On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke

excavation of the shrine in the late nineteenth century is said to have revealed the skeleton of a wolf, with its
feroce
teeth and skull intact.
    So powerful was the legend of the wolf among early Franciscans that in 1213 the bishop of Assisi persuaded the Benedictines to give Francis and his friars La Vittorina, a tiny church just outside the current city walls, where the taming of the wolf took place. We have a rather difficult time finding the church in the confluence of roads looping around it, but we manage, guided by a modern bronze sculpture of a barefoot, tattered Francis being licked in the face by the adoring wolf. We clearly are not the only ones to have sought out the legendary shrine: Stuffed in Francis’s sculpted bronze hand is a bouquet of fresh red roses.
    I want to digress for a moment here to explain why I am including so many of Francis’s miracles and in such detail. Some of his modern biographers downplay or even exclude the many miracles attributed to him. They are more concerned with Francis’s spiritual development and the rapid growth of the Franciscan movement. That, of course, is understandable and entirely relevant, but I think diminishing the miracles misses an instructive and charming dimension of the Franciscan legend. Obviously, there’s no way to prove the miracles, which if taken literally often seem silly. One has to suspend disbelief and not only give in to the mysticism that laced medieval times but factor in a political aspect as well.
    Francis’s medieval biographers, all of whom were Franciscan friars, were determined to present him as a messenger of God on earth and thus armed him with all sorts of otherworldly powers. They were also determined to confirm and maintain his status as a saint, which gives even more credence to their emphasis on miracles. That they were successful goes without saying, but their body of evidence seems far less relevant and even embarrassing today to some modern Franciscan friars.
    “Yes, that
supposedly
happened here,” says Padre Tonino, a friar we meet at the Franciscan church in Alessandria, Lombardy. We have gone miles out of our way to the attractive, quite modern city because eight centuries ago Celano had recorded a charming miracle there, performed on Francis’s behalf, after a dinner party.
    The legend holds that Francis’s host in Alessandria, where he had come to preach, was so thrilled to have Francis at his table that he ordered the ultimate delicacy—a seven-year-old capon—to be served for the meal. A wicked man, posing as a beggar, came to the door during dinner and received as alms a piece of the capon from Francis. But he did not eat it. Instead, the next day, hoping to expose the humble Francis as a closet hedonist, the wicked man (described as a “son of Belial” by Celano) waved the incriminating capon to a crowd gathered to hear Francis preach so the people could “see what kind of man this Francis is.” But his scheme backfired when the capon in his hand turned miraculously into an everyday fish.
    It was that documented story of Francis in Alessandria that had brought us to the city, but to Father Tonino, as to many other friars we talk to all over Italy, it is the spiritual legacy of Francis and the very real work they are doing now that identifies their faith, not medieval capons turning into fish.
    Father Tonino, for example, an attractive man of fifty with close-cropped hair and cheerful brown eyes, was a missionary in Zaire until his mission was burned, rebuilt, and then bombed. He now feeds upward of thirty poor people a night in Alessandria with the help of volunteers and five resident friars. The cloister of his quite modern church is not reserved for contemplative prayer but has been turned into a miniature soccer field for local children. And a sunny, new meeting room, next to the church’s massive library under reconstruction, sports a colorful painting by a group of ten-year-olds, which includes not only