Letter to Brother Saint Francis

Solomeo, 6 January 2026


Dear Brother Saint Francis,

I am writing this letter to you, across the centuries, inspired by a long-cherished dream, in order to converse with you.

I write to you on a joyful evening, with the scent of wood burning on quiet hearths, spreading through the lanes of my hamlet of the spirit, not far from your beloved Assisi: Solomeo, a hamlet of which you may perhaps have heard, you who were a great walker, ever attentive to what surrounded your path. If monks were ordered to remain within the walls of their monasteries, you instead invented brotherhood and friars, which signify community and circulation. I have read your Fioretti, and I know that you sought spiritual fruit where many people were gathered, among the crowd, as on that occasion at the castle of Montefeltro, where you were drawn to a colourful and musical multitude celebrating the new knighthood conferred upon one of the Counts of that family.

You sought solitude only for the brief time of prayer and meditation, but then you returned to the roads, accompanied by your friars, visiting cities and villages which, precisely in your time, had only just freed themselves from feudal rule—the free Communes whose “plebs” had emancipated themselves and perhaps too hastily devoted themselves to worldly affairs. Although no one could have imagined it, capitalism was being born then; people competed for work, ran after it, forgetting that within us there exists a soul in need of measure. In Assisi you had seen your own father, Pietro Bernardone, do the same with bales of wool, which must not have been very different from the bales of cashmere I deal with. You knew the nature of the mercantile spirit, yet you longed for something else; you possessed an unpredictable inventiveness and imagined joyful festivities, for which you were named “prince of youth.”

A word that left another indifferent was enough for you to create a new reality, as on that occasion when, in a small country parish church, you heard from the words of the Gospel that one should have neither gold, nor bags, nor two garments but only one, nor shoes. Giotto painted with deep emotion and supreme artistry the moment when you put the words of the Gospel into practice and remained with a tunic which, in place of a belt, you bound around yourself with a hempen cord; and I think that that cord, to which it was impossible to hang any object, was a stroke of genius, saying much about your intentions. I do not believe that you did this against your father, but rather to have a life so light as to allow you to experience your great idea more freely. You never gave rise to conflicts, not even when you spoke to emperors, popes, and sultans; you always remained faithful to your heart. You were perfectly free, and you demonstrated this through practical examples, in which you displayed your spiritual merchandise; just like Pericles, you did not criticise others, but said: “I follow my own path.” I have always loved the fact that you considered the servants of God as jesters, and for this reason you yourself were called the “Jester of God.” The jester, it seems to me, is one who has a light soul, a perpetual and fertile richness. And wandering through the villages, perhaps—who knows—I like to imagine, even in Solomeo, you would enact the Gospel on the spot, directly, with living scenes, wherever you happened to be, just as Jesus had done. How much imagination there was in your work! What an invention the Nativity scene was, which by itself told the tale of the child, the Son of God who came to save the world, more eloquently than many words.

I am writing to you at a time when the memory of the recent Christmas festivities is still vivid, and today is Epiphany; I like to think that Christmas is the most Franciscan of feasts. Once you said that, were you able to speak in the presence of the emperor, you would ask him to have barley and grain scattered through the streets, to feed the birds and to make Christmas a feast for them too.

Brother Francis, eight hundred years ago you were the first to speak of death as a sister, and again the first to put into practice a social contract with Creation, a pact of which we are in such great need today, and which, with my frail strength, I endeavour to renew, discussing it with the beautiful souls of my time, as you did—true genius of relationships among human beings. In these days so intensely spiritual, I trust that you will wish to listen to me and, from the infinitely blessed place where you dwell, teach humanity a path that is new and ancient at the same time; for compared with your days the forms have changed, and greatly so with technology, but the soul is still the same—perhaps at times a little dazed by an overly insistent background noise, and faded by a certain malaise that afflicts it, especially the young, more exposed to the lightness of being, young people who are the salt of the future. You know how to give this humanity the guidance for a tomorrow that respects Creation, a tomorrow lived with your courage, your imagination, and your joy. Of this I ask you with reverence, signing this letter which I entrust to the heavens.