FOUR ENCOUNTERS: What Francis of Assisi Still Teaches Us | KAIROS GLOBAL | SEPTEMBER 2026

Author: George Paul

Audio

Intro: George Paul shows us how St Francis’ life can still solve our present-day dilemmas.

Francis and Clare

I was twelve when I first came across Francis of Assisi, and what struck me then was not the miracles but a certain lightness about him. Here was a man who seemed to own nothing, yet lacked nothing. Something about that has stayed with me all these years. Even now, whenever I catch myself holding on to something a little too tightly, it is his name that comes to mind.

Nowhere is that lightness clearer, perhaps, than in his friendship with Clare. She was about twelve years younger, born in 1193 into one of the wealthier families of Assisi. By every account she was beautiful, spirited, and headed for a good marriage. Then she heard Francis preach, and something within her quietly turned over. On the night after Palm Sunday in 1212, she slipped out of her father's house and made her way to Francis and the brothers. He cut off her hair. She was eighteen years old.

What he did next is the part we tend to hurry past. He did not keep her close to him. He lodged her at San Damiano, the little church he had repaired with his own hands, and there she remained for forty-two years while he wandered across Italy, Spain, and Egypt. They saw very little of each other. And on the rare occasions that they did meet, he made sure others were present.

The easy reading is that he was plainly guarding himself against temptation. Perhaps there was some of that. But there is something deeper at work here. Francis seems to have understood that Clare had a calling of her own, and not merely a supporting part in his story. For years she pressed one pope after another for the right to remain poor, and she was still at that struggle on her deathbed. Notice that Francis did not fight it on her behalf. He left her the dignity of her own vocation.

And here, I think, is the first thing worth sitting with, though it is far harder than it sounds. Can we love someone of the opposite sex without slowly absorbing them into our own story? Without quietly needing them to revolve around us? Our culture, it must be said, has almost no language for this. We have romance on the one side and mere transaction on the other, and in the wide space between them there is a silence where friendship between men and women might have lived.

The Church has an old word for what once filled that silence. It called it charity: love that wills the good of the other precisely as other, and not as an extension of oneself. One likes to think that Francis and Clare loved each other in just this way, a way that left both of them more fully themselves, and not less.

There is a story, very likely a legend, of the two of them sharing a simple meal at the Portiuncula. The people of Assisi, looking down from the hill, saw the little chapel apparently ablaze and came running with buckets of water. What they found was two people at prayer. The fire, it turned out, was not theirs at all. It was Christ's, and both of them were gazing at it rather than at each other.

When Francis lay dying, blind and in great pain, he was carried to San Damiano. And it was there, close to Clare, that he composed the Canticle of the Creatures. She was not at his bedside when the end came. She was in her enclosure, where she belonged. Some loves, after all, are proved by presence. Others, quietly, are proved by the freedom to be absent.

Francis and the Pope

In 1209 Francis walked all the way to Rome with eleven companions and a rule of life so short that it was little more than a handful of Gospel verses stitched together. He had come to ask for the Pope's approval.

Pause for a moment on how strange this is. Francis had received his call directly, and dramatically. He had heard the crucifix at San Damiano speak to him. He had stripped himself bare in the town square and handed his very clothes back to his father. If anyone in the whole history of the Church had grounds to say I answer to God alone, surely it was this man.

Instead, he went to Rome and knelt. And the Pope he knelt before was Innocent III, by most reckonings the most powerful pontiff who ever held the office: a canon lawyer, a man who made and unmade kings. Innocent's first response, one should note, was not warmth but suspicion. The Waldensians too had been preaching poverty, and had been declared heretics for their trouble. The curia had seen this sort of enthusiasm before and had a fair idea of where it usually led.

So Francis waited. Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo spoke up for him, arguing that to call the Gospel unliveable would be to insult Christ Himself. And Innocent, so a story told within a generation goes, dreamed of the Lateran basilica leaning over as if to fall, and a small poor man holding it up on his shoulder. On 23 April 1209, he gave his approval by word of mouth, not in writing. Francis took it gladly and went home a happy man.

And what did that act of submission cost him? Rather a lot, as things turned out. In the years that followed, the order swelled from twelve men into thousands, taking on structures, houses, a legal standing. Francis watched his simple vision being tidied and organised, and towards the end he stepped back from leading it altogether. 

Yet he never left. We live in a time when leaving has become almost the first instinct. When the institution disappoints us, and sooner or later it always will, the reflex is to walk out and begin something purer of our own somewhere else. Francis had every reason to do exactly this, and every opportunity besides. His movement was popular enough to have survived a clean break. And yet he chose to remain within a Church that in his own lifetime was corrupt in places and tangled up in politics.

The words he heard at San Damiano were ‘rebuild my church’. Not replace it. Not abandon it. Rebuild it. And one cannot easily rebuild a house one has already walked out of. There may be a quiet practical wisdom hidden here as well. Francis seems to have sensed that a call which only the one who received it can vouch for is a fragile thing, and that his obedience was, in a sense, his protection against himself. Every reformer, after all, believes God is speaking to him, and some of them are quite right. But it is often those willing to place their vision under the judgement of the Church whom we later call saints, while those who are not tend to become the founders of something else altogether.

Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio

Around the year 1220, in the Umbrian town of Gubbio, a wolf was killing livestock and, before long, people. The townsfolk took to arming themselves and staying indoors. And Francis, by this time weakened and in poor health, announced that he would go out and meet the creature.

