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Assisi: The Goodness of 
Creation 

R T . R E V . MSGR* J O H N K . 

C A R T W R I G H T 

J U N E 2 3 , 1957 





ASSISI- THE GOODNESS 

OF CREATION 

In the Carthusian order which was our 
subject last week we considered one as-
pect of our Catholic faith which is to 
teach us the littleness of the world in 
comparison with eternity. Today at Assisi 
we shall see the other side of the picture 
and shall come to realize with what whole-
someness, balance and sanity the Church 
regards the world. The Church insists 
that our life here is not all and that it is 
not final. One way of insisting on this 
is to sanction the Carthusian austerity 
and to have us reverence the Carthusian 
vocation. But the Church understands that 
we have nevertheless to live in this world 
and in this world to prepare for heaven. 
And so she teaches us to value this world 
as made for us by God and to rank its 
values according to their order and im-
portance. One way in which she teaches 
us this is by sanctioning the Franciscan 
ideals and by authorizing men to live by 
the rule of St. Francis. 

Of the many citadels that the faith has 
built there are few that so endear them-
selves to the Christian mind as Assisi, 
the home of St. Francis. The loveliest of 
Italian hill-towns it is visited by millions 



as one of the principal points of interest. 
And almost all who go there catch some-
thing of the spirit of St. Francis and 
through him of Christ. It is as if there 
were two Holy Lands: the first where 
passed "the sinless years beside the Gali-
lean blue," and the second where he, 
whom some have seen as the most Christ-
like of the saints, re-enacted in Umbria 
the tenderness of Bethlehem and the sac-
rifice and strength of Calvary. As Beth-
lehem and Calvary compass the meaning 
of the Palestinian Holy Land, so Greccio 
and Alvema compass that of the Umbrian. 
On the hill of Assisi we live again those 
venerable traditions, we breathe again 
those exquisite fragrances reminiscent of 
a diviner air. 

St. Francis is in several ways unique 
in our Christian calendar. It has been 
said of him that he entered glory even in 
his lifetime; and this is true, not only of 
the seraphic moment "nel crudo sasso 
intra Tevere ed Arno" when he embraced 
the Crucified, but of his conversation 
among men, when reverence akin to the 
honors of the altar was paid in his living 
presence. 

In another way he is unique among the 
saints for having captured the admiration 
of those who do not usually admire saints. 
His was a personality so vivid, so wide 
in its interests, so rich in "expression 

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unexpected yet never inappropriate," that 
he has held the sympathetic imagination 
of all the representatives of the secular-
ism of our time. In the abundance of 
biographical detail that we possess about 
him there is a wealth of fascinating sec-
ondary traits. His gaiety, his humor, his 
love of nature and of the creatures of the 
wild have endeared him to all who have 
in our day what his contemporaries called 
a "igentil cuore" — a gentle heart. On 
the other hand, his "philanthropy," his 
freedom from hierarchical vestment and 
gesture, his development of his plans out-
side the formal framework provided by 
canonical tradition, his alleged independ-
ence, ecclesiastical control —these things 
have made him the darling theme of des-
cant of our intelligentsia ardent for revo-
lution and aspiring after anarchy. The 
sentimentalist, the nature-worshipper, the 
libertarian, the Christian-without-God turn 
to words of benediction when they speak 
of the poor man of Assisi. 

It is well that all these should admire 
St. Francis, even though they fail to ad-
mire the sanctity which was the fountain 
of all that they admire. St. Francis really 
had the gifts and qualities they reverence 
and is fully entitled to the rank of hero 
in their Legenda Aurea. He was "every-
body's St. Francis" in very fact. 

Yet he was "everybody's" not in just 



any way that anybody wanted him. He 
was everybody's on his own terms and 
those were Catholic terms. He gained 
(and merited) the enthusiasm of the mul-
titudes, but he was no demagogue to thrive 
by flattering them. His gains (and merits) 
the enthusiasm of some modern literati; 
but, were he here, he would not hold their 
esteem by condescending to their senti-
mentality, their intellectual looseness, 
their social irresponsibility. St. Francis 
was a Catholic; Catholic in his concept 
of society, Catholic in the total habit of 
his thought, Catholic in that very charity 
which embraced the whole creation and 
for which he is so celebrated. 

He was Catholic in his concept of so-
ciety. He had a penetrating sense of what 
we now call "social justice." He per-
ceived the follies and crimes of one part 
of mankind and the wounds and blood of 
the other. He did what he could to expiate 
the one and to ally the other. Yet neither 
his indignation at wrong nor his ardor for 
the right made him oblivious to the en-
juring values in the social structure. He 
was neither an anarchist, nor a commu-
nist, nor a socialist, nor in any other 
sense a revolutionary. His vision of good-
ness embraced, as our Lord's did, the 
total social scene, but transcended the 
political framework as though it were an 
irrelevance. But on the other hand, both 



his actions and his writings prove beyond 
any doubt that he not only tolerated but 
esteemed and loved the social structure 
of Christendom which was the effective 
framework of his time. Would that it were 
of ours! ; 

