Every church named for St. Francis offers a plenary indulgence until January

ASSISI, October 4, 2026 AD — Today is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, eight hundred years after his death, and it falls in the middle of a special Year of St. Francis declared for the centenary. Until January 10, 2027 AD, a pilgrim can receive a plenary indulgence at any Franciscan church. The same holds at any church in the world named for St. Francis. The sick and the housebound can receive it at home.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines an indulgence as “a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven”. Even after a sin is forgiven, a purification is still owed for it, in this life or after death in Purgatory. A plenary indulgence removes the whole of that punishment.

Pope Leo XIV declared the year so that every Christian would follow St. Francis’s example, live a holy life and be a constant witness to peace.

St. Francis, the founder of the Friars Minor, died at nightfall on Saturday, October 3, 1226 AD. He died in a hut beside the Porziuncola, the small chapel in the plain below the town. Thomas of Celano and St. Bonaventure, who counted the new day from sunset, date his death to October 4, the day the Church keeps as his feast.

Less than two years later, St. Francis was made a saint by a Pope who had known him well. Cardinal Ugolino, who had been the order’s protector in St. Francis’s lifetime, had become Pope Gregory IX. At a meeting in Pope Gregory IX’s rooms at Perugia, the cardinals told him that no miracles were needed “to attest the most holy man’s most holy life, which we have seen with our eyes, handled with our hands”. On July 16, 1228 AD, Pope Gregory IX came to Assisi and declared St. Francis a saint.

That month, at Perugia, Pope Gregory IX issued Mira circa nos (Wondrous towards us), the papal letter proclaiming the canonization. In it he wrote that he knew the saint’s life well from their friendship, and that the Church now had in heaven “a patron whose friendship we enjoyed on earth”. He ordered the whole Church to keep the feast “on the fourth of October, the day on which he entered the kingdom of heaven, freed from the prison of the flesh”. The Roman Martyrology keeps him on that day.

On January 7, Pope Leo XIV wrote to the heads of the Franciscan orders for the opening of the centenary. The Pope opened the letter with “Our sister death,” the words St. Francis called out at the Porziuncola on the day he died. He wrote that the saint went to meet death as a man at last at peace. Pope Leo XIV wrote that the greeting of peace St. Francis taught his friars passed on what the Gospel had shown him: that “peace is the sum of all God’s goods, a gift that comes down from on high.” The letter closes with a prayer the Pope wrote to the saint, addressing him as “You who, unarmed, crossed the lines of war and of misunderstanding.”

Three days later, on January 10, the Apostolic Penitentiary, an office of the Holy See, issued the decree that opened the year and granted the indulgence at the Pope’s wish. The decree describes St. Francis with a line from Dante, “a sun was born into the world”, and as the man “who, as the son of a rich merchant, made himself poor and humble, a true alter Christus (another Christ) on earth.”

The decree ties the pardon to St. Francis’s own mercy. It quotes a letter he wrote to one of the order’s ministers, who had asked him how to treat friars who fell into serious sin. The decree says the letter sets out what mercy is, and that forgiveness and indulgence cannot be separated from it. St. Francis answered the minister: “And by this I wish to know if thou lovest God and me His servant and thine, to wit: that there be no brother in the world who has sinned, how great soever his sin may be, who after he has seen thy face shall ever go away without thy mercy, if he seek mercy.”

The decree offers the plenary indulgence to members of the Franciscan orders and of the communities that follow St. Francis’s rule or spirit, and to all the faithful without distinction. The usual conditions are three: confession, Holy Communion and prayer for the Pope’s intentions. A person must also have turned away from every attachment to sin. The pilgrimage must be to a Franciscan friary church or to any place of worship, anywhere, named for St. Francis or connected with him.

There the pilgrim joins in the services held for the year or spends some time in meditation, praying for charity toward others and for peace between peoples. The visit ends with the Our Father, the Creed and prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Francis, Saint Clare and the other Franciscan saints.

The indulgence can also be offered for the souls in Purgatory. The old, the sick, the people who care for them and anyone kept at home for a serious reason can receive it there. They join the celebrations in spirit and offer God their prayers and their sufferings, and they must mean to meet the three conditions as soon as they can. The Penitentiary asks every priest who is authorised to hear confessions to be ready and generous in hearing them.

On February 21, the friars brought St. Francis’s remains up from the crypt of the basilica at Assisi into its lower church. In the crypt the remains lie in a plain stone sarcophagus set into a pillar, in the keeping of the Conventual Franciscans of the Sacro Convento, the friary beside the basilica. The remains stayed in the lower church for a month, the first time they had ever been on public view for so long, and more than 370,000 pilgrims came to pray before them. On March 22, after the last pilgrims had passed through, the friars held a rite with no one else present and returned the remains to the crypt.

Fra Marco Moroni, the friar in charge of the Sacro Convento, described the pilgrims as “a composed and praying brotherhood, which wanted to meet, in the sign of poor and fragile bones, all the power of a life moved by the Spirit.”