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Catholic Saints
St. Francis of Assisi
00:26:15
Dr. Tim Gray and Paul McCusker talk about the incredible Saint Francis of Assisi. This massive figure of the Church spread the Gospel with incredible power and grace throughout the 13th century.
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Narrator
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Tim Gray
Welcome to form Now, I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, and joining me is Paul McCusker, who's our creative director here at the August Institute for many of our projects and. And an author. And we're going to talk about Brother Francis, St Francis of Assisi, because we want to talk about this great, great saint, one of the most, I think, according to recent polling, the most beloved saint of our Catholic tradition. And of course, he's probably one of the best known saints in our Catholic tradition. And one of the projects that we had a chance to do together, Paul, is work on the Brother Francis audio drama. And so Paul headed up and did the script writing for our audio drama that we have here on Brother Francis. And it was done. If you've never listened to it, we have it on formed. We use professional actors and actresses. We film it in a studio in England. And this audio drama, by the way, won best audio drama in all categories in the audie Awards in 2018. So that was a remarkable award to win and beat out Audible and the biggest publishers who were doing audio dramas. This was the best audio Drama for 2018.
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Paul McCusker
Quite an award.
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Tim Gray
And you know, Paul, you get to work with these actors and actresses and you get to see the story come alive. You work first off, you spend time. We talked a lot about this, researching about St. Francis, so getting ready to know the person and then the angle that you want to tell. And I think one of the ways you tell the story of Francis that I thought was just really unique and creative is Francis is such a unique figure. But what you do is in each of the chapters of the audio drama, it begins with one of the characters in the story. Not Francis, but a character. Like whether it's Francis father or Francis brother or one of his friends who start talking about Francis, and you get them as the perspective, the window into this unique man. It's a really great way of storytelling.
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Paul McCusker
Well, thanks. And part of that probably was indicative of my own feelings about Francis. When we talked about doing it, you'll remember, I really was skeptical about doing that story. I didn't even know that there was a story. Because a lot of times with the saints, we have people who are interesting people and they have very deep internal lives, but that doesn't always translate very well into story. But what happens?
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Tim Gray
Yeah, where's the drama? Because we know it's hard to Tell an interior drama, but did the saint have an exterior drama with other people and places that can be told?
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Paul McCusker
So that was the thing. I had my impressions of Francis, and then I began to do the research and then I began to see what the story was. And it was very clearly a story. And it was a man in conflict with his own family, with his culture. I mean, he was just in conflict all the way around, even with himself, especially early on. And that's where that idea came from. I kept thinking everybody has different impressions of him, and everybody in his life is seeing him differently because of who he was. And so it came together as an idea that maybe I could start each segment with, with the different people in his life giving a perspective. And how very different. Their perspectives were very contradictory in terms of how they saw him.
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Tim Gray
Very different. I mean, when you get his father talking about Francis and his frustration and anger and how he is just being irresponsible, giving money away to the poor and squandering the family inheritance and putting the family at risk, and where is his loyalty as a son? And Francis has to live out that conflict between his relationship with God and his relationship with his father.
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Paul McCusker
And his mother was stuck in the middle. Pico, dear woman, was stuck between a very stubborn man as a husband and an equally stubborn son. That's the other thing about him, is he was very much his father's son in his stubbornness, that once he got the idea and once he grabbed onto it, and it was true. Because before, let's call it his conversion, before his faith became very real to him, and then what he decided to do after that, the collision with his dad was very real because he was as stubborn as his father was. And that's one of the things that I appreciated about his humanity. That in the saints lives very often who they were before that turn, that thing that happened with them goes with them. I mean, you can imagine the apostle Paul, Saul was a very stubborn and tenacious man. Well, his conversion, his encounter with Christ didn't necessarily change that. It redirected. He became just as stubborn and tenacious about the faith as he was before. And Francis was very much like that.
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Tim Gray
When I think about Francis in the conflict with his father, I'm always reminded in the Upper Basilica of the basilica in ASSISI Dedicated to St. Francis, you have all these famous paintings from Giotto, a great Italian painter who came in and painted so much of, especially the Upper Basilica of the life of Francis. And there's this great scene in the Basilica of Francis in front of the bishop and his father, his earthly father. And of course, we tell this scene in such a great dramatic fashion in the audio drama, where Francis is renouncing his right to inherit and to be the son of Don Pietro. And as he does that, he strips off and he gives everything he has. He even strips off his cloak. And of course, the bishop then has to give him his cloak to clothe him, because Francis is there naked. But Francis, in that scene that Gialto paints, Francis is looking up. So he. You've got his bishop and his father right in front of him, but he's looking up beyond them. And if you follow the trajectory in the basilica, he's actually looking up to a scene, a different scene that was painted up there of Abraham offering up Isaac. And I thought, how fascinating that Giotto juxtaposed this Old Testament scene of Abraham, who's called by God to offer up his son. In other words, Abraham has to love God more than he loves his own beloved son, Isaac. And in that scene, Abraham is offering up his son Isaac, and Francis is looking up. And to me, it's such an incredible reversal because Francis isn't offering up his son, he's got to offer up his father. And I thought it was a brilliant way of Giotto telling the story of.
