The Virtues of St. Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi didn't write lengthy treatises on virtue — he lived them, loudly and concretely, in a way that made everyone around him uncomfortable in the most productive way possible. Eight hundred years later, his four core virtues still cut directly against everything the modern world tells you to want.

In the 12th century, a man's social position determined nearly everything about his life. Francis was born near the top of Assisi's social ladder. He chose the bottom — deliberately and without resentment. He called his order the Friars Minor, the Little Brothers, and he meant it. He refused titles, refused positions of authority within the order, and in 1220 stepped down as its leader because he believed he was not suited to govern it.

This was not false modesty. It was the genuine theological conviction that the path to God runs downward, not upward. The culture today runs entirely in the other direction — personal brand, status signaling, and the endless performance of achievement are not just tolerated, they are expected. Francis's humility looks strange in this context, the way any foreign thing looks strange. That strangeness is worth sitting with.

Francis's poverty was absolute. He owned nothing. His brothers owned nothing as a community. When a well-meaning cardinal offered to soften the Rule's demands on poverty, Francis refused. He believed that possessions — and the anxiety that comes with protecting them — were incompatible with the kind of radical trust the Gospel demands. He had tried the path of having more. He found what he was looking for was not in the warehouse.

Evangelical poverty, the technical term for what Francis practiced, is not a requirement for every Catholic. But the spirit behind it — the willingness to hold possessions loosely and trust God for what you need — is available to anyone. Francis lived it at maximum intensity. The question he puts to every generation is: what are you holding on to that is actually holding you back?

Francis demanded obedience from his brothers and practiced it himself, even when it cost him. He submitted his Rule to Rome for approval. He obeyed Pope Innocent III even when the direction of the order took turns he had not planned. He accepted the authority of the Church even when he saw clearly that the Church needed reform. Autonomy is the supreme value of contemporary culture — the idea that submitting to authority could be a path to freedom sounds like a contradiction.

Francis understood it differently. He saw obedience as the practical form of trust. You cannot say you trust God while reserving the right to override everything He asks of you. Obedience, for Francis, was the way a person actually puts belief into practice. It is still, for the same reason, one of the hardest things the Gospel asks.

Francis was known for his joy — not performative cheerfulness, but a deep, durable gladness that survived illness, rejection, misunderstanding, and years of severe physical suffering. By the time he received the Stigmata at La Verna, he was nearly blind and in constant pain. His joy did not diminish.

He described what he called "perfect joy" in one of the most remarkable passages in medieval spiritual literature: a friar arrives cold and hungry, is refused entry, insulted, and driven away. If we bear all that with patience and charity, thinking of the sufferings of Christ — that is perfect joy. It is a deeply uncomfortable answer. The joy Francis describes is not the result of good circumstances. It is the result of being so unattached to good circumstances that nothing can take it from you.

Francis called his brothers not colleagues or subjects but brothers. The fraternal bond he built was not sentimental — it was structural. His order drew from every class of medieval society: noblemen, merchants, laborers, illiterate and learned alike. What held them together was not policy. It was the conviction that they were genuinely responsible for one another's souls.

Francis understood that Christian community is not an optional add-on to the spiritual life. It is the spiritual life, lived out in real relationships with real people who need real things from you. In a culture increasingly organized around individual choice and the curated presentation of a self, fraternity in the Franciscan sense is genuinely counter-cultural. It asks you to be known, to be responsible, and to stay even when staying is hard.

The virtues Francis lived are not antiques. They are the specific remedies for the specific diseases that afflict modern Catholic life: the anxiety of too much, the exhaustion of too loud, the loneliness of too isolated. He does not ask you to become a medieval friar. He asks you to look honestly at your life and ask what you are carrying that is not yours to carry.

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