History's Youngest Heroes: St Francis of Assisi: Teen Rebel

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This story begins in the Middle Ages in central Italy.

It's in the area called Umbria.

It's a mountainous region.

All the cities are on hilltops.

This was for protection.

One such city was Assisi.

It was not very large, maybe 10,000 to 12,000 residents.

It was a face-to-face society.

It was commercial.

The cloth trade was important.

The year was 1205.

Within the cloth trading community, a family feud was simmering.

But it wasn't about cloth.

Local silk merchant Pietro de Bernadone wanted to have his son formally renounce any claim to his inheritance.

As far as Pietro was concerned, his son, now in his mid-20s, had been acting bizarrely.

He seemed to have been overcome by a religious fervor.

Their relationship had broken down.

Pietro felt his only choice was to disinherit his son.

At Pietro's command, The city elder summoned his son before a magistrate's court, but his son refused to recognize its authority.

He, amazingly, says to his father, wrong court.

I'm an ecclesiastical person, and he says, this has to be done at the bishop's court.

The family duly gathered in front of Bishop Guido.

Pietro's son arrived, dressed in blue and purple silk and fine wool.

His given name was Giovanni di Pietro di Bernadone, but everyone in Assisi knew him as Francesco or Francis.

The bishop asked Francis if he would renounce any claim on the family's resources and depend on God alone to provide for him.

Francis' father, mother, and brother watched in disbelief.

Would Francis give up the fortune to which he was entitled and any prospect of a comfortable life?

To their astonishment, Francis said he would do exactly that.

Then, with a swift movement, Francis withdrew to a side room and in a flamboyant gesture, stripped off his clothes.

And he piles it up at his father's feet and says,

Now

here is everything I have from you.

I give up everything, and now I can call God my father instead of Pietro Bernardone, his father's name.

Francis was now naked.

apart from the hair shirt he wore underneath his clothes.

No one in the court that day could believe what they were seeing.

And the bishop then takes his cloak and covers Francis.

It's a sign that he is now a ward of the church.

He's directly under the bishop and the bishop is responsible for him.

I'm Nicola Cocklin and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes: Rebellion, Risk, and the radical power of youth.

Saint Francis of Assisi, Teen Rebel.

Modern Philadelphia in the United States of America.

It was the 2010s, and Stephen Cantwell, then in his 20s, worked in construction management.

He was earning decent money and having a lot of fun.

Yeah, there were some weeks where I had gotten drunk every night and not really kept track of what that was.

And yeah, I chased women.

I did all the stuff that many people do.

But something didn't feel right.

The term I finally figured out what to put on it was that I was unfulfilled.

I would have this kind of gaping hole that something was missing, which was strange because on paper, I had everything that I wanted.

Cantwell had been brought up Catholic.

Hoping to reconnect with his faith, he joined a young adult group attached to the church.

And just slowly got more and more involved with it.

And then one day a vocation director talked to me.

He asked me if I wanted to be a friar and I said, no, thank you, I'm good.

Still, the director invited Cantwell to a retreat outside of the city.

So I went there and they would talk about St.

Francis and who he was.

Now, I had the general understanding that most people have of St.

Francis is that he's the guy in the bird bath outside, you know, with his hands up wide and, you know, this sort of a hippie sort of figure that blesses the animals and everything like that.

Yet, the retreat inspired Cantwell to give up everything.

And I

had kind of a profound experience of the Lord where I realized that I was called to be a Capuchin Franciscan.

As Brother Stephen, he began to learn more about Saint Francis of Assisi, who had established his order centuries before.

When I first started with the order,

my

family didn't necessarily understand what it was that I was doing.

They were met with a lot of initial fear and sort of confusion.

My father specifically was not a fan at all.

What consoled me is that I opened up the life of St.

Francis and I started reading and I realized that, you know, by the grace of God, I was getting the Franciscan experience.

It's not that easy to find out about Francis' life in medieval Assisi.

A little preface of as best we can tell, he lived over 800 years ago, which means that although he left by comparative standards a reasonable amount of witnesses to his life and documents he wrote himself, he's

not that well testified to in written texts compared to, say, popes and kings of this same time.

Father Augustine Thompson is a Roman Catholic priest of the Dominican order.

He's also a biographer of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Francis was born in around 1181 or 82 into one of the wealthiest families in Assisi.

And his father's tax returns, which actually still exist, show him way up in the, well, the top 10% at least.

His family's house faced the main square.

It was in the rich neighborhood.

The family's wealth appeared to originate from his mother's side.

Francis began to work as an apprentice for the family business.

He would have sold cloth over the counter.

He would have controlled inventory.

He would have done rudimentary bookkeeping.

He was basically in the sales division.

