Francis and Catherine: Joyful rebels and prophets for our time  

By Sister Kelly Williams, RSM 

When I taught high school religion, I loved my students’ reaction to the young and rebellious Francis of Assisi, who was not much older than them when he stripped himself naked in the town square in front of his shocked father, returned his fine clothes and renounced his hereditary rights. The students’ eyes widened with disbelief – and wonder. 

The beauty of St. Francis is that he speaks to the rebel in all of us.  

Francis’s example appeals to people of all ages. We instinctively know when something isn’t right, and when it is time to stand up to authority figures or unjust systems.  

St. Francis of Assisi inspires me for the same reasons that I am compelled by Venerable Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy. Like Francis, she wasn’t afraid to make people uncomfortable.  

Catherine opened her first House of Mercy on Baggot Street in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Dublin, Ireland. She knew that Dublin’s upper classes would chafe at seeing poor women and girls coming and going from the house. But she wasn’t worried. Just as Francis did in embracing a leper and others on the margins, Catherine trusted that God would remove her “painful anxiety” as she and her sisters cared for people in Dublin’s slums suffering from cholera and other diseases, abject housing and a lack of schooling.  

Catherine and Francis were prophets of their time. Their role, their calling, wasn’t to make everyone feel good about themselves. They understood that to bring about the Reign of God, they had to shake up the complacent, too-comfortable church and culture around them.  

As we celebrate the feast day of St. Francis this month, I invite us all to reflect on how we respond to being uncomfortable when faced with poverty and need in other people and our fragile planet. 

Is the way we live our lives contributing to people’s material poverty and to the destruction of Earth? What are we being called to cast off? What is holding us back from the work that the Spirit is calling us to do? 

Are we cultivating centeredness in our Loving God so we can slow down and see the need – and the hidden beauty – that’s right in front of us? We are aware that crucifixions are happening all over the world. We are called to ask God for guidance to mourn those losses and to do what we can bring healing.  

When we are tempted to be weighed down by such reflections about the needs of our time, we can take heart from the joyful lives of Francis and Catherine. Trusting in the God of Love, we can “dance every evening” to keep our spirits up, as Catherine suggested to her sisters. We can take time to enjoy St. Francis’s favorite almond cookies and, in Catherine’s words, a “comfortable cup of tea.” 

And we can of course remember Francis in his care for the Earth, as we bring our dogs and hamsters to church for a blessing as my students would do.