only when the other friars pleaded with Francis to release him, saying Masseo’s disproportionate workload was distracting them from their prayers, did Francis relent and welcome Masseo back into the fold.

Francis orchestrated another rather cruel trial in obedience, this one for Clare’s cousin Rufino. Rufino, who is described in the
Little Flowers of St. Francis
as being “so absorbed in God . . . that he became almost mute,” was timid and had neither the “courage nor ability to preach the word of God.” Nonetheless, Francis, who was presumably trying to instill confidence in Rufino, ordered him one day to go to Assisi and preach “whatever God would inspire him to say” in the cathedral.

Rufino’s ordeal was set in motion when he pleaded with Francis to rescind the order. Because Rufino had not obeyed him “at once,” Francis not only reissued his order but added the requirement that Rufino preach to the people in his underwear. The reaction was predictable. Poor Rufino, who evidently stuttered as well, was being subjected to ribald laughter in the cathedral until a contrite Francis suddenly burst in, clad only in
his
underwear. Francis then proceeded to give such a moving sermon on the “nakedness and humiliations” Christ had suffered on the cross that the congregation stopped laughing and was moved to tears.

Rufino evidently recovered from his harsh lesson in obedience. He would remain loyal to Francis for the rest of his life and play a central role in the drama already stirring among the parishioners at San Rufino.

Nobody knows whether the young Clare Offreduccio was in the congregation on the day her half-naked cousin mounted to the pulpit. But Clare, whose family lived right next to the cathedral, had been hanging on Francis’s every word in the two years or so since he returned from Rome in 1209 and started preaching in San Rufino.

She was sixteen at the time and Francis, twenty-eight. And an unknowing Assisi was soon to be rocked by another family scandal.

12

Clare Flees to Francis

T
HE
P
ORZIUNCOLA,
where Francis receives the runaway Clare ·
S
AN
P
AOLO DELLE
A
BBADESSE,
where she is threatened by her uncle ·
S
AN
D
AMIANO,
where she pines for Francis, who calls women “honeyed poison”

A
ssisi awoke on March 18, 1212, to an ordinary Palm Sunday. The families attended a Palm Sunday service conducted by Bishop Guido at the Cathedral of San Rufino, and each received a palm frond at the end of the service to take home. The only odd thing about this particular Palm Sunday was that Clare Offreduccio did not approach the altar with the other parishioners to receive her palm frond but sat frozen in a pew. Bishop Guido, who is thought to have known what was soon to take place, left the altar to hand-deliver Clare’s palm.

Later that night, in what was an amazingly daring move, Clare and her coconspirator cousin, Pacifica, wrestled away the stones and wooden planks from the family palazzo’s “door of the dead,” jumped to the ground, and stole away into the dark. They headed toward the woods and the Porziuncola three miles away, where Francis and his friars were waiting for them.

The young women’s arrival must have been a moving one. Thomas of Celano, who authored Clare’s official biography as well, writes that the “brothers, who were holding a prayer vigil before God’s little altar, welcomed the virgin Clare with candles.” Other biographers add that the woods resounded with the singing of the brothers, some of whom lit their way with flaming torches. The scene was undeniably romantic. And it grew more so.

Francis received Clare himself and led her to the altar of the tiny chapel in the woods, where she became the first woman to take the Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Then, while she knelt before him, bathed in candlelight, he slowly and methodically cut off all her long blond hair. Remnants of these tresses are identified as relics in Clare’s basilica in Assisi, and while this claim may strain credulity, there is no doubt that Clare was “tonsured.” Completing the induction ceremony, Clare then “abandoned her colorful baubles,” in Celano’s words, and exchanged her fine clothes for the rough, woolen habit worn by the friars and thus, renouncing the world, was “united to Christ.”

In retrospect, Clare’s dramatic flight from Assisi seems understandable. She had admired Francis ever since he defied his earth father in front of the Bishop’s Palace and turned to a heavenly one. She was only thirteen at the time and is said to have marveled at his piety and bravery. Her parents were already talking about her marriage prospects, which filled her with dread. Clare had somehow managed to stave them off, but it is thought that her time had run out at seventeen, and she was indeed betrothed. How she must have wished that she could renounce her father, Favorone, just as Francis did his, and thereby cancel the wedding arrangement. But Clare did not make a scene—then.

Instead she clung resolutely to religion. It is not clear how much of her recorded history is revisionist, but even as a child, Clare is said to have been well on her way to becoming a saint. As penance, she wore a rough hair shirt under her elegant clothes, was so modest that she never left the house except to go to church, prayed for hours on end, and saved the best morsels of food on her plate to feed the poor. She is also said to have secretly supplied meat as sustenance for the friars restoring the Porziuncola.