Francis was an outgoing kind of person, and this role suited him well.

A winning, charming personality,

somewhat witty and amusing.

This is one of the stories about his youth that I think there's good reason to believe is true.

A beggar came into the store, and Francis brushed him off and pushed him out the door.

We know from his own words that he found ugliness distressing and he avoided it.

He says, I found the presence of lepers loathsome.

This was what he wanted to avoid.

It was the ugliness, the bad smells.

This was a world he was adverse to.

In that moment, though, Francis felt he had done the wrong thing.

Almost very quickly, Francis was struck to the heart about how mean he had been, and he apparently left the shop and ran off to find the fellow and give him some money.

As a teenager, Francis wasn't exactly preoccupied with virtue.

He worked hard.

He played hard.

He was charismatic and extremely popular.

We have a yuppie, a young urban professional.

He was the president of his fraternity, so to speak.

the local boys' club of those who went around having dinner out and having a few drinks and wandering the streets and singing and he was known for singing songs in bad french and playing the air guitar with them or i should say the air mandolin

by the time he reached his 20s the direction of francis's life seemed to be mapped out

the trajectory he was on was to take over a big cloth business

He saw himself as a leader in the militia of the city and probably eventually in the government,

he probably would have ended up a generous, fun-to-be-around businessman, perhaps a politician.

Though Francis could live a life of comfort and success, the city of Assisi was far from a relaxed place to live.

The city was riven by factions.

When Francis was a youth, A civil war led by the wealthy urban commercial class forced the old landowning class into exile.

Francis belonged to the urban commercial class, not the nobility.

They made money, but were not invited to socialize with high society.

Assisi was an independent commune, but that meant it had to defend itself.

It came under attack by the forces of the Holy Roman Empire and by its neighbors.

We know that Assisi had a boundary problem with the next city north, Perugia,

and that there would be skirmishes and so forth on the boundaries regularly.

As a young male citizen of Assisi, Francis was automatically enrolled in the city's militia.

In 1202, he rode out with the mounted troops to fight Perugia.

The boys from Assisi expected adventure and glory.

And at the Battle of Colestrada, which took place on the river between the two cities, Assisi's militia was horribly defeated.

It was a bloody, by medieval standards, a very bloody battle.

Francis watched in horror as his friends were butchered.

He was one of the lucky ones.

Not killed, but taken prisoner by the Parusians.

And Francis and the survivors of the Assisi militia ended up for over a year imprisoned, waiting to be ransomed back for money by the city of Assisi.

When he was finally released, still in his very early 20s, Francis was a changed man.

Maybe he had killed people, we don't know.

Certainly what he had seen was traumatic enough so that he came back disturbed.

When he got home, he began to withdraw.

He wouldn't eat

and

basically unable to function.

Francis suffered from horrible nightmares and flashbacks to the battle.

He was unable to work.

After about 18 months, he decided he must force himself back to the battlefield.

Perhaps a positive experience could overcome the memories of the disaster at Colestrada.

In the spring of 1205, he rejoined the militia of Assisi.

At that time, the militia were gathering to fight on the side of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II's claim to the throne of Sicily.

This wasn't necessarily a cause Francis cared about all that deeply, but perhaps it would be his duty.

He saddles up.

He's got a new horse.

He's got a squire again.

I think his family says, oh, Francis is getting back to normal.

He's doing what a young man's supposed to do.

He's going to go off and defend the city.

Francis rode for about a day to Spoleto.

30 miles from Assisi.

That night, he had a conversation with his squire.

He said, I'm not sure I should be going off with the army to southern Italy to fight against the emperor.

He says, I should be doing something greater than that.

I should be following a greater prince.

He and his squire turn around and head back to Assisi.

He never gets down to join the army.

This was the end of Francis' military career.

He sold his horse, his arms, and his fine clothes, and dressed in cheaper fabrics.

On his walk home to Assisi, he came across the church of San Damiano.

It was in terrible condition, but he asked the priest if he could stay there for the night.

The priest agreed.

But when Francis asked if he could look after his money from the sale of his horse, the parish priest says, no,

I don't want your money.

What does Francis do?

Just leaves the money on the windowsill of the church.

Francis returned to Assisi and to his family.

He tried to go back to work, go on as he had before, but his heart wasn't in it.

He'd wander around.

He was worthless in the shop.

He'd lost his ability to

do sales.

He started to give away things.

He would give away his food.

He would give away money.

He began to spend long periods of time

wandering in the woods, apparently praying.

He started to do all sorts of things that medieval people would do because they wanted to do penance.

In those times, people in crisis might undertake a pilgrimage to soothe their souls.

Francis decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome to pray at the tomb of St.

Peter the Apostle.

When he arrived, the tomb was protected by a grill.