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Paul McCusker
Francis and the power of that and the power of that moment for him to renounce and to officially, publicly have to do it, to basically for the two of them to essentially completely break their relationship. And it wasn't just legal. It was an emotional. It was a true break of the bonds of family, which was heartbreaking on so many levels. And we play that out in the drama. And yet necessary. This, to me, was the nature of Francis. Francis, as a young man, I think, perceived himself as a troubadour. So a lot of the ways that I thought of him later, where he would do huge, dramatic things that most of us, some of us would look at and go, that's crazy. I mean, the stripping naked or the things. The extreme that he would go to, to play out his faith was hinted at in his earlier life because of. And I don't mean artificial showmanship, I don't mean fake, I just mean that this was the way he was wired, that he wanted to go to the extreme of his relationship with Christ wherever it may lead him, and as extreme as it may be. And then the other thing I realized with him, and why that break with his father was so important, was that for him, in his mind, whatever couldn't be redeemed had to be eliminated. So for him, he was almost like someone who might be like an alcoholic. To him, a single coin, a penny, was the same as giving him a bag of gold. To him, one coin was as bad as all the wealth that he was trying to put away. It was dangerous for him, but he knew it, so he denounced it and had to get rid of it.
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Tim Gray
Because Francis is known for his radical poverty, right. But he grows up as this rich, young spoiled kid in this very affluent up and coming trade society that's happening. And so he deals with that wealth by the opposite. I mean, I think you're insight about it, he goes to the other extreme. And for him, because he was so spoiled with wealth, he can give, no, he can't give any space to that.
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Paul McCusker
And I think that's a lesson for many of us because too often we're constantly toying with and playing with things that God really wants us to leave completely behind. And he took that seriously. And it's interesting to look at him because you look at what he gave up, anything that hinted of wealth and he actually, he says it in the drama. And I think I got it from the biographies that he always hinted that the temptation to go back to it was ever present. But when you look at what he could redeem, for example, he loved to sing, he loved music, he loved, he sang all the time. And after his conversion, after that pivot point, he, he continued to sing, but now he sang to the glory of God. So the things from his life that could be redeemed for God's glory and align with where he believed God wanted him to go, he kept. And then he used the other stuff.
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Tim Gray
He got rid of, he got renounced. He had to just leave no quarter for them. Well, one of the things that Francis was known for is being the life of the party. And you capture that right in the opening scenes of the audio drama. And, and he was known for being the social networker. I mean he creates, he's at the heart of a network of friendship. And so Francis had this gift for friendship and he found he could redeem that because he ends up drawing people, so many people in your story who are some of the friends of Francis that really you enjoyed telling their story.
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Paul McCusker
Well, my problem is that my mind goes to the actors names and I've suddenly gone blank on the characters names because there was Harry and there was Dominic and there are the actors and they were the friends that came with him. Like his first was part of the old crowd and basically said if you are serious about this, I want to follow you. And Francis almost doesn't even know what to do with it. He hadn't even thought of followers. He was only thinking in terms of his own. In fact, that would come back to haunt him later when he had to come up with rules for order and things like that. But the depth of friendship, not only with those from his town that followed him, but then those who came around him later, you get a sense of a deep intimacy and a very honest friendship and a very fragile. I mean, he would confess to the others. He never put on airs about who he was or what he was doing. He was always aware of his own sinfulness and temptations. And even with St. Clare later, which we capture in the drama, is the purity of a kind of intimacy that was purely spiritual, but the deep friendship of that. But again, it was redemptive. It was a redeemed part of his early life that he took with him later on. And again, he models it for us. He shows us, maybe we don't strip naked and run down the street, which would cause its own set of problems, but the extremes that he went to, I think we're called to sacrifice and we're called to say, what can we redeem? And then what does that look like when it's redeemed in our lives by way of relationships, by way of what we do with our materialism, our wealth, whatever it may be, and what does it look like? And I think we see in his life what it looks like. Here's what it was before, here's what it is later. What do we see the difference as being, and how do we take that into our hearts?
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Tim Gray
I love seeing the transformation of Francis that you slowly tell that comes out in the story. There's so many things about Francis that people don't know today, that he was in a war and became a prisoner in war and suffered post traumatic syndrome.
