Francis of Assisi is one of the few medieval saints whose appeal has never faded, and the reason is the radicalism of his choice. The son of a prosperous cloth merchant, he renounced his inheritance, stripping off his clothes in the public square to return them to his father, and embraced absolute poverty, begging his bread and calling Poverty his bride.
The order he founded, the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor), took that renunciation as its rule and grew, within his lifetime, into one of the great forces of the medieval Church. His spirituality was affective and concrete rather than scholastic: he preached to birds, tamed the wolf of Gubbio in legend, composed the Canticle of the Creatures in praise of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and assembled the first Nativity scene to make the humility of Bethlehem visible. Near the end of his life, on Mount La Verna, he is said to have received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, the first recorded case. His feast, and his modern adoption as patron of ecology, keep alive a vision of Christianity stripped to poverty and delight in creation.