Mikhail Gorbachev once declared that while he remained an atheist, he had to admit that Soviet Communism had never produced anyone quite like Saint Francis, the Poor Man of Assisi, and his universal humanistic appeal.
The former Soviet premier, who visited Assisi in 2008, is one in a long list of global figures who’ve been drawn to the home of Saint Francis over the years, from Tariq Aziz, the Foreign Minister of Iraq under Sadaam Hussein and a Chaldean Catholic, to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and even rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. (The Catholic Herald, admittedly with a slightly less well known band of individuals, was also drawn there on pilgrimage in 2023.)
When Italian President Sergio Mattarella needed a platform in 2022 from which to address a nation still emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, not to mention stunned by the Russian invasion of Ukraine seven months earlier, and fearful of the future, he too chose Assisi, which is what Italians always do when they feel a special need for comfort and reassurance.
“We can only exit [from the pandemic] together!” Mattarella said that day. “The difficulties aren’t actually over,” he added, imploring St. Francis to inspire a new commitment to “political love and service to our common home…without which no plan can be realised for tackling such thorny challenges.”
Mattarella’s visit, which was shown live on national television, offered a reminder that over the centuries, the Sacro Convento in Assisi has been much more than a place where a handful of Franciscans live, just as its basilica is far more than simply a place of worship and a pilgrimage destination.
The dynamism of the place is what first took Gorbachev to Assisi in 2008, when he arrived to receive the Lampada della Pace, or “lamp of peace”, a replica of the lamp that burns continually over the tomb of St. Francis, and which is awarded annually in what could be described as the Catholic Church’s version of the Noble Peace Prize.
That award, and its attendant publicity, demonstrates how the overall Assisi complex, formed by the friary and the basilica, amounts to a vital nerve centre for preserving and propagating the spiritual legacy of St. Francis – a unique hybrid blending a holy shrine with more worldly elements such as academic think tanks and even lobbying groups.
Put differently, the complex serves as a hub devoted not merely to preserving the memory of St. Francis, but to making it relevant in the here and now.
Hence this coming 1 February, the “Hall of Peace” in the Sacro Convento will host a symposium on Pope Francis’s eco-encyclical Laudato si’, which took its title from St. Francis’s famed Canticle of the Sun. Among various notables attending, the symposium will feature the president of Italy’s National System for Environmental Protection, as well as Franciscan theologians and environmental activists.
It comes on the heels of an 18 January visit to the Sacro Convento by famed actress Isabella