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His father is absolutely furious at what is going on. He's embarrassed that his son is begging. In medieval custom, a father has a right to throw his children into sort of a personal family prison and keep them confined there until they decide to reform. And so he puts Francis in the family cell and goes off on a business trip.

The mother has a little more sympathy, and Francis is able to talk his way out. When the father comes back, he's doubly furious and he goes to the city magistrate. But Francis says, "No, I'm under the jurisdiction of a church. I'm working with a priest here at the San Damiano. You can't arrest me."

The father then goes to the bishop, who says, "All right, Francis, enough of this. You just can't be taking money from your dad like that. Your mission may be good, but that's stealing."

Francis has tremendous respect for the church, so when the bishop says that, he replies, "Fine. You're right."

He goes off into another room, takes all his clothes off, puts them in a pile, puts a bag of silver on top of the pile, and walks back to the bishop. In front of a crowd, he says, "I no longer call Peter (his father's name) my father, but I say, my Father who art in heaven."

How did he go from there to getting followers and building his order?

You could call Francis the accidental reformer because his full intention, as far as we can tell early in his life, was simply to reform himself and to build these churches and do very specific local things. His lifestyle becomes increasingly impoverished, more ascetic, and more mystical. He's mocked by local townspeople and is an embarrassment to his family.

But in the midst of all this, he keeps at what he's doing and begins preaching his message of God's call for poverty and a radical life of obeying the Sermon on the Mount. Slowly, local young men, some of them fairly wealthy themselves, look at him and say, "You know, Francis isn't crazy. He's a crazy genius."

He never goes out recruiting. These young men are attracted to something about him. They begin to come to him and say, "Can we join you? Can we join your order?" After he gets about a dozen people he thinks, "I need to get a little organized here." So, he creates a rule and he decides to go off to get the Pope's approval. He feels it's absolutely necessary to get the Pope's permission to do this.

Even though for political reasons he can't make Francis's order an official order yet, he does give him his blessing. The Pope, Innocent III, has a spark of faith in him and sees in Francis something of the ideals of the gospel that he originally was called to.

What made Francis and his order different?

The business of being Catholic through and through was very important, because there were other movements very similar to his that called the church to poverty, emphasized preaching, and emphasized obeying the Sermon on the Mount, but they were so critical of the church of their day, they found themselves more and more alienated from the leadership of the church.

Francis felt that if he was going to have any success reforming the church he needed to stay in relationship to the church. It was absolutely important to him to stay connected. He insisted his friars be in obedience to him, and then when they had enough friars to have some hierarchy, so everyone would be in obedience to someone else.

How did the order grow from there?

Francis was a great leader for a group of 12 men. Six or seven years later, by the year 1219, the movement has 5,000 people. He just frankly doesn't have the administrative gifts to know how to manage such a thing. It's a sign of his great humility that he recognized his gifts were not meant for that type of organization. He actually turned the organization over to one of the brothers and submitted himself in obedience to that brother.

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May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47