Francis walked up to it.

To the astonishment of other worshippers, he began to throw handfuls of coins at the altar.

Francis left the tomb and exchanged his clothes with a beggar.

Then he went begging himself.

Back in Assisi, he moved out of the family home to wander in the forest.

Then, without telling his family, he became a lay penitent at the rundown church of San Damiano.

Lay penitents were ordinary people who had not taken religious orders, but who chose to live lives of self-denial.

They often ate very little food, wore uncomfortable hair shirts, and beat themselves.

And that caused consternation in his family.

There's something wrong with the boy.

Pietro went to find his son, but Francis went on the run, hiding from his father for a month in the forest.

Eventually, though, he returned to the streets of Assisi.

He looked so gaunt and filthy that people threw mud at him.

Pietro dragged him back to the family home and kept him under lock and key.

Yet when Pietro went away for business, Francis' mother Pika let him out.

Pietro was not merely concerned for Francis' welfare.

The family business had been founded on Pika's dowry.

Francis was legally entitled to half of that.

His brother Angelo would inherit the other half.

If Pika died, Francis would take control of half the business.

Which he will probably lose, throw away, or give giveaway because of his bizarre behavior now.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

Pietro went to San Damiano to confront Francis one last time.

Francis was in tears, distraught, and offers his father all the money he had.

But for Pietro, that wasn't the point.

The family business could only survive if it wasn't chopped in half.

And so he says says to Francis, let's go to court, to the city council, and I want you to renounce your claim on your mother's dowry.

This was the fateful moment when Francis stripped naked in front of his father and the bishop.

That is when he has the formal act of converting.

He's now no longer a yuppie.

He's now officially an ecclesiastical person.

He is a professional penitent.

In this dramatic courtroom scene, Francis gave up all the worldly goods he had.

He and his father Pietro would never speak again.

Francis is living in the woods, in a cave.

Kids in the neighborhood would throw rocks and dirt at him because he was wandering the streets and scruffy.

In the winter of 1206, Francis, now in his mid-20s, was walking alone in the snowy woods.

Suddenly, he was attacked by two robbers.

They beat him, stripped him of his tunic and hair shirt, and left him for dead.

Francis staggered to a monastery.

From there, he made his way back towards Assisi.

On the way, he had an experience which he believed truly changed his life.

As a young man, Francis had always been disgusted by physical deformity.

Then, near Assisi, he encountered a community of lepers.

Yet he wasn't repelled by them.

Instead, he found himself drawn to them.

A whole change of perspective.

Somehow, what had been loathsome before,

the lowly, the ugly, the down and out, had now become sweet.

Francis, we know, seems to have,

at this time, regularly gone and began to serve the lepers in the leprosarias.

that are around the city, out on the outskirts.

Francis moved into the lepresarium.

He helped clean the lepers' bodies, tend to their sores, dress their wounds.

When he wasn't caring for his new friends, he spent his time praying and renovating the church of San Damiano.

Francis hears a message, rebuild my church, from the cross at San Damiano, which we know he was doing physically.

And Francis then undergoes an enlightenment in which he realizes that his mission is not to repair church buildings, but to restore the whole institutional church.

Francis expected to do this alone.

Then, in the spring of 1208, a visitor arrived at San Damiano.

His closest friend, Bernardo Quintavale, shows up and wants to join him.

Which means that although he's now acting very different, he still has a kind of magnetism that his friend would want to come and say, I want to be a lay penitent too.

Then, another man from Assisi showed up.

This one was called Pietro.

And Francis is now disturbed.

He's now accumulating followers out in the woods.

And he says to the two of them, we have to go find out what God wants.

Francis and his two followers return to Assisi and to his family's old parish church, San Niccolo de Piazza.

He goes to the parish priest and says, I want you to do Bible divination for me.

Bible divination meant opening the holy book at random.

The verse the priest saw was thought to reveal God's will.

The priest of San Niccolo didn't have a complete Bible to hand, so he used a shorter version, an altar missile, which had biblical passages arranged in a calendar.

And he takes it out onto the altar, they pray over it, and he opens it up and sticks his finger in.

and reads the text.

Give up all things and follow me.

They pray over it again, open the book again, finger goes in, take neither traveling bag nor staff.

And then finally, they do it a third time.

You do all these things in threes.

The finger goes in and it says, take up your cross daily.

The men committed the verses to memory.

Francis may not have known it yet, but this was the foundational moment of what would become the Franciscan Order.

His new mission is not only to become a good citizen of the city of God, but also to bring other people into

that vision.

He starts then to actually collect followers.

People enjoy being around him.

He looks a lot like the pre-conversion Francis.

He sings.

He's frolicsome.

It's a great adventure.

