L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 6 NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS within – has always known this, even when the rest of the world has preferred the post- card version of the saint. The city's art is a great example of this. Far from merely "depict- ing" Francis, art in Assisi interprets him, sometimes with surprising toughness. In the Basilica's great cycles, Francis is broken into scenes that are starkly free from sen- timentality: renunciation, encounter, risk, refusal, con- solation, and death. You see a y o u n g m a n w h o d o e s n o t "find himself," so much as lose what once made him leg- i b l e t o o t h e r s a n d k e e p walking anyway. And make no mistake, visual art is cen- tral here, because Francis' life is a story of actions: he never preached peace as a theory; h e p e r f o r m e d i t , o f t e n i n ways that make even sympa- thetic readers uneasy. He kissed the lepers. He gave up the shelter of a family name. He chose poverty not as a costume but as a loss of lever- age. He stepped away from the logic of accumulation, and with it, from the subtle permissions accumulation grants: the right to dominate, the right to punish, the right to decide whose suffering counts. A n d t h e n , t h e r e i s t h e episode that keeps returning, e s p e c i a l l y n o w : F r a n c i s crossing the lines of war to meet the Muslim ruler during the Fifth Crusade. T h e d e t a i l s c o m e t o u s t h r o u g h h a g i o g r a p h y a n d context: he goes, unarmed, into a space built to manufac- ture enemies, and he refuses to behave as one, in what is the most powerful example of Franciscan spiritual diploma- cy: he understands that peace is not achieved by declaring y o u r s e l f h a r m l e s s , b u t b y learning not to need harm as a tool. This is why it matters that this year's initiatives in Assisi are being described by the fri- ars themselves in a language that includes civic institu- tions and people who do not necessarily share the same f a i t h . T h e p r e s s r e l e a s e speaks of a "historic moment" uniting faithful, pilgrims, and institutions "in the spirit of universal fraternity," and it i n s i s t s t h a t F r a n c i s remains "a gift for every- one." Y o u c a n t a k e t h a t a s rhetoric, or you can take it as a n o b s e r v a t i o n a b o u t t h e hunger these months reveal. A n d i f t h e e a r l y f i g u r e s offered about the venera- t i o n a l m o n t h o f F r a n c i s ' m o r t a l r e m a i n s a r e t o b e believed, the second option stands strongest. On the 21st of February, the first day of t h e v e n e r a t i o n , a r o u n d 370,000 people had already registered to pray in front of the relics, most from Italy b u t m a n y f r o m a b r o a d ; around 400 volunteers from dozens of associations are supporting the effort. And if it's true that numbers are never the story, in this case, they certainly hint at it. Peo- ple still want to stand near the question Francis embod- ies: how to resist without becoming a mirror of what we want to fight against. There is another essential point to make about Francis, which perhaps makes him more revolutionary than all revolutionaries, and because of which his artistic repre- sentation is so important: he did not leave behind a politi- cal manifesto, but a pattern of life that had to be translat- ed into forms others could see. The open hands, the lis- tening face, the refusal to consider power as the central element of life. Artists return to him because the problem remains unsolved: how do you depict someone whose force comes from renuncia- tion? This is where Christ- ian Bobin, an incredible contemporary French writer, enters the conversation; in h i s l y r i c a l m e d i t a t i o n o n Francis, often known by its French title Le Très-Bas, Bobin does something histo- rians cannot quite do, and that devotional writing often ruins: he finds a language for Francis' "low-ness" that is neither humiliation nor aes- thetically framed, but a delib- erate descent. Bobin's Fran- cis is not a plaster saint, he is an interruption; and his holi- ness doesn't mean transcend- ing the human, but a way of living the human without the u s u a l a r m o r . T h a t i s w h y readers who are not religious can still recognize themselves in the book: Bobin does not argue doctrine so much as reveal what happens when a person stops treating domi- nation as normal. T h e r e i s a t e m p t a t i o n , when writing about Francis and peace, to end with uplift, but that is not what he offers. He offers clarity: the possibil- ity that a human life can be reorganized around some- thing other than fear, and that gentleness is not weak- n e s s w h e n i t i s c h o s e n , trained, and defended by dis- cipline. In Assisi in 2026, you can walk into the Basilica, and you can't photograph what you see. You can register, wait your turn, stand in front of what remains, and then you have to leave. Nothing about the process lets you keep Francis as an object. At best, it lets you carry away a question or a prayer. And perhaps that is the strongest message of this anniversary: not that Francis belongs to Italy, or to the Church, or to the past, but that his peace still refuses to b e a m e r e d e c o r a t i o n . I t remains what it always was: an insistence that fraternity is real only when it becomes practice, and that peace is not a feeling we have, but a disci- pline we choose. Francis learned not to react automatically to insult, to threat, and, perhaps most impor- tantly, to fear. He did not answer humiliation with humiliation. He did not turn fear into aggression. He did not pretend the world was harmless, but he refused to copy it. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 The coffin containing the glass case where Francis's remains are kept (Image courtesy of Sala Stampa Sacro Convento di San Francesco) Praying with the mortal remains of the "Poverello di Assisi" (Image courtesy of Sala Stampa Sacro Convento di San Francesco)

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