Her spirituality was undoubtedly encouraged by her pious mother, Ortolana, who had reportedly made three pilgrimages. Omer Englebert, in his biography
St. Francis of Assisi,
writes that after Clare’s mother told her daughter the story of the hermit Paul counting off his three hundred daily prayers in the desert with pebbles, Clare started saying and counting three hundred Our Fathers a day. Even her name was deemed a spiritual prophecy. Ortolana had named her Clare, or Chiara, meaning “light,” after she had a vision during her pregnancy that her child would bring light to many souls.

What Ortolana had presumably not counted on was that her teenage daughter, listening to Francis preach in San Rufino, was falling in love. Just what sort of love is a subject of debate. Was Clare drawn to Francis by his fervor for the Lord, a fervor that mirrored her own? Was she swayed by the example of her cousin Brother Rufino, who had been one of the first nobles from Assisi to join Francis? Was her impending marriage so horrible to her that she would do anything to get out of it? Or did the seventeen-year-old girl simply fall in love with Francis?

In any event, Clare was so desperate by 1211 that her cousin Rufino brokered secret meetings between Francis and Clare, presumably in the woods. Clare was chaperoned by a sympathetic family servant, and Francis, as added moral insurance, brought along another of his friars, the impeccable Philip the Tall. The immediate subject in these dangerous meetings must have been her distress about her upcoming marriage. And sooner or later, Francis and Clare reached a decision. She would not marry the man to whom she was betrothed. She would elope with Christ.

The old Benedictine monastery church of San Paolo delle Abbadesse stands at the entrance to a large cemetery in Bastiola, a suburb of Assisi also known as Bastia Umbra. The church is so plain and unassuming that we walk right by it and spend what turns out to be fascinating time in the cemetery searching for it. Dozens of highly styled family mausoleums line the pristine gravel paths, some designed to look like mini-cathedrals, others like ancient chapels, and still others, ultramodern smoked glass and chrome structures like Giorgio Armani showrooms. One mausoleum is even fronted by a greenhouse, filled with flowering cyclamen and geraniums. And all bear framed, weather-sealed photographs of their occupants.

Exhausting our search, we head back toward the parking lot and suddenly realize that the biggish, brick and stone, rather institutional-looking building we had passed on the way in is the very church we are looking for. There is no identifying plaque on the outside walls, but inside we find an inscription bearing the words “Santa Chiara,” or St. Clare. A wall plaque identifying the building as the medieval church of a Benedictine monastery for women (or “virgins” as the plaque notes) cements its significance as the very monastery that briefly harbored the runaway Clare—and was the stage for the violent showdown with her family.

For Clare to remain with the friars at the Porziuncola was out of the question, so when Pacifica left to return to Assisi, Clare was quickly escorted to San Paolo delle Abbadesse. The Benedictine nuns here were expecting Clare, but they hadn’t bargained on the ruckus that followed her family’s discovery of her defection.

Clare’s uncle, Monaldo, came after her—with a vengeance. Though it would be nice to think that her family simply missed her company, the bottom line, as it often was with the relatives and prospective heirs of Francis’s converts, was money. There is some thought that Clare’s father had died, so she already had her considerable inheritance. If her relatives didn’t get her back, they would lose her family property to the poor. So Uncle Monaldo came after Clare with some of her male relatives and for several days, according to Celano, harassed her “with violence, venomous counsel and bland promises in order to convince her to withdraw from such a lowly state.” The terrified nuns fled to their quarters, which were protected from intruders by Papal edict, but the shouting and cursing continued.

Clare finally faced down her uncle at the old stone slab altar that, on the day we are here, is covered with fresh sprays of baby’s breath and Clare’s favorite flower, roses. Who knows whether there were flowers on the altar eight hundred years ago, but Celano reports that there was an altar cloth, to which Clare clung with both hands before exposing her shorn head to her uncle. He finally realized that she had made an irrevocable leap of faith, and after trying, and failing, to convince her to accept money for the properties she owned rather than lose them to strangers, Uncle Monaldo and his relatives withdrew. But it was not over.

A week later Clare’s fifteen-year-old sister, Catherine, decided to follow Clare’s path. She had been visiting Clare every day and decided one day not to return home. When the nuns at San Paolo learned Catherine’s intentions, they expressed such terror of a repetition of the consequences that Francis quickly spirited Clare and Catherine away to the stouter hearts of another convent of Benedictine nuns at Sant’Angelo Panzo, on the other side of Mount Subasio. It soon became all too clear that the nuns’ fear had been justified.

