On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke

garments out of love of poverty, clothed himself with the garments of a certain poor man, and joyfully sat among the poor in the vestibule before the church of St. Peter,” writes Celano.
    This, presumably, was the first time Francis had actually cross-dressed with the poor. His biographers all make note of his increasing sense of charity toward the least fortunate and the various articles of clothing he had spontaneously taken off and given to others. But there is no indication that he had ever given away all his clothes and donned beggars’ rags in return—though he wanted to.
    Celano postulates that Francis had resisted the temptation because he was worried about what people in Assisi would think of his already strange behavior and waited to experiment until he was out of town. “Many times he would have done a similar thing had he not been held back by shame before those who knew him,” Celano writes.
    Safely away in Rome, Francis did not stop with the clothes exchange. He joined the beggars outside St. Peter’s and started begging for alms himself—in French. Though Francis certainly could have afforded to buy himself a good meal, he settled down with his new friends to share their scraps of food. “Considering himself one of them,” notes Celano, “he ate eagerly with them.” Celano does not record how the beggars must have felt having this seemingly crazy man enter their midst, don their rags, and eat their stale crusts with relish, but Francis probably felt the first stirrings of the pleasure, and ultimate freedom, of doing without. He was still playing a role, however. He wasn’t a true
poverello—
yet.
    Francis came closer on the way home to Assisi, where he confronted his greatest nightmare, as in a different sense do we. Ours occurs on the ancient Via Flaminia, the Roman road linking Rome with the Adriatic coast, as it passes through the southern industrial city of Terni. We have every intention of stopping in this modern bus and train hub to find the little twelfth-century church of San Cristoforo, where Francis preached in his later years, and the stone he stood on outside the bishop’s residence. But we are foiled by a soccer game.
    The rush-hour traffic inside Terni is gridlocked by the large police contingent double- and triple-parked along the streets to oversee the regional soccer game about to take place in the city’s stadium. Our nightmare begins when a convoy of police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, tries to force a busload of players through our car into the stadium parking lot. It is compounded when yet another flashing, screaming police car suddenly roars out of the parking lot and fetches up half an inch from my side of our car. We can’t move forward or back, despite the sirens and flashing lights. When we finally manage to extricate ourselves from Terni, vowing never to return, I try to dispel my negative feelings about the city by reminding myself it is the birthplace of St. Valentine.
    Francis met his nightmare farther along that same road when he came face-to-face with a leper. Of all the diseases for which there was no cure at the time, leprosy was the most vile, mutilating, and feared. It was believed to be highly contagious, so that anyone with skin ulcers, suppurating sores either from leprosy or from other skin diseases like St. Anthony’s fire from eating contaminated grains, was forcibly quarantined for forty days in leprosariums, or
lazzaretti,
before being allowed into any of the walled cities.
    Assisi had several such leprosariums nearby, places of such horror to Francis that, like most of his fellow citizens, he went far out of his way to avoid them. His fear of lepers was so strong, according to the
Legend of the Three Companions,
that “if, by chance, he happened to pass anywhere near their dwellings or to see one of the lepers, even though he was moved to give them alms through some intermediate person, he would nevertheless turn his face away and