A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. On one occasion, Jesus said, father, lord of heaven and earth, to you I offer praise. For what you have hidden from the learned and from the clever, you have revealed to the merest children. Father, it is true, you have graciously willed to be so. Everything has been given over to me by my father.
No one knows the son but the father, and no one knows the father but the son and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal him. Come to me, all you who are weary, and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And Christ is talking about a yoke, and this is the gospel of the lord.
Praise be to the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. It's not a coincidence, of course, that we have today the feast of Saint Claire, founder of the poor Claire's, which is the corresponding order for women matching the order of friars minor with Saint Francis of Assisi, established or founded or began, I suppose is the best word. They are contemporaries.
They both came from Assisi and we had Saint Francis feast recently. Now, I'm depending on a very fallible memory. But in 1934, I spent some time in Assisi and I don't I forget how I got there but I stayed with the poor Claire's in their guesthouse. They took a few guests in. And a fellow guest, the only other guest, was a gentleman.
At that time I thought he was quite old, he was probably about 38. But anyway, he was advanced in years, he even had gray hair. And he had become at that time a recognized authority on Saint Francis and the Franciscan movement. And he practically was a permanent residence there. He was still working, he had already published a life of Saint Francis, and he was working on and working on a new revision or something.
Anyway, he was there. The point I want to make is, of course, naturally I forget his name. He was from the north Scandinavian country, was not a Catholic. But first I want to point out, he could have lived any place in the season. This wasn't the only place he could have lived.
But here he was making his temporary home with the poor eclairs. Secondly, in the face of a very complicated picture, because this movement that Saint Francis started or the order or any words you want, because it's all of those things, is a very complicated, puzzling bit of history, hard to recapture. And anyway, he had devoted his life to this. So if anybody was in a position to have some decent, well founded opinions on the matter, he was it. Anyway, now in Assisi, you have the following situation.
You have a church, the basilica, which has the tomb of Saint Francis of Assisi, and that's under the control of what is called the black Franciscans. They wear the black robe. Then you have the poor Claire's with their house, and that is the direct sequence of Saint Claire because there are plenty of other orders of Saint Francis. Then you had, of course, the brown Franciscans, they have another church there. Then Assisi is on a mountaintop.
Down in the valley, you have the Portiuncula, the little church which now surrounded by a huge basilica. And it's in that little church in the twelfth at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries that Saint Francis may consider that his church really, and some of his most impressive religious experiences, whatever they were, took place there. In addition to this, there's something else at Ecclesiastes which some people don't remember or know about. It's a good hard long walk, and if it's a summer afternoon it's a very arduous and sweaty walk through a rugged path out to a hermitage. Naturally, I forget its name.
When I went there, there were some monks living there, some Franciscans. It was still a viable hermitage. Again, this was a place where Saint Francis often went to be in alone solitude. Now, having said all of that now, of course, as you know, there was considerable dissension among the Franciscans. That's the reason you had to begin with the blacks and the browns.
And if you've been there, you'll know you'll see how his body is bolted to the ground. Matter of fact, they lost track of it. It was so thoroughly hidden that for several hundred years it was lost Because, those who had it didn't want other people to steal it. But having a body of a recognized saint was was money in your pocket that's faced the reality of situation. It's what it was.
So anyway, all of this is very fascinating. This gentleman, who certainly as I say had a right to have his opinion respected. Not that it's absolute, but here's what he said to me. He spoke English fluently, a lot better than I spoke Danish. He said that in his opinion, the true spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi was in this house of the poor of the poor Clare's.
That's what he said. That's why he stayed there. And after my few days there, I could only I couldn't compare it with any others, but I certainly was impressed by it. Felt you really did. Now I can't analyze this and I don't try to analyze things, I just live with them.
I'm an existentialist. But you could not at least I couldn't. The place was flavored with an atmosphere. That's all I can say. And you felt it.
And it was a remarkable experience for me to have that privilege because I don't know how I got there, it was certainly a coincidence. It wasn't planned very well. But there it was that this that Saint Clare's followers are still very viable and still very much alive with with the spirit of Saint Claire and, if we can believe this gentleman, with the spirit of Saint Francis of a season. Now, I spoke last week about Saint Francis of Assisi, and it's it's a very complicated picture. I'm not minimizing it at all.
But some things are very factual. As long as you don't want to get documents and writings and try and talk about authenticity and all of this, there's where the problems begin. Some phenomena come out absolutely factually. For example, within a few years of Saint Francis initiating this movement that by that I mean you see when I say initiate, you get the you get the picture of a man sitting behind his desk and saying, I'm going to initiate a religious order. Then he gets out a lot of his drawing materials and starts charting it all out.
Well, that's not the way it worked at all. The first thing I know about Saint Francis for sure is that he decided to do something with his own life, period. He had no idea of doing anything like getting anybody around him or or getting associates. He probably thought he said what he was doing was too crazy for any sane person to get on with him because he did some very odd things. We know that for sure.
And, of course, there are a lot of there's a lot of fiction about Saint Francis too, but, there's a lot that isn't. But he had anyway, this movement that he started of men who wouldn't be priests, of men who would depend for the most part for their living upon alms of the faith, whose lives would be spent not separated from people but with people in the hearts of their cities preaching the word of God. These were not ordained men. They weren't even deacons. For the most part, they weren't well educated men.
The the many of them were scarcely educated. Saint Francis wasn't a university person. The universities were just about beginning, but the only real one you had at the beginning of the thirteenth century is Paris. So now here's this is the way it started, that he got rid of everything personally. He came from a wealthy family, and he even took some of his father's goods and sold it.
So he he got rid of everything totally, absolute absolute poverty and no right. He didn't want anybody to have rights or property to own anything. And within a few years, within less than a half a dozen, as a matter of fact, three or four, the group in Italy, men men alone, numbered between three and four thousand. This is absolutely phenomenal. Of course, it it it was a it was a threat because to have three or 4,000 of people running around this way was kind of challenge, shall we say, to good order, law, and order.
But anyway, this is a fact. And of course, dissension and differences arose from the very start. But the point is, this is a factual. And most of the dissensions, most of the controversies are with the men, not with the women part of this movement. Because Saint Claire initiated the same kind of a movement for women that Saint Francis began for men, and they both came from Assisi.
But I want to end where I began with the present tense. I hope it's present tense. That in the judgment of this gentleman who had spent most of his mature years studying Saint Francis, the move to Francis notice it's called the Franciscan movement because it was something very totally new and it wasn't at all like Saint Dominic. It has a very different beginning, it has a different history, it has a very different idea, it's unique, very peculiar. But here's a gentleman who certainly was in a position to know a great deal about the whole caboodle.
And it was his considered opinion that in this this was the same convent, the very buildings that Saint Clair had founded. That if you wanted the true spirit of Saint Francis of Assisi, it was found with the poor players. So that is the saint we honor today. That's the company we keep. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.