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Paul McCusker
I mean, for a year he was held, and a lot of people don't realize it wasn't just taken prisoner the way we think. And then a few weeks later, he was let go. He was actually, I think, a year imprisoned and then released. And you can see that is the key point where he went from arguably a frivolous young man, wealthy and just loved to party. We have hints of things like the story of a beggar who came to him and what he did in response to that. So you see a foreshadowing of what would happen later. But that was the key thing in my mind when he was taken prisoner and then you even ask, well, what in the world? What were they even fighting over? Territory. A couple of rivalries like we have with football teams. It was almost superfluous. And yet it changed his life. And when he came back from that, it set him on a whole other course of exploration. It might be ptsd, but also created a whole different hunger for him that he had to follow. But it took him a while to actually figure out what that was, what it was that was nagging at him.
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Tim Gray
And of course, that experience forged for him and probably this idea of peace. I mean, he really preached peace and tried to practice peace. And that was pax was peace was a very important image for him. And, you know, he loved the prayer of blessing that you find in numbers, the blessing of Aaron, the priestly prayer that ends with the blessing of peace. And so, you know, here you have a man who's three thrown into conflict. He's seen violence, he's seen hatred and the fruits of sin, and he becomes an instrument of peace. He really wants to become a peacemaker.
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Paul McCusker
And it's not a sentimental piece, oh, let's all just get along. It is actually a very real divine peace that only comes through Christ. The peace that passes all understanding and that you have to sacrifice to embrace that. You have to sacrifice to understand what it is and to employ it. And that's again part of the renouncing. I think he knew that the only way to peace was going to be to give up all these other things and then we could find it, that the worldly solutions to reconciling difficulties and things like that could only go so far. And then he spent the rest of his time playing that out and trying to figure it out in his life. And then, of course, the lives and people around him, when he was put in this position as head of an order, when he actually didn't really want to be head of an order and have to create rules and things like that. Because in his mind, by the way, touching on this, often when we come up with something like peace, it's like, well, what's the formula for that? We want to figure out a formula. Francis in many ways didn't think in a program way. He thought in the dynamic human interaction with Christ way. So when it even came down to you've got to create rules for this order, it was difficult for him because he went, well, how in the world do I embody what is a dynamic thing? As soon as we put it on a page, as soon as it becomes a rule, part of it gets Lost. Which is very true. I know a pastor that once said, when Christians don't want to deal with people, they create programs. And that's very. He felt that it was like, I don't want to lock it down in a way, and yet I sort of have to in order to pass this on. And I love the fact that it wasn't sentimental, that he did it almost invisibly. I mean, we could argue he was one of the great reformers without actually being a reformer.
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Tim Gray
That's right.
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Paul McCusker
That the church had its own problems, as it always does. And yet whenever he was challenged to engage in an issue, he rejected engaging in the issue because he also felt that by obedience and sacrifice and all these other areas, the issues sort of will take care of themselves as we follow Christ rather than make the issue the center of why we're following Christ. And then you're dealing with an issue rather than a relationship with Christ.
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Tim Gray
One of the responses that people have had to Brother Francis, the audio drama Paul, whether on audible, because it's on audible, you can also get it on form for free. You know, one of the responses people have is that I love. You've opened up the character of Francis. I mean, I even think of Joseph Timms testimony that this is a man you've never. This is a story you haven't heard. This is. You don't know the true Francis. And we're going to. This story blows that open. I mean, so you even get the excitement of the actors who are involved in the story of the authentic story is so much more powerful than just simply the tradition or legend of Francis being this nice hippie who liked everybody. But the real Francis is so real. So people love the humanity of Francis that you bring to this. But Francis also is a window into Jesus humanity. Right?
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Paul McCusker
Well, exactly. That's what he was trying to model after. So one of the famous stories, of course, was when in Matthew, he's reading in Matthew, where Jesus is telling him, don't take any shoes, don't take a cloak, don't do this, don't do that. And it was like a revelation to him. He went, oh, okay. And he stopped doing it. He just went, okay, I'll go barefoot now. That's why it's subtitled the Barefoot Saint of Assisi. Because he just went, well, that's what Jesus said to do. So I'll just do it. That was the reckless side of it. And I sometimes wonder what my own spiritual life would be like if I just got reckless. If I said, okay, I'm just going to take Jesus at his word and just do literally what he said. People would think I'm crazy, but maybe that's actually what I need to do. And the impact of that, I was going to say about the actors, I've been doing audio drama for a very long time. I mean, it's part of 30 years of my life plus. And so I've been in a lot of studio situations. And I will admit that I have never seen anything quite like the impact that Francis had on the actors emotionally in many, many different ways. I mean, without naming names and saying, ooh. But the actors talked about very personal things because of Francis. They connected in very personal ways to some of the scenes in surprising ways that I then learned from some of the other guys who said, well, did you talk to. Did he tell you his story about. And these are not. These are not believers. Many of these actors are not people of faith or of the Christian faith. And yet it affected them emotionally in a very deep way. And I kept thinking, well, that's Francis. You know, it's not writing. It's not anything other than this saint and what he did and how it impacts. So he's basically, as he is doing what Paul said, imitate me as I imitate Christ. You've got Francis doing the same thing. And much like the encounters with Jesus where everybody seemed to respond to him differently, good and bad, those who embraced him and then those who turned and walked away, you have the same thing. And sometimes it even brings out an extreme reaction, as it did with Francis. Very often, how he responded to Christ's call elicited all these different responses from everybody around him, and still does, I think.