This time Uncle Monaldo was livid. Two nieces, two inheritances—in a week. Without further ado, he set upon the convent with a dozen armed servants. The wily Monaldo evidently sweet-talked his way into the convent, but once inside, he commanded Catherine in no uncertain terms to return home. She refused. And the legend turns ugly.

One of the mounted servants grabbed Catherine by the arm, wrestled her outside, and started to drag her through the woods toward Assisi. Catherine cried out to Clare to help her, which Clare did in her own way—she fell to her knees in prayer. That was of little apparent use to Catherine, who was being dragged along the ground, leaving bloody smears on the rough stone and snatches of her hair on the thornbushes. But a curious thing was happening. Catherine’s body was becoming heavier and heavier. Uncle Monaldo ordered the horsemen to pick her up and carry her, but they couldn’t. “It seems as if she has been eating lead all night,” one of the horsemen called out.

At that, Uncle Monaldo lost all restraint and lifted his arm to strike his niece, only to find that his arm was frozen in place. Monaldo’s roar of pain scared off his horsemen, who fled toward Assisi, followed shortly by Monaldo himself. Poor Catherine, her clothes torn, her body bloodied, was left on the ground. She was barely conscious when Clare found her, but at Clare’s touch, Catherine’s wounds miraculously healed and she returned with her sister, unscathed, to the convent.

It was obvious to Francis, after all this violence, that Clare and her sister needed a safe place of their own. And it was then that the prophecy he had made while rebuilding San Damiano, that someday it would be a sanctuary “for the holy virgins of Christ,” came true. He installed Clare and Catherine, who would adopt the name Agnes, at San Damiano, and the Second Franciscan Order, known as the Poor Ladies, was born.

Francis and Clare would have a very complicated relationship. On the one hand, he was devoted to her. He referred to her as his “little flower” or his “little plant.” “As the first tender sprout, she gave forth a fragrance like a lustrous untouched flower that blossoms in springtime,” writes St. Bonaventure.

On the other hand, Francis was so terrified of any compromising situation in his relationship with Clare that he rarely saw her. Public perception of his order was of paramount concern to Francis, and the last thing he wanted was even a whisper of impropriety. The Roman Church was fraught with sexual scandal at the time, as it is today, and Francis was determined that he, as well as the men and women who joined his orders, remain above suspicion.

It was not easy. Because it would have been unseemly for the Poor Ladies to wander the countryside begging for alms, Francis had to assign friars to San Damiano to look after the sisters and collect their food. But there was danger in that as well, because the friars were, after all—human. So Francis issued strict guidelines. “I do not want anyone to offer himself of his own accord to visit them, but I command that unwilling and most reluctant brothers be appointed to take care of them, provided they be spiritual men, proved by a worthy and long religious life,” Celano quotes the anxious Francis.

His concern about the friars’ contact with women extended to any visits to any sisters at other monasteries. (Italians call the dwelling places of nuns “monasteries” as opposed to the American custom of calling them “convents.”) One instance recorded by Celano involves a friar who wanted to take a gift in Francis’s name to two sisters he knew at an unidentified monastery. The friar evidently protested when Francis refused his request to go, prompting Francis to “rebuke him very severely by saying things that should not now be repeated.” Francis then dispatched the gift with another friar, “who had refused to go.”

All this could be chalked up to the vows of obedience and chastity sworn by all of Francis’s followers and the spiritual value Francis placed on the denial of human wants, but his harsh punishment of friars who came in voluntary contact with women speaks more to the sexuality Francis both felt and steadfastly fought. When one unfortunate friar paid a sympathy call on a monastery without permission from Francis, Francis imposed his own delusting ice-water remedy on the poor man by making him “walk several miles naked in the cold and deep snow.”

That Francis is so human while struggling so hard not to be is one of his greatest appeals. His efforts to distance himself and his friars from any temptation vis-à-vis women, however, border on paranoia. He referred to women as “honeyed poison” and warned his friars of the consequences of looking a woman in the face. “All of us must keep close watch over ourselves and keep all parts of our body pure, since the Lord says ‘Anyone who looks lustfully at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart,’ ” he wrote in an early Rule for his friars.

Francis, who was so chaste he boasted that the only female faces he knew were those of Clare and “Brother” Jacopa, discouraged his friars from even talking to women—“He declared that all conversation with women was unnecessary except for confession or, as often happens, offering very brief words of counsel.” When Francis himself was forced to talk to a woman, he did so, according to Celano, “in a loud voice so that all could hear.” But talking to women at all had its perils. “Avoiding contagion when conversing with them, except for the most well-tested, was as easy as walking on live coals without burning his soles,” Celano quotes Francis in
The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul.