St. Francis' Stigmata and the Year of Mercy

On September 17 I offered a spiritual workshop to the Sisters of the Third Order of St.Francis at their motherhouse in Peoria, IL.  While the universal Church remembers the Jesuit St. Robert Bellarmine in the liturgy that day, Franciscans celebrate a feast in remembrance of their holy founder’s receiving the stigmata.  However, there is an interesting connection which Fr. John Hardon, S.J.has noted:

“St. Robert Bellarmine had a great devotion to St. Francis of Assisi, and was especially devoted to honoring Francis' stigmata. Bellarmine urged that there be a special feast in honor of the five stigmata of St. Francis. Bellarmine had an important position in the Vatican and he made sure that the feast was introduced in the Church, despite strong opposition. As Providence arranged, Robert Bellarmine died on the feast of the stigmata of St. Francis, September 17.”

The readings for the Franciscan feast are Galatians 6: 14-18 and Luke 9: 23-26 and the following is the homily that I offered to the Sisters.

As Providence would have it, today, as we reflect on the Jubilee Year of Mercy, we are celebrating a feast in honor of St. Francis of Assisi’s stigmata, a gift that he received in the year 1224. The Year of Mercy and St. Francis’ stigmata go together quite well.  For if mercy is the greatest expression and embodiment of God’s love, and if the Church is the Body of Christ, then we are to embody God’s mercy and show it to the world in a visible way.  The greatest act of mercy is the Passion—the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

In his Message for the 2015 World Mission Day, Pope Francis wrote:  “Mission is a passion for Jesus and at the same time a passion for his people. When we pray before Jesus crucified, we see the depth of his love which gives us dignity and sustains us. At the same time, we realize that the love flowing from Jesus’ pierced heart expands to embrace the People of God and all humanity. We realize once more that he wants to make use of us to draw closer to his beloved people and all those who seek him with a sincere heart.”

Isn’t this what St. Francis did?  He prayed before Jesus crucified and experienced the depth of his love.  He shared Jesus’ passionate love for his people so much that he received the wounds of Jesus into his body. He embodied the Passion, the mercy of God.

On October 4, 1673, several months before Jesus appeared and revealed his Sacred Heart to her, St. Margaret Mary had a vision.  Here is how she described it: “On the feast of St. Francis, our Lord let me see in prayer this great saint, clad in a garment of light and unspeakable brilliance. He had been raised above the other saints to an extraordinarily high degree of glory, because his life was so like that of the suffering Redeemer who is the life of our souls and the love of our hearts. His glory was the reward of his great love for the Passion of our Lord, a love which rendered him worthy of the sacred stigmata and made him one of the great favorites of Jesus’ heart.”

In our first reading, St. Paul wrote that the world had been crucified to him and he to the world.  What does this mean?  I think it means that he shared Christ’s passionate desire for the salvation of the world.  This also describes St. Francis who took up the cross of poverty and labored for the salvation of souls.  He even risked his life in 1219 by going to Egypt to speak with the Sultan about Jesus.  Christian Crusaders were attacking the Sultan’s city and Francis was concerned as well for them because of their immoral life style.  Francis shared Christ’s passionate concern that no one be lost. 

The ultimate meaning of St. Francis’ stigmata is that he shared the desires and concerns of Jesus’ Heart so much that his body revealed the merciful wounds of Christ.  He was so configured to Christ that he embodied the mercy of God in a visible way.  

We too are called to be configured to Christ.  When we share his concern for the world and labor with him for the salvation of all, we embody the mercy of God.

We do so, always, with joy.  St. Francis once said: “It is not right for a servant of God to show a sad or gloomy face to anyone.”  More recently, in “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis said that Christians cannot be “sourpusses.”  The mercy which we embody is joyful.  Being “merciful like the Father,” as the motto for this Extraordinary Jubilee Year tells us, means sharing God’s joy in being merciful.  In the parables of Luke 15, Jesus tells us that there is great joy in heaven when the lost are found, when sinners repent and receive the mercy that God always has in store for them.  May our celebration of this feast and our ongoing Jubilee celebration help us to embody the joyful mercy of God.

St. Francis of Assisi Church

 I am in Springfield, IL, at the Motherhouse of the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis where I am helping direct some seminarians from Kenrick Seminary in St. Louis on their annual retreat.



While the weather has been desperately cold, I've stayed indoors where it is cozy and warm.  The Sisters run a retreat and conference center called Chiara Center.  The hospitality has been great.





One of the beauties of this retreat center is the church which clearly shows we are still in the Christmas Season.

This Nativity set is up yearlong and includes St. Francis who is credited with organizing the first living creche.








The church also includes a shrine of St. Therese of Lisieux which depicts various scenes from her life.

The Sisters ran a Tuberculosis Sanitarium here from 1919 to 1973.

