St. Francis kneels on the mountain path to say goodbye to La Verna

MOUNT LA VERNA, Tuscany, September 30, 1224 AD — Saint Francis of Assisi left Mount La Verna early on the morning of September 30, at the end of a forty days’ fast. He was too exhausted to walk, so he rode a horse lent to him by Count Orlando, the lord who had given him the mountain eleven years before. He came down with the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, in his hands, his feet and his side. They had opened in his flesh two weeks before, and he was trying to keep almost everyone from seeing them.

St. Francis, who founded the Friars Minor, hid the wounds from everyone but the friars who lived with him. He could not keep the wounds wholly from those friars, but he hid them as far as he could. He was afraid that a friar who knew the secret would take it as a sign of special favour and tell others. St. Francis feared he would then lose part of the grace he had been given. He often repeated a verse of Scripture: “I have hidden Thy words in my heart that I should not sin against Thee.”

The wounds were marks like nails, formed of his own flesh: round black heads in the palms and on the tops of the feet, and long points bent back on the other side. His right side carried a red wound, as if a lance had pierced it, and it often bled onto his habit.

St. Francis wore woollen socks, with pieces of skin laid over the wounds so the wool would not rub them. He washed only the fingers of his hands, and he washed his feet rarely and in private. When anyone asked for his hand to kiss, he uncovered only the fingers, and sometimes he held out his sleeve instead. When his tunic was taken off to be shaken out, he held his right arm, or sometimes his left hand, over his side. It distressed him to be looked at, so his companions learned to turn their eyes away whenever he had to uncover his hands or feet.

One friar saw the stigmata in St. Francis’s feet and asked, “What is this, good brother?” St. Francis answered: “Mind your own business.” Another time the same friar took St. Francis’s tunic to shake it out and found blood on it. When the friar asked what the blood was, St. Francis put a finger to his own eye and said: “Ask what that is, if you don’t know it to be an eye.”

The wounds hurt, and the pain went on growing in a body already frail from years of penance. St. Francis called his body Brother Ass, and near the end of his life he asked its pardon for treating it so harshly. Once Brother Rufino, one of his companions, reached inside St. Francis’s habit to scratch him, and Brother Rufino’s hand slipped onto the wound in the right side. St. Francis pushed the hand away and cried out to God to forgive Brother Rufino. Tradition holds that St. Francis chose one friar, Brother Leo, to know everything about the wounds, and let him see and touch them and bind them with cloths to ease the pain and stop the bleeding.

Before he set out, St. Francis took a last look at the rocks, the flowers and the trees, and said goodbye to the hawk that came into his cell at first light every morning to wake him for prayer. Then, as Tradition tells it, he asked the two friars staying behind on La Verna, Brother Masseo and Brother Angelo, to look after the mountain. Brother Masseo and Brother Angelo begged to see his hands, and St. Francis held them out for the two friars to see, touch and kiss.

St. Francis mounted Count Orlando’s horse, and the friars set off with him down the path toward Monte Acuto. Every one of them went, even those who were to stay on La Verna. At the last point on the path where the mountain could be seen, St. Francis got down from the horse and knelt on the ground facing La Verna. He said goodbye to it: “Adieu, mountain of God, sacred mountain … adieu Monte-Verna, may God bless thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; abide in peace; we shall never see one another more.” A few minutes later, the mountain was out of sight.

The path dropped quickly into the Tiber valley, and people came out of the villages to see him pass. St. Francis was so deep in thought that he did not notice them. At Borgo San Sepolcro the townspeople cheered him, and he still did not notice. Long after the friars had passed the town, St. Francis looked up and asked the friar beside him whether Borgo was near yet.

That night the friars stopped at Monte Casale, a small hermitage above Borgo San Sepolcro. One of the friars living there was possessed, and that evening St. Francis healed him. Tradition tells how: sitting at supper, St. Francis heard about the sick friar, made the sign of the cross with his wounded hands over a slice of his own bread, and sent it to him. The friar ate it and was well.