A Novena to Saint Francis of Assisi

In 1205 or 1206, praying before the crucifix in the ruined church of San Damiano outside Assisi, Francis reported hearing a voice tell him to repair the church, which he initially took literally, selling cloth from his father's shop to buy stone for the building.

Brought before the bishop of Assisi by his furious father over the sale of the cloth, Francis returned the money and then removed his own clothes in the public square, saying he now had only his Father in heaven; his father never reconciled with him.

Francis later wrote, near the end of his life, that his conversion turned on a single encounter with a leper, whom he had long dreaded and finally embraced; contact with people with leprosy became a regular practice of his early community.

Francis's insistence on corporate and personal poverty caused disputes within his own order even before his death, disagreements over how strictly the rule should be kept that continued for more than a century afterward.

Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures in 1224 or 1225, largely blind and in severe pain from his final illnesses, addressing the sun, moon, wind, water, fire, and earth as brother and sister.

In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the siege lines at Damietta in Egypt to meet the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil; he was received courteously and the two spoke for several days before Francis returned to the Christian camp unharmed.

By the early 1220s the Franciscan order had grown to thousands of members across Europe, requiring an organizational structure Francis distrusted; he resigned its formal leadership in 1220 and spent his final years with reduced influence over its direction.

In September 1224, two years before his death, Francis reported receiving the stigmata, marks resembling the wounds of the crucifixion, while praying on Mount La Verna; he concealed the marks for the remainder of his life.

Francis added a verse on death to the Canticle of the Creatures shortly before he died on 3 October 1226, and asked to be laid on the bare ground in his final hours; he was canonized less than two years later, in 1228, by Pope Gregory IX.