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Tim Gray
Well, I think that's what's so powerful about Francis, is that he was so conformed to Christ. Of course he's going to be conformed at the end of his life, literally with a stigmata. Right. But it's the power of Jesus Christ. And I think people encounter Jesus in Saint Francis of Assisi in a special way more than most any saint. And I think that's why Francis is so powerful. But maybe we should have called it the Breckless Saint of Assisi. I like your idea of this idea of being reckless, recklessly trusting God.
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Paul McCusker
And what does that look like when we do? And it looks usually unlike anything we expect, which is also an ongoing theme in the Saints lives. As I've done some of these and as I study the saints now, and doing the audio dramas has helped me gain a new appreciation for many of the Saints that I'd really studied before. Because I think, as I've said to you, that, you know, my problem with the saints has often been they're like the older brother and sister that seem so perfect and good, and the parents are throwing them in your face going, why can't you be more like them? But when you go in and you see what it was that they did and who they were and how very human they were, their humanity is what comes out. And I don't mean humanity as in let's just highlight flaws. It is their humanity and the fullness of humanity and their response to Christ and that recklessness, whether it's Francis Patrick. Patrick defied the wisdom of the time in even going back to Ireland, because they weren't even sure that the pagans over there had souls, let alone go over and preach the gospel to them. Joan of Arc being the same. I mean, you go through all of them, and we're seeing people who, I guess reckless is the right word. They were going to follow Christ wherever he led them, whatever it cost.
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Tim Gray
That is so profound and so radically human. I mean, I think the fact that Francis just grapples with what he learns about God and he says, okay, I've got to radically change my life. And he does it. And everybody around him is kind of astounded, like, you're going to actually try to live this, like the Beatitudes, he thought, you know, we actually can live that. And that's the beautiful thing. One story of Francis really changing people's lives is one of our audio engineers who worked on this. He became Catholic through. Through working on this production.
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Paul McCusker
I mean, yeah, it just. The script raised the questions. He didn't really know Francis, and he's reading and going through the script of working with the. In the studio, of course, and he did the mix, and I saw it because he and I began to have all these conversations. He's asking questions about the faith, about Francis, which then rolled into Patrick when we several months later recorded the Patrick drama. And that story, as I've mentioned before, was we left Colorado Springs to go to London to record. And when we were coming home, he said, now, you do understand that when I left Colorado Springs, I was a Protestant, but I'm coming back a Catholic now. I just have to do it for real. And he did. He was received into the church then the following. Well, the following Easter, and is still very strong and very involved in his parish. But to me, it's indicative. It's beyond anything that I could contrive in fact, I think to a great degree, my role as a storyteller is in many ways to stay out of the way of the story and let God use the story. I'm just doing what I hope I can do well by telling it. And then the rest of it goes beyond. I could never contrive the responses we have seen to some of these stories, like Francis in the studio and with listeners since then.
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Tim Gray
Yeah, you know, I think, Paul, that this is the kind of moment where the power of stories that we've talked about many times and will continue to talk about, to change, to capture people's imagination, to grab their mind and their heart, and that's the power of story. And I think of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who, you know, as he's his sickbed, he's reading stories of the lives of the saints. And one of those lives is Saint Francis of Assisi. And, you know, and he realizes Francis went off to war and got injured or, you know, was captive and had to recover from that. And he had just been at war and all of a sudden he realized, you know, Francis is called by God, you know, who's greater, you know, and Francis decides to serve the greater Lord for greater glory and honor. And that captures Ignatius of Loyola's heart. And so he then is going to imitate that in his own way, you know, and just as Ignatius read the stories of the saints, we hope Today, in the 21st century, in the new evangelization, will people hear the story in the lives of the saints through these audio dramas that we have. And if you have a chance, listen to some of these episodes of Brother Francis on Formed. It'll really enrich your celebration of his feast. Do that over the weekend. You know, of course, in know October 4th is a Sunday, so don't forget about Francis because the Sunday liturgy kind of eclipse his feast day. But you know, listen to Brother Francis audio drama, be inspired and encouraged and enriched and pray to this great saint for your needs. Well, thank you for joining us and thank you to everyone who's on our mission circle that supports us. We're deeply grateful for you. May God bless you all.
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Narrator
You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting form.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press with award winning studies and parish programs, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustan institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.