St. Francis vs. Modern Masculinity

Before Francis was a saint he was a soldier — a young man with military ambitions, expensive clothes, and a reputation for throwing the best parties in Assisi. What happened next is one of the Church's most compelling accounts of what real masculine strength actually looks like. The culture offers men dominance or passivity. Francis offers something rarer: a man who conquered himself.

Francis went to war in 1202, was captured at the Battle of Collestrada, and spent a year as a prisoner in Perugia while his father arranged his ransom. He came home sick and restless, unable to find satisfaction in the things that had once filled him. He began pulling back from the parties. He started praying more seriously. Then one day, riding outside Assisi, he encountered a leper on the road.

His first instinct was the usual one: revulsion, distance. Then something shifted. He dismounted, approached the man, pressed money into his hand, and kissed it. He later identified this moment as the turning point of his conversion. That is not the act of a weak man. That is the act of a man who has decided to stop running from what he fears and start moving toward it.

The conversation about masculinity in Catholic circles tends to oscillate between two poles. On one side is the loud, chest-forward version: strength as dominance, leadership as control, toughness as the refusal to feel anything inconvenient. On the other side is a deferent softness that mistakes passivity for virtue and conflict-avoidance for peace.

Francis offers neither. His was a masculinity built on conquest of a specific kind: self-conquest. He fought the same battles every man fights — comfort, pride, lust for recognition — and he won them not by suppression but by grace, by choosing something better every day for twenty years. He cannot be dismissed as a soft saint. He was formed by a series of experiences and choices that cost him everything, and what came out on the other side was real.

In 1219, Francis crossed enemy lines during the Fifth Crusade and walked into the camp of Sultan Malik al-Kamil of Egypt. He was there to preach the Gospel. He offered, by some accounts, to walk through fire alongside Muslim clerics to demonstrate the truth of the Christian faith. The Sultan declined but received him with hospitality and sent him back safely.

Think about what that required — not physical courage only, though that was certainly present. It required the conviction that the Gospel was worth saying to someone who had every reason to reject it, in a context where saying it could cost you your life. It required the kind of freedom from self-protection that only comes from having already given everything away. Francis went to the Sultan not to debate but to witness. He came back without a conversion to report but with his own faith deepened.

Francis founded one of the most successful religious orders in Church history. By 1220, the Franciscans had spread across Europe and into the East. He had started with twelve brothers — now there were thousands. And in 1220, he stepped down as Minister General of the order. He believed he was not the right person to govern it at that scale. He handed leadership to others, accepted the role of simple brother, and spent his final years in prayer, writing, and suffering.

A man who could not step down from something he had built would not have been able to build it in the first place. The same ego that refuses to yield also refuses to listen, refuses to learn, and eventually collapses under its own weight. Francis stepped down because his goal was never the order. His goal was Christ. That is leadership — and also the rarest kind.

Two years before he died, Francis received the Stigmata — the wounds of Christ in his hands, feet, and side — while at prayer on Mount La Verna. He bore them until his death in 1226. He tried to conceal them. He asked his brothers not to speak of them publicly during his lifetime. The man who had once paraded through Assisi in fine clothes spent his last years hiding the most extraordinary grace in the history of the order.

The transformation is complete. What began as a desire for glory ended in a desire for hiddenness. The one thing he had to show for twenty years of radical self-gift was wounds — and he covered them.

It does not require poverty vows or barefoot walking. A devotion to Francis for the ordinary Catholic man looks like a willingness to ask, honestly and regularly, what you are carrying that is not yours to carry. It looks like the practice of self-conquest: choosing patience when impatience is easier, choosing silence when noise feels safer, choosing presence when distraction is always available. It looks like the kind of daily fidelity that does not announce itself.

Source: Content produced for The Catholic Woodworker · youtube.com/@thecatholicwoodworker · April 2026