Pope Francis was a man who knew poverty. As the Catholic Church’s leader, he made poverty visible as an act of theological witness. As the church’s shepherd, he sought to ameliorate it with pastoral tenderness.
As a Baptist, Pope Francis held no formal ecclesial role in my life. But he looms large in my theological imagination, particularly when it comes to my capacity to understand poverty and the Christian life.
This capacity is also shaped by a second Francis—the namesake of the Holy Father and the one whose legacy he sought to embody. Both Francis of Assisi and Pope Francis taught me a theology of poverty through the image of dirty clothes.
Following a Naked Crucified Lord
Francis of Assisi (or “O.G. Francis,” as he is affectionately called in my classroom) was born to a family of means. When he, the son of an Italian merchant, was called to follow in Christ’s footsteps, his father was furious and marched him before the town bishop to disown and disinherit him.
Francis willingly forswore his inheritance and even gave his father the clothes off his back in an act of total renunciation. The bishop took pity on the naked Francis and clothed him with the only garment he had lying around—an old, nasty, cheap cloak that was left behind by a farmer who had once worked for the bishop.
The cloak was of such poor quality and in such wretched shape that even an old farmer couldn’t be bothered to take it with him.
(Yes, you should now be thinking of the scene when Captain Von Trapp asked Maria why she still owned her ugly dress if all her worldly possessions were given away when she entered the abbey. Both Fraulein Maria and our dear Francis could now boast: “Well, the poor didn’t want this one.”)
Yet Francis was thrilled with his sorry attire. From his spiritual biography, we learn that “Francis accepted it gratefully and with his own hand marked a cross on it with a piece of chalk, thus designating it as the covering of a crucified man and a half-naked beggar.”
St. Bonaventure, his biographer, concludes: “Thus the servant of the Most High King was left naked so that he might follow his naked crucified Lord, whom he loved.”
St. Francis followed Christ’s life and witness in all the ways that appeal to us least. He embraced the hard, dirty, cheap-brown-wooly truth that Christ-following may lead to poverty, to sacrifice, and to a cross.
When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was looking for someone to give his papacy meaning—whose name and witness would guide the kind of leader, shepherd, and servant he would be—the Holy Father chose that guy. The holy, happy beggar. The joyful, generous saint.
If “the clothes make the man,” we would do well to remember that the late Pope modeled himself after a half-naked, mendicant monastic who modeled himself after a half-naked, itinerant rabbi.
Clothing Christ’s Images with Dignity
I love that story of the bishop who was moved to pity by Francis’ nakedness and who showed mercy by offering him clothes. Shaped by the charism of the simply-clad saint, Pope Francis brought these lessons to us in similarly sartorial specificity.
Early in his papacy, Pope Francis wrote that mercy is “the beating heart of the Gospel,” and declared a Holy Year of Mercy so that the church might focus on its commission “to announce the mercy of God.”
One of the many “concrete signs” of God’s mercy that he enacted during the year of Jubilee was opening a free laundromat near the Vatican. “Pope Francis’ Laundry” was a place of refuge for all who needed to wash, dry or iron their clothes, especially the poor and homeless of Rome.
Like the saint of old, our own Francis knew that mercy often comes in tactile, even textile, forms. As one man reported, “Today I came to the new center to do my laundry and came out with some dignity.” Like his namesake, Pope Francis fathomed the link between poverty and dignity, and taught us the connection between clothing and mercy.
Both Francises have shown me a great deal about what it means to love God and love my neighbor. Today, I remember Pope Francis as a man who took poverty seriously, not just as a spiritual concept or a posture of the soul, but in its full physical, social and political reality.
I am grateful for the witness of that tender shepherd and for all the ways his life pointed us toward that great saint of simplicity and joy. For the lives of both Francises, I give thanks.
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Jordan Rowan Fannin is Associate Professor of Christian theology at beautiful Berry College in Rome, Georgia. She is a proud member of First Baptist Church of Rome, where she co-teaches adult Sunday School and sings alto in the church choir.
