On La Verna, the wounds of Christ open in St. Francis's flesh

MOUNT LA VERNA, the Casentino, September 14, 1224 AD — St. Francis of Assisi got up from prayer on the side of this mountain today with the stigmata — the wounds of the crucified Christ — in his hands, his feet and his side. He covered them and said nothing to the three brothers who had climbed the mountain with him.

He is the founder of the Friars Minor, and he is forty-two. Early in August he came up here with Brother Leo, Brother Illuminato and Brother Rufino. They came to keep a forty days’ fast in honour of St. Michael the Archangel and the Blessed Virgin Mary, running from the feast of the Assumption to the September feast of St. Michael. La Verna is an isolated peak of the Tuscan Apennines, some four thousand feet above the valley of the Casentino, and Count Orlando of Chiusi gave it to him eleven years ago as a place to pray.

He had come up to find out what God wanted of him. He prayed, took the book of the Gospels from the altar and asked one of the brothers to open it three times. Each time it fell open at the Lord’s Passion. The three openings told him he was to be made like Christ in the sufferings of the Passion before he died. Years of penance had left his body worn out, but the prospect did not frighten him.

The answer came in his own body, on the morning of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the feast the Church keeps today. He was praying on the mountainside when he saw a seraph with six wings, burning and bright, coming down out of the sky. As it came near, the figure of a Man crucified appeared between the wings, hands and feet stretched out in the shape of a cross. Two of the wings were raised above the head, two were spread for flight, and two covered the whole body. He felt joy and sorrow together — joy at the look the seraph turned on him, sorrow at the sight of the crucifixion.

Then the vision was gone, and the marks of the nails were in his hands and his feet, in the same places he had just seen them in the crucified figure. The heads stood out round and black in the palms of his hands and on the upper side of his feet. The points came out through the backs of his hands and the soles of his feet, long and bent over, and they were made of his own flesh. There was a red wound in his right side, as though a lance had been driven in, and it bled through his habit and his breeches.

After the vision, still on the mountain, Brother Leo asked him for something written in his own hand. St. Francis called for writing materials: “Bring me paper and ink, for I wish to write the words of God and His praises which I have been meditating in my heart.” He filled one side of the sheet with praises of God. On the back he wrote a blessing for Leo, drawing the letter tau — a cross shaped like a T — down through Leo’s name. He handed Leo the sheet and told him to guard it until the day of his death.

He kept the marks out of sight from strangers, and he hid them from his own brothers too. He was afraid that anyone he told would take the confidence as a sign that God favoured him, and would pass it on. If that happened, he thought, he would lose some of the grace he had been given. He had a verse of the Psalms in his heart and often on his lips: “I have hidden Thy words in my heart that I should not sin against Thee.”

But he could see the marks would not stay hidden from the men he lived with. He could not decide whether to speak or to keep silent. So he called some of the brothers together and asked them, as a general question, whether a man should tell what God had shown him. He did not say that the question was about himself.

Brother Illuminato was one of the men St. Francis called. Illuminato saw that something St. Francis had seen had left him barely able to speak, and worked out that the question was St. Francis’s own. Illuminato told him: “Brother, thou knowest that at times the divine secrets are shown unto thee, not only for thine own sake, but for the sake of others also. Wherefore, meseemeth thou wouldst have reason to fear lest thou shouldst be judged guilty of hiding thy talent, didst thou keep hidden that which thou hast received, which same would be profitable unto many.”

Pressed about his interior life, St. Francis usually answered “My secret to me.” This time he gave way. He told the brothers the vision in order, and with much fear. He added that the figure who had appeared to him had spoken words to him that he would never repeat to any man as long as he lived.