St. Therese died of TB and so it was natural to create this shrine in the church and to ask her help for the patients as well as for the missionaries who left this Motherhouse and journeyed throughout the world.

"Rich in What Matters to God"

I celebrated Mass at the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Francis in St. Francis, Wisconsin. Most of the Sisters there are retired and many are in wheelchairs.  Here is what I told them in my homily today:

With about one month to go, our Year of Faith is drawing to a close.  Today's first reading (Romans 4: 20-25) presents us with one of the greatest examples of faith--Abraham. He not only believed in God but he trusted in God. He trusted that God loved him, that God would care for him, that God would be true to His promises.  This faith, in St. Paul's words, "empowered" him. It was behind all his decisions and actions.

One aspect of the faith that we share with Abraham is brought out in today's gospel (Luke 12: 13-21) where Jesus says "one's life does not consist in possessions."  This is the belief that empowered St. Francis to strip himself of everything and to offer everything to God.  He did so in order to follow Jesus more closely, imitating the one of whom St. Paul wrote in another letter (Philippians 2: 6-11), "he emptied himself." Jesus became a tiny, weak, and helpless infant, and "he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross." He believed that in this way the world would be saved.

St. Francis emptied himself in order to be filled. He became poor in order to be, in the words of Jesus from today's gospel, "rich in what matters to God." What matters to God? Love. God is love and humans, made in the image and likeness of God, are made to be like God, to love.

But poverty is more than having nothing of one's own, more than following the vow of poverty that consecrated persons take, promising to share everything in common.  Real poverty means not even having a choice. The poorest of the world don't have a choice whether or not to give up possessions. This is the poverty that Jesus also revealed when he was nailed to a cross and was helpless.

Such poverty comes to us when our bodies and minds diminish, when poor health comes our way, when we don't have the strength to move around as we once did, when our memories fail. It is a poverty we may not choose but if we accept it and make it an offering to God for the salvation of souls, we will be "rich in what matters to God." Our faith that God can take this offering and do great things through it can empower us one day at a time to follow the path of St. Francis who followed the path of Jesus so closely. 

God blesses this faith and this offering. Poor in the eyes of the world which values youth and vitality and good health, you will be "rich in what matters to God." 

St. Francis and the Sacred Heart

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus started slowly in the Church. For the first millennium of Christianity there was not an explicit devotion to the Heart of Jesus. Rather, there was a growing devotion to those wounds which St. Thomas the Apostle touched and which led him to declare "My Lord and my God!" 

St. Francis of Assisi had a deep devotion to the wounds of Jesus, so much so that he was given the mystical gift of the stigmata. This happened four days after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on September 17, 1224.  More than 450 years later Jesus spoke to the great apostle of the Sacred Heart, St. Margaret Mary.  This was before He revealed His Sacred Heart to her. He told her that she was going to have to face many trials and sufferings but that St. Francis would be her special patron and guide. 

Why did Jesus choose St. Francis for this job?  St. Margaret Mary offers this answer:  "On the feast of St. Francis [1673], our Lord let me see in prayer this great saint, clad in garments of light and unspeakable brilliance. He had been raised above the other saints to an extraordinarily high degree of glory, because his life was so like that of the suffering Redeemer who is the life of our souls and the love of our hearts. His glory was the reward of his great love for the Passion of our Lord, a love which rendered him worthy of the sacred stigmata and made him one of the great favorites of Jesus' heart."

Through devotion to the Passion of Jesus, to His Wounds, and to His Wounded Heart, St. Francis and St. Margaret Mary knew the love of God which is stronger than all sufferings and even death. In a time of uncertainty and change, the love of God revealed in the Heart of His Son is a sure and steady refuge.  Holding fast to that love, to the Heart of Jesus, we need not fear.

The New Pope and St. Francis

People have asked me which of the many saints named "Francis" did our new pope choose as his patron. Besides St. Francis of Assisi there is also the great Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier and the gentle founder of the Visitation Order St. Francis de Sales. There are also two other Jesuit saints named "Francis"--St. Francis Borgia, the third general superior of the Jesuits, and St. Francis Jerome, a great preacher in Naples.  It seems pretty clear that Pope Francis had the saint from Assisi in mind when he chose his name, but, I'm sure he'll be happy for all the saintly help he can get.

Pope Francis and St. Francis share a strong devotion to the Cross of Jesus. In his first homily, Pope Francis said the following:

"When we journey without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord, we are worldly: we may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord."


In 1673, months before revealing His Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary, Jesus prepared her for the revelations and the sufferings that would follow.  She described it this way:

"On the feast of St. Francis, our Lord let me see in prayer this great saint, clad in a garment of light and unspeakable brilliance. He had been raised above the other saints to an extraordinarily high degree of glory, because his life was so like that of the suffering Redeemer who is the life of our souls and the love of our hearts. His glory was the reward of his great love for the Passion of our Lord, a love which rendered him worthy of the sacred stigmata and made him one of the favorites of Jesus' heart. By a very special favor he had been given power in applying to the faithful the merits of the Precious Blood, a power which made him in a sense a mediator of this treasure. After I had seen all this, the Divine Bridegroom, as a token of his love, gave me St. Francis as my soul's guide. He was to lead me through all the pains and sufferings that awaited me."