They begged him not to. He went all the same. The story, as the Fioretti tells it, is a familiar one. The wolf charged. Francis made the sign of the cross and called it Brother Wolf. The animal stopped in its tracks, came to him, and lay down at his feet. Francis rebuked it plainly for all the harm it had done, and above all for preying on human beings made in the image of God. Then he offered it terms: the wolf would stop its killing, and in return the town would feed it. And the wolf, so the tale goes, placed its paw in his hand.

He walked it back into the marketplace and drew a promise from the townspeople too. Both sides, note, had to give something up. The wolf lived on in Gubbio for two more years, going from door to door for its food, and when at last it died, the people grieved and gave it a burial.

Historians will remind us, and rightly, that the Fioretti was set down more than a century after Francis died, and is not a biography in any strict sense. It may have been a real wolf. It may have been a bandit whom the town feared. Read it as a parable, though, and it loses nothing at all.

For the parable is a careful one. Francis did not kill the wolf, which was what everyone wanted and what the town had already tried and failed to do. Neither did he sentimentalise it; he named the harm out loud. What he did, instead, was to refuse both of the options on the table, destruction on the one hand and terror on the other, and to reach for a third: a relationship, with obligations running in both directions.

And this, I suspect, is part of what sets Francis apart from much modern environmental feeling. Francis did not imagine that nature was innocent. He knew perfectly well that wolves ate children. His Canticle may call the sun brother and the moon sister, but it also blesses God for Sister Bodily Death and for fire, which after all burns. He was no romantic, but a man who saw every creature as coming from the one Father, who made them kin, which meant they were owed something, and which also left them accountable.

Notice too that Francis asked the town itself to change. They were now to feed the very animal they had been hunting. Peace with creation, in other words, did not come free. It cost them their daily bread, and it cost them their fear.

We are the town, of course. We would far rather solve the problem than alter our habits. We would rather be rid of the wolf than learn to live with it as a neighbour who has some claim on our table. And Francis seems to be hinting that the second of these may be closer to what God is actually asking of us.

There is an inner reading as well, one the friars themselves were fond of. Each of us, perhaps, carries a wolf: something within that prowls, an anger, an appetite, an old wound that lashes out when touched. The temptation is either to pretend it is not there, or else to try to kill it outright. Francis, characteristically, does neither. He walks out to meet it, names it honestly, and then gives it a place and a rule to live by. Grace, one begins to suspect, does not destroy our nature. It orders it.

Francis and the Sultan

In the summer of 1219, Francis boarded a boat bound for Egypt. The Fifth Crusade was in full swing. The crusader army lay encamped around Damietta, in the delta of the Nile. Francis had already watched them suffer a heavy defeat that August, having warned them beforehand, to no avail, that the assault would fail. And then he did something no one had asked of him. Taking a single companion, Brother Illuminatus, he walked out of the Christian camp and across the lines, towards the army of Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, the nephew of Saladin.

He went unarmed. There was, at the time, a standing bounty on Christian heads. He was seized and roughly handled before being brought at last before the Sultan.

What passed between the two men in that tent, we cannot say in any detail. The sources disagree. But on this much the earliest accounts agree: al-Kamil, a cultivated and educated man, listened. Francis spoke to him of Christ. He was not killed, but remained for several days. The Sultan pressed gifts upon him, most of which he declined, keeping only a horn, and he was escorted back safely. Some accounts add that the Sultan asked Francis to pray for him.

No one was converted. By ordinary measures, the mission was a failure. And yet it remains one of the most remembered things Francis ever did, and it seems to have changed how his own order thought about mission thereafter. In the Rule of 1221 he wrote of brothers going among Muslims in two ways: first, and simply, to live among them peaceably, without argument, and only then, if it should seem right to God, to preach. That ordering of things was far from obvious in 1221. If we are honest, it is not entirely obvious even now.

Francis went himself. He did not sit in Assisi and compose opinions about Muslims; he got on a boat. And so much of what sours relations between communities in this day and age comes precisely from people who have never once sat in the other person's home.

Francis went unarmed, and without leverage of any kind. He had nothing to offer al-Kamil, and nothing with which to threaten him. He came simply as a poor man, and his poverty turned out to be the one credential that could carry him safely through a war zone. Perhaps there is a hint in this for us: when we approach those of other faiths clothed in institutional power, or money, or the unspoken offer of some advantage, it becomes very hard for us to be heard clearly. Francis had laid all of that aside years before.

Francis was not a modern relativist. He did not, for a moment, stop believing that Christ is the truth. He had gone to preach. He was not conducting a seminar in comparative religion. He believed what the Church believes, and he said so, in a tent, to a man who could well have had him executed for it. What he laid down was not his conviction but the sword. 

He returned to Italy with the crusade still grinding on. He had halted nothing. And yet, eight hundred years later, when the Church reaches for an image of how one might meet the stranger, it often looks to a barefoot man walking across a battlefield with no weapon in his hands.

George Paul is a freelance UX design consultant with a professional career spanning 25 years, specialising in information design and UI/UX. A graduate in mechanical engineering, before finding his calling in design at IIT Bombay. Alongside his professional work, George has been an active member of the Jesus Youth movement since 1992, serving in both campus and professional ministries. Driven by a deep passion for history, philosophy, and theology, in which he holds a bachelor’s degree, he is dedicated to promoting intellectual Catholicism and guiding others toward the Church’s rich intellectual traditions. In philosophy, his main interests lie in virtue ethics and aesthetics, shaped by the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, and Simone Weil.