But Francis began to feel that he needed this new way of living to be endorsed by the church's highest authority.

He set off with his two followers, Bernardo and Pietro.

And he goes to Rome, he finds his bishop.

The bishop says, to settle your conscience, we'll get this approved by Pope Innocent.

Innocent says, yes, the lay penitents from Assisi can follow these Bible quotes and they're going to be lay preachers.

And Francis's way of life is approved, but they're still not sure what it is because they didn't expect to be commissioned to be lay preachers.

When Pope Innocent III granted Francis this approval, he wasn't yet giving permission for him to preach.

That came later.

Even so, by the end of his 20s, Francis began to amass more and more followers.

Francis lives those in a way that is electrifying to those around him, and we can tell that by he goes from a handful of followers for within seven years to probably well over 10,000, and soon they're outside of Italy, although Francis himself never goes to those places.

Most people meet Franciscans, they never meet Francis himself.

Francis' appeal stretched beyond his magnetic personality.

Things like service to the sick and the poor, that is quite radical and it inspires lots of people to want to do that kind of thing, to become the, to identify with the lowest of the low.

Other religious orders were formed during this period.

But what set the Franciscan order apart was its scale.

As his following grew, Francis continued to imitate the life of Christ.

He was a nature lover, a preacher, and a social worker.

He addressed animals, even insects, as his brothers and sisters.

He preached to birds.

Francis formed two more orders.

He sponsored a women's religious movement, the Poor Clares.

Another was the third order of Brothers and Sisters of Penance for those who wanted to carry out devotional acts.

but could not leave their families and homes.

Francis made several attempts to travel to the Islamic world to preach.

At the time, the Fifth Crusade was underway in Egypt.

In 1219, Francis traveled to Damietta on the north coast of Egypt, in the hope of converting Sultan al-Kamil to Christianity.

Reports from Francis' followers suggested that he was received graciously by the Sultan.

He was permitted to preach to Muslims, as well as to travel to the sites in the Holy Land.

Francis didn't succeed in converting the Sultan, he remained a Muslim.

On his travels, Francis suffered various illnesses and infections, probably including malaria.

His health declined after he returned to Italy.

In 1223, he retired the leadership of his orders.

He tried to live as a hermit, but followers kept finding him.

People see him doing something that inspires them to say, yes, that is what we all want.

That's how we think people should become holy.

At the Hermitage of Laverna, he developed stigmata.

These spontaneous wounds on his hands and feet echoed the wounds inflicted on Jesus of Nazareth during the crucifixion.

In the summer of 1225, nearly blind and unable to eat, Francis submitted to medical treatment.

The treatments of the time did little to help him.

He died in the autumn of 1226, aged around 44.

Two years after his death, Francis was canonized by his friend, Pope Gregory IX, a Saint Francis of Assisi.

In modern-day Philadelphia, Brother Stephen, the Capuchin Franciscan friar, wears robes reminiscent of Francis.

He serves his community, whatever problems it may be facing.

For me, the first engagement I had with that was in Philadelphia.

We encountered a lot of people people that are addicted to opioids, and a lot of people treat them as if, well, you did that to yourself, so you sort of get what you deserve.

And I kind of had this personal encounter with a lot of different people.

The reason, you know, I feel led among them is that's what Francis did.

He saw these people that were outcasted, these people that were, you know, on the outskirts and the margins of society.

Brother Stephen still looks to the life of St.

Francis for inspiration.

As much as, you know, plans are great, it's also a lot of life happens when there's no plans at all.

So, to look at St.

Francis' life and to realize that that was not a life that was planned.

That was a life that he just lived

what he was called to one day at a time.

So, to try to do that and sort of free yourself from the idea of what

everybody else thinks you're supposed to be doing.

The heroism of Francis is the decisions he finally makes about how his life is to fit together makes him a person that changes other people's lives and inspires them to do things and to act in certain ways that are, in terms of their own vision, ennobling and make them

of service to others.

And I think that doesn't require being Catholic or Christian or even religious.

Next time, on history's youngest heroes.

After losing his sight in a childhood accident, a young Frenchman invents a tool that will change the lives of blind people around the world.

He wanted to give blind people, in addition to himself, a way of putting their thoughts on paper.

They'd never been able to do that before.

We take it for granted now.

Louis Braille, codemaker.

Cafe Hope on BBC Radio 4.

By the time I finished these 100 meetings, I'd raised £50,000.

I'm Rachel Burden, welcoming you into a virtual coffee shop where I chat to people looking to improve the lives of those around them.

It's about tackling isolation and loneliness.

Engaging in conversation with people that you know can make a massive difference.

Amazing individuals trying to make the world a better place.

It's a real gift.

Cafe Hope from BBC Radio 4.

Listen now on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to Your Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.