May St. Francis now lead Pope Francis through the sufferings that await him as "the Servant of the Servants of God."  May he too draw strength and courage from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

"God Became Poor"

The symbol for the evangelist John is an eagle.  The theology of his gospel is soaringly high.  He begins his gospel writing about the Word or "Logos" which in the Greek world stood for Wisdom.  The early Fathers of the Church said that John found the wisdom about which he wrote at the breast of Jesus during the Last Supper.  When he drew near to the Heart of Jesus he drank from the source of wisdom and was able to soar into the heights that his gospel takes us. 

Every year, during the Mass of Christmas Day, we hear the beginning of John's gospel.  We hear: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word as with God, and the Word was God."  As the Word, Jesus is the perfect communication of God the Father.  According to the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews, before Jesus came, "God spoke in partial and various ways...."  In Jesus, the Word, God did not speak partially but in the fullest way possible.  Jesus is the complete revelation of who God is. 

As the saying goes, "actions speak louder than words."  So "the Word became flesh."  God took flesh so that humanity would not only hear about or hear from God, but would see and touch and experience God in the flesh. 

St. Ignatius Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, invites people to not only read about Jesus, nor to simply think about the scenes in the gospels, but to use the imagination to experience them.  Jesus is the Living Word whom we encounter in the gospels. 

I don't think St. Ignatius' insight is original.  It was this same motivation--to not only read about the birth of Jesus but to experience it as though one were actually present--that led St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 to create what many have called the first Nativity scene.  In Greccio, Italy he brought together an ox and an ass, a manger and hay, so that people would experience for themselves what it must have been like for Jesus to be born.  He wanted them to not only hear the gospel but to see the baby Jesus with the eyes of their hearts. 

At Midnight Mass in 2011 Pope Benedict said the following about this: 

"Francis discovered Jesus' humanity in an entirely new depth. ... This human existence of God became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. ... For God’s Son to take the form of a child, a truly human child, made a profound impression on the heart of the Saint of Assisi, transforming faith into love. ... In the child born in the stable at Bethlehem, we can as it were touch and caress God.

"This has nothing to do with sentimentality. It is right here, in this new experience of the reality of Jesus’ humanity that the great mystery of faith is revealed. Francis loved the child Jesus, because for him it was in this childish estate that God’s humility shone forth. God became poor. His Son was born in the poverty of the stable. In the child Jesus, God made himself dependent, in need of human love, he put himself in the position of asking for human love – our love."

God came to save the world not with a purifying and destroying flood, not with legions of soldiers nor armies of angels, not with thunderbolts.  God did not come with violence to impose His will on humanity nor to force people to be good.  God came as a poor, weak baby to attract our attention and our love. 

This is completely contrary to human or worldly wisdom.  Yet, whose birthday is remembered annually throughout the world?  Is it Nebuchadnezzar's?  Is it Alexander the Great's?  Is it the birthday of Caesar, Julius or Tiberius or one of the others?  Is it Napolean's?  Or Adolph Hitler's?  Or Stalin, who once asked, "The Pope? How many divisions does he have?" 

It is the birthday of Jesus that the world remembers every year.  It is His example that inspired St. Francis that great lover of the humanity of Jesus, of the Christ Child.  It is their example--Jesus and His close follower Francis--that continues to inspire people today.

Love is the only power capable of changing hearts and changing the world.  In his First Letter, John wrote "God is love."  Jesus is love in word, in action, in the flesh.  Now we, as members of His Body, make Him present today.  Let us draw near with our imaginations to the Baby Jesus and show Him our love by promising to love those for whom He became a baby and suffered and died.  Let us commit ourselves to be peace-makers as we read these words from Pope Benedict's 2011 homily at Midnight Mass:

"God has appeared – as a child. It is in this guise that he pits himself against all violence and

brings a message that is peace. At this hour, when the world is continually threatened by violence in so many places and in so many different ways, when over and over again there are oppressors’ rods and bloodstained cloaks, we cry out to the Lord: O mighty God, you have appeared as a child and you have revealed yourself to us as the One who loves us, the One through whom love will triumph. And you have shown us that we must be peacemakers with you. We love your childish estate, your powerlessness, but we suffer from the continuing presence of violence in the world, and so we also ask you: manifest your power, O God. In this time of ours, in this world of ours, cause the oppressors’ rods, the cloaks rolled in blood and the footgear of battle to be burned, so that your peace may triumph in this world of ours."