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Francis was the son of a cloth merchant, yet after his conversion he wore a miserable, threadbare patched tunic.

When his father begged Assisi's bishop to stop his crazy son from giving away family property, Francis stood in front of the bishop and stripped himself naked to proclaim that he had no father but God.

In the surging profit economy of northern Italy, Francis told a Franciscan brother who had accepted a coin to shove it into a dunghill with his lips.

Crucial events in Francis's relationship with Jesus Christ turned on poverty. He was enamored with the poverty modeled by Christ and the disciples, and he insisted his followers live in radical poverty. Why?

Francis was not a systematic theologian articulating an explicit, developed doctrine of poverty. He preferred acting out the truth to stating it in bald words. Still, his Admonitions (a collection of directives to his friars), and the Earlier and Later Rules (guides for his Order), offer material for an outline of his "gospel of Jesus' poverty."

To Francis the Gospels made it utterly clear that the only way to know God was through Jesus. And the Jesus Francis knew was humble:

"Why do you not recognize the truth and believe in the Son of God? See, daily he humbles himself as when he came from the royal throne into the womb of the Virgin; daily he comes to us in a humble form; daily he comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of the priest" (Admonitions I:15–18).

Jesus was the one who emptied himself of status and glory and came as one who was humble and poor. Francis saw Jesus as coming in humility whether as a poor preacher or through a piece of bread (in Communion). Status and glory went with wealth; the high and the mighty were always the rich. But the crucified Jesus was lowly, weak, and therefore poor.

Those whom Jesus called to repent of the world's way and to follow his "footprints" to eternal life had to be humble like him, renouncing the pride of station and power. That meant renouncing possessions above all. When Francis stood in front of the bishop of Assisi and stripped off his father's clothing, it was a symbolic renunciation of his birth family's whole life, a round of godless getting and spending.

Ever since the Fall, humans had claimed to possess things for themselves alone. Francis was particularly harsh about any form of "appropriation": arrogating to oneself what is God's:

"The Lord said to Adam: Eat of every tree; do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He was able to eat of every tree of paradise, since he did not sin, as long as he did not go against obedience. For the person eats of the tree of the knowledge of good who appropriates to himself his own will and thus exalts himself over the good things which the Lord says and does in him; and thus … what he eats becomes for him the fruit of the knowledge of evil" (Admonitions II:14; emphasis added).

Glorying in your thoughts and deeds or lording it over brothers and sisters or owning property—all alike were acts of appropriation. They blocked out God and neighbor in favor of self. They did precisely what Jesus had not done. They flew in the face of the reality that God alone was Lord.

That reality, Francis constantly reminded his hearers, God would enforce at the Last Judgment. Thus Jesus' call to repentance was a call to turn from appropriation to poverty:

"The Lord says in the Gospel: 'He who does not renounce everything he possesses cannot be my disciple,' and 'He who wishes to save his life must lose it' " (Luke 14:33, 9:24; Admonitions III:1).

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