The mystical power of Assisi

In the courtyard of the bishop’s palace, the young man who would become Saint Francis stripped naked in front of his parents and various town and church officials. He handed his clothes with a bag of money on top to his father, saying: ‘I give these back to you. From now on I have one father; the Father in Heaven’.

It was a turning point in his life (not to mention devastating for his parents). He would become known as Il Poverello – ’the little poor man’ in Italian’ – famous across the world for embracing a radical simplicity and humility in the pursuit of the divine Godhead, and for turning his back on ‘the economic system of calculated wealth’, as Donald Spoto describes in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi.