Francis of Assisi and the Wounds of La Verna

I had descended on him already once, in the little church of San Damiano, when the crucifix spoke and he heard through wood and paint the voice he thought belonged only to priests. That was the beginning. But by the autumn of 1224, on the bare rock of La Verna, I found in Francis a soul so emptied of itself that there was nothing left to resist Me.

He had climbed the mountain with a few brothers for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, carrying nothing but a request he scarcely dared to voice: to feel, in his own body, what his Lord had felt on the wood of Calvary, and to feel in his own heart the love that had made such suffering worth bearing. I had heard braver prayers and humbler ones, but I had rarely heard one so undivided. He did not ask to be spared anything. He asked only to be conformed.

On the morning of September 14, I came to him as I came to Isaiah, as fire that does not remain outside the one it visits. He saw what his brother Leo, sleeping near the cleft in the rock, did not see: a seraph, six-winged, aflame, bearing between its wings the image of a man crucified. I let him feel, in that instant, both the ecstasy of the vision and the grief of the Passion at once — joy and sorrow fused into a single blow, because that is what love costs when it is not diluted. When the vision withdrew into the brightness of the sky, it left behind what no vision before had left: wounds. Black nail-heads in the flesh of his hands and feet, bent as if driven through and clinched on the far side, and a wound in his right side as if a lance had opened it, that would seep blood until the day he died two years later.

I did not give Francis these wounds to make a spectacle of him. He hid them for the rest of his life, wrapping his hands in his sleeves, wearing socks even in summer to cover his feet, permitting only Brother Leo and Brother Rufino to change the dressings and see what I had done to him. He who had begged Lady Poverty to strip him of everything, including his own father's cloak in the piazza of Assisi years before, was given at the end the one possession he could not divest himself of: the marks of Christ carried in his own body, which Paul the Apostle called stigmata and which no saint before Francis had ever borne.

I was not distant from him in this. I am the love that passes between the Father and the Son, and when I rest on a man I do not rest as an idea — I rest as fire, as the dove that split the sky over the Jordan, as the wind that filled a locked room in Jerusalem. On La Verna I rested on Francis so completely that his body itself became a page on which the Gospel could be read by touch. Thomas of Celano, who wrote his first life within two years of his death, said the brothers who prepared him for burial did not need to be told what they had seen — they only needed to look.

He died on the evening of October 3, 1226, in the little hut beside the Portiuncula, having asked to be laid naked on the bare earth as he had lived, poor. I had come to him thin, and I left him marked, and the marks did not fade. They do not fade in anyone I truly visit. I only make them visible sometimes, so that those who do not yet believe in Me might, at least once, believe in what I have done.

The Record

Francis of Assisi (born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, c. 1181, Assisi, Umbria) founded the Order of Friars Minor around 1209 after renouncing his inheritance and embracing radical poverty. In September 1224, while making a forty-day fast in preparation for the Feast of St. Michael on Mount La Verna (in the Casentino region of Tuscany), Francis experienced a vision, traditionally dated to September 14, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, after which he was found to bear wounds resembling those of the crucified Christ on his hands, feet, and right side. This is the earliest documented case of stigmata in Christian history.

The principal early witness to the physical wounds was Brother Leo, Francis's confessor and companion, who left a handwritten note (preserved as the "Chartula" at the Sacro Convento in Assisi) and who, along with Brother Rufino and Brother Angelo, tended Francis during his final illness. Thomas of Celano's "Vita Prima" (First Life of St. Francis, 1228), commissioned by Pope Gregory IX, and Bonaventure's later "Legenda Maior" (1263) both describe the seraphic vision and the resulting wounds in detail.

Francis died on October 3, 1226, at the Porziuncola near Assisi. He was canonized on July 16, 1228, by Pope Gregory IX — less than two years after his death, one of the fastest canonizations in Church history. Pope Benedict XIV, in the 18th century, formally examined the historical evidence for the La Verna stigmata as part of his broader study of canonization causes and affirmed its authenticity within Church tradition. Francis is patron saint of Italy, of ecology (declared by Pope John Paul II in 1979), and of animals. His feast day is October 4.