Francis and Clare by Jon M. Sweeney

Author:Jon M. Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CARING FOR CREATURES

The connection between Francis of Assisi and animals is the single fact about him that most people know. We have tales of his encounters with animals, fish, invertebrates, and plants. In all of these ways, Franciscans emphasized that creation includes more than humankind. Just as they redefined what it means to be family, they further widened the fraternity to link humans and creatures in the same relationship with God.

On one warm afternoon, Francis wandered outside of Assisi, questioning his motives for ministry, asking God if perhaps everything he had done up until that point had been for the wrong reasons. He wondered if he should have simply gotten married and raised a family as his father wanted him to do. Francis was always the most critical of himself, but it was on just such an afternoon that Francis first met the birds and spoke to them as if to equals. That day marks the beginning of the environmental movement, the beginning of the era when we began to understand ourselves as intrinsically connected to all of creation.

Many other legends arose surrounding Francis’s love for animals, and chief among them were stories about the Wolf of Gubbio—whom Francis tamed of his savagery in exchange for a commitment from the townspeople of Gubbio to feed him for the rest of his life. In the early twentieth century, a book called The Chronicles of Brother Wolf brought the wolf to life again as a full-fledged disciple of Francis. These newer legends were written in the spirit of those friars who regretted the institutional turn taken by the Order after Francis’s death.

In “Brother Wolf Joins the Poor Clares,” the anonymous author tells of how the friars in charge disdained the wolf after Francis’s death, and how the wolf eventually went to live with the sisters instead. “Now among some of the Brothers was a certain dislike of Brother Wolf, which after our master’s death showed itself in various words and murmurings, scorning and spurning and pushing aside. No food was put out for him, and no water, which was worse, and Tertius [the friar-narrator of these tales] fared little better, so that there was nothing to share with Brother Wolf.”

After this rude treatment of Francis’s brother Wolf, the creature is driven away with a stick by one of the friars. He wanders briefly, imagining that he might return to Gubbio, but instead finds his way to San Damiano, where he waits outside for a short time with an injured foot.

When they opened the door wide [Brother Wolf] crept inside, looking upon them with eyes that were full of tears and pain. And they too, when they saw the evil case that he was in, and that foot, fell to mourning as women will, and very quickly they summoned the Sisters, though it was past Compline, when none may speak, but they with warm water and soft oils washed and dressed it and bound it up. . . . After that he lived with [the Poor Clares] and left them no more.

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