Who was St. Francis of Assisi?
Francis was born at Assisi, in Umbria, in 1181 or 1182; the Catholic Encyclopedia says the exact year is uncertain. His father, Pietro Bernardone, was a wealthy cloth merchant. His mother, Pica, is said to have come from Provence. He was baptized Giovanni; his father renamed him Francesco. He liked fine clothes, parties and the company of young nobles, and even then he was kind to beggars.
At about twenty he fought in Assisi's war with Perugia, was captured, and spent more than a year in prison, where a fever turned his thoughts toward eternity. Released, he set out to be a soldier again; two dreams and an illness at Spoleto sent him home in 1205. Then the Encyclopedia's story turns. He got down from his horse to embrace a leper and gave him his money. Praying before the crucifix in the half-ruined chapel of San Damiano, he heard the words "Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin." He took them literally, sold his father's cloth and his horse to pay for the repairs, and was beaten, bound and locked up by his father. His mother let him out. Before the bishop of Assisi he stripped off his clothes and handed them back: "Hitherto I have called you my father on earth; henceforth I desire to say only 'Our Father who art in Heaven'."
In 1208, hearing at Mass the Gospel in which Jesus sends out the disciples with no gold, no bag and no staff, he knew what his life was for. Bernard of Quintavalle was the first to join him. He wrote a short rule, and in 1209, the Friars Minor record, Pope Innocent III approved it for Francis and his eleven brothers. In 1212 Clare of Assisi, about eighteen, came to him after Palm Sunday; he cut her hair and clothed her in the habit, and from her came the Poor Clares. At Christmas 1223 he set up the crib at Greccio from which the custom is usually dated, and that November Pope Honorius III approved the Rule the Friars Minor still profess.
In August 1224, during a forty-day fast on Mount La Verna, he received the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ. Nearly blind, in a reed hut beside San Damiano in September 1225, he composed the Canticle of the Sun. He died on the evening of Saturday, October 3, 1226, at the Porziuncola, the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, aged forty-four. The Encyclopedia, Franciscan Media and Vatican News agree on that date; the summary on the Friars Minor's site says October 4, though its own timeline gives October 3. Pope Gregory IX canonized him at Assisi on July 16, 1228.
Why Catholics pray to St. Francis for peace at home, money worries and a lost sense of purpose
Two of his patronages are declared. On November 29, 1979, in the apostolic letter Inter Sanctos, Pope John Paul II named him heavenly patron of those who promote ecology, at the request of Cardinal Silvio Oddi. Forty years earlier, on June 18, 1939, Pope Pius XII had proclaimed Francis and St. Catherine of Siena primary patrons of Italy. In Laudato si' Pope Francis, who took his name, called him "the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology," a man who "lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself," and recalled that he asked for part of the friary garden to be left untouched so that wild flowers could grow. Patronage of animals and of merchants is traditional: no document declares it, but Franciscan Media lists both, and the wolf of Gubbio and the birds at Bevagna have carried it for eight centuries.
Why, then, does a Catholic with a tense household, a bill she cannot pay, or no idea what to do with her life pray to him? Because his conversion ran through exactly those places. His home became a battleground. His father's business was the thing he had to let go of. His twenties were a string of false starts: a war, a prison, a fever, a soldier's career abandoned on the road. He did not find peace by fixing any of it. He found it by hearing one sentence in a ruined chapel and doing what it said. The Encyclopedia, quoting Bossuet, calls him "the most ardent, enthusiastic, and desperate lover of poverty the world has yet seen." That is not a plan for the family budget. It is a reminder that money, and the fear of losing it, is not the ground you stand on.
One thing should be said plainly. The "Peace Prayer" that begins "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace" was not written by Francis. Franciscan Media reports the findings of the French scholar Christian Renoux: it first appeared, anonymously, in 1912 in a small French magazine, La Clochette, and was attached to Francis's name only decades later. Catholics may pray it. They should not quote it as his.
How to pray to St. Francis
His memorial is October 4; he died on the evening of October 3. A novena fits the nine days before the feast, September 25 to October 3. In 2026 the feast falls on a Sunday and gives way to the Sunday Mass, so you will not hear his name in church that day. Pray to him anyway, that day or any day. If you can go to Assisi, his tomb is in the basilica that bears his name.
Say the prayer below slowly. It is the Praises of God, which Francis wrote in his own hand on La Verna in 1224, two years before his death, in the Franciscan scholar Paschal Robinson's 1906 translation. It asks for nothing; it tells God who he is, and a frightened heart sometimes needs that first. Then put your trouble into your own words: the argument that keeps repeating, the number in the account, the sense that your life has stalled. Pair it with Confession and Mass, and with the help God sends through other people. A prayer to St. Francis is not a substitute for a financial counselor, a lawyer or a doctor, and if there is violence at home, the first call is to the police, not to a saint. Francis did not pray instead of acting. He prayed, and then he picked up stones.