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Reluctant Saint: Francis of Assisi
Hallmark Channel
Premieres April 13 (7 P.M. EST)

Environmentalists believe that the salvation of the world lies in the preservation of an eco-sensitive Francis of Assisi. Pacifists want to make Francis an instrument of their peace movements. And Reluctant Saint wants to make Francis into a religious pluralist who is shocked out of his parochial Christianity into a new respect for the goodness of Islam.

Though ostensibly about Francis, Reluctant Saint is really about current religious attitudes and reveals both the temptations and promise of religious biography.

The difficulty of presenting an even-handed biography of Francis has been with us since the beginning. Within a decade of Francis's death, for example, his more rigorous followers were already challenging the Franciscan bureaucrats by producing a biography that highlighted his asceticism.

The current cultural values implicit in this documentary are many. It is unseemly, for example, to want to be a saint. So Francis here is depicted as one for whom "sainthood was the last thing he ever wanted." But, in fact, Francis often drew attention to his sanctity. He plunged into a life of sacrifice, poverty, asceticism, and prayer—and made sure others knew that he was doing so. During one fast, for example, he vowed to not eat any meat. At one meal he consumed some chicken broth and was stricken with guilt. So he ordered a brother to lead him around town by a rope, shouting that Francis was a miserable sinner.

This is not to fault him for spiritual pride, but only to set him in his time: This sort of thing was a regular feature in the lives of medieval saints, who often "marketed" their saintliness to inspire others to holiness (with a dose of egotism mixed in, to be sure). Francis was very much a medieval man in this respect.

Or take religious pluralism, another high value in our age. This documentary would have us believe that Francis, disgusted by the ravages of the Crusaders (this Francis is not disgusted with the equally cruel Muslim warriors), went to a Muslim sultan "to preach peace."

According to the earliest accounts, though, Francis went to proselytize. Despite Reluctant Saint's peaceful images of chess-playing Muslims, and biographer Donald Spoto's voice-over about the "extremely cultured, extremely courteous, devoutly religious" sultan, the real Francis bumped into a less-than-irenic Islam.

In truth the sultan's religious advisers demanded that he behead Francis for preaching blasphemy. The sultan, in awe of Francis's bravado at crossing enemy lines to convert him, tried to persuade Francis to settle in Egypt. Francis said he could see the sultan wasn't interested in converting to Christianity (even when Francis threatened him with hell), so he preferred to evangelize elsewhere. In contrast, the documentary—with absolutely no evidence in the sources to support it—says Francis learned that "goodness and mercy were not solely the attributes of Christians," and "came home with more things spiritually from the sultan than he did from the Crusaders, his fellow Christians."

Evangelistic fervor, of course, doesn't play well in an age that often suspects evangelism of being a hate crime. So in this documentary we get stuff that does play well: A sentimental mystic shown hugging lepers (the medieval era's equivalent of people with aids), a wandering teacher who physically withers away because of his continued ministry to lepers, and so on. In fact, Francis only ministered to lepers for a few months early in his ministry, and his declining health was caused by his severe asceticism; he fasted himself into a mortal illness that killed him at age 44.

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April 2003, Vol. 47, No. 4