Novena to St. Francis of Assisi

Francis was born around 1181 in Assisi, Italy, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant, and spent his youth pursuing wealth, pleasure, and the chivalric ambition of becoming a knight. A serious illness after being taken prisoner in a local war, followed by a slow, unsettled conversion in the years after, led him to give up his inheritance publicly before the bishop of Assisi and embrace a life of radical poverty. He gathered companions who lived by begging and manual work, preaching repentance and peace, and in 1209 received informal approval for what became the Franciscan Order, which spread with extraordinary speed across Europe within his own lifetime. He is remembered for an unusual, tender regard for the natural world — preaching, by tradition, even to birds, and composing a vernacular hymn praising God through the sun, moon, wind, water, and death itself — and for an unarmed 1219 journey, well documented by contemporaries, to meet Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade — an encounter those same sources describe as an attempt to preach the Gospel and seek the Sultan's conversion, and which later tradition, especially in the twentieth century, has come to read as an early model of interreligious peacemaking. In 1224, two years before his death, he is recorded to have received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ's Passion, on Mount La Verna. He died in 1226 and was canonized within two years; Pope John Paul II declared him patron of ecology in 1979.

Biographical facts drawn from standard, widely corroborated Franciscan hagiography and historical scholarship, including the early biographies by Thomas of Celano (13th century) and the documented 1219 meeting with Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade. His 1979 declaration as patron of ecology (Inter Sanctos, Pope John Paul II) is documented papal record. His hymn 'Canticle of the Creatures' is referenced here by description only; it is not quoted, since while Francis's original Umbrian text is public domain, published English translations are separate, more recent copyrighted works.