St. Francis was Catholic in his thought. 
For him the reaches of the mind did not 
fade off on vague and ever-receding hori-
zons. He had the innocent conviction of 
the value of human reason which is the 
mark of healthy minds. And for him where 
human reason ended Faith began. Faith 
was then a known and living thing. It had 
not degenerated into a sentimental con-
fidence, a sickly optimism, an insistence 
on the opposite of experience as it is for 
so many moderns. Neither was it, as it 
is for so many others today a foolish loy-
alty to Utopian dreams, still less to all-
promising politicians. Because this is 
the meaning of faith to so many of our 
contemporaries, and because this is con-
temptible, many of our contemporaries 
contemn it. But faith was to the man of 
the thirteenth century — and was to St. 
Francis — a reasonable conviction which 
had for its object explicit truths revealed 
by Christ and preserved through His church. 
St. Francis believed in the Church, be-
lieved in the Mass, believed in the Holy 
Eucharist, believed in the sacred priest-
hood (though he shrank from accepting its 

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honors.) For him therefore faith was a 
"reasonable service," faith was the foun-
dation of things hoped-for and the persua-
sion of things unseen. 

St. Francis was Catholic in his love. 
Our age abounds in praise of love, but 
the things it praises under this name range 
from a putrid sensuality glorified by Freud 
to a sentimentality as ineffectual as it is 
meaningless. 

Real love differs from sensuality, as I 
need not declare. Also it differs from 
sentimentality by a difference as wide as 
the world. Sentimentality is feeling felt 
for the sake of feeling. Love is feeling 
directed by reason to an object which 
reason acknowledges and sanctions as 
worthy of love. For love there must be a 
constant heart and also a clear sound mind. 
Sentimentality sprawls over the universe. 
Love marches to its object and pays its 
tribute in the order of the hierarchy of 
excellence of all being. It rises from the 
inanimate to the animate, from the animal 
to the human in orderly degree. And in 
the human order its intensity is enhanced 
in harmony with the just claims of society. 
It proceeds from the tempered love of the 
good citizen for his fellows through the 
love of friendship to that love which St. 
Paul compared to the love of Christ for 
His Church, or to that which a true apostle 
has for souls. All these forms of love 

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finally rise and have their completion in 
the love which the saint fixes upon God 
through whose love the whole creation 
moves. 

St. Francis was thus Catholic in that 
love of his for everything and everybody. 
His strange and childlike Canticle cele-
brates the glory of sun and moon, the 
magnificence of hills, the freshness of 
fountains by bidding them to praise the 
Lord. He loved the wild creatures with 
which God has peopled the earth and air 
and water, and he loved them precisely 
as creatures. He did not make friends 
with beasts as an act of protest against 
society, nor as a refuge from loneliness. 
He made his compact with Brother Wolf 
because God would wish him to live in 
friendship with mankind. His tenderness 
for the birds made him think of them as 
his rivals who should take their turn with 
him in heralding God's goodness. 

How much St. Francis has to teach the 
world today if only the world would listen, 
as the birds did, to what he really wants 
to say. If only many of its leaders and 
thinkers would desist from their endless 
vanity and come to learn from him. They 
have given their followers much in the 
things that serve life's minor uses. But 
they have taken away the faith in the 
meaning of life itself. If they could only 
be disciples of St. Francis he would say 

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to them, as he once did to one of his in-
tellectual brethren: "May God confound 
you by your own wisdom and learning — 
and send you back to your vocation whether 
you will or no." 

What more splendid and charitable prayer 
for the leaders of the world of this dark-
ness. What a glorious thing if St. Francis 
could obtain from God the effect of that 
kind imprecation; if the intelligences 
which are so guilty of the world's present 
sorrow might be confounded into their 
true vocation "whether they will or no." 

Just at present we are in a time of much 
disaster abroad and of uncertain domestic 
omen. The democracy which seemed to 
be the secure possession of our day, which 
seemed to bear the fairest promise of the 
world's future, which seemed to be the 
aegis of all human values which seemed 
to pledge its bounties to the whole spread-
ing world of men, that democracy has 
shrunk from frontier after frontier. Even 
here it bristles with preparation for war 
that may destroy what it would defend. 
God only knows what future years of guid-
ance by only human virtue and only human 
wisdom may bring us. 

Yet somehow today I picture the real 
St. Francis turning from the fluttering birds, 
those images of pity and laughter, to look 
down in our American cities upon the pity 
and laughter in the fluttering hearts of 

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men. Doubtless he sees what we can see, 
but better than we can see it. Doubtless 
he sees our follies, our sins, as we stand 
here "upon a darkling plain where ignorant 
armies clash by night." Doubtless he 
sees all this. But perhaps he sees also 
what we cannot even glimpse. Perhaps 
he sees in the country which is democ-
racy's beleaguered capital the dawning 
of the only spirit that can ever give de-
mocracy the soul of life. Perhaps he sees 
tHe light of God descending on our minds, 
His grace upon our wills, His peace upon 
our hearts. Perhaps he sees not only the 
form of democracy but the faith that is its 
life going forth from this nation to all the 
world. Perhaps he utters today over each 
of our cities the gracious prayer which came 
from his dying lips over Assisi: "Blessed 
be thou by God, 0 holy city; because by 
thee many souls shall be saved. In thy 
walls many servants of the Most High will 
dwell, and amongst thy citizens many will 
be chosen for Eternal Life. Peace be to 
Thee." 

And thus the peace of God will come to 
surpass our understanding and to assuage 
our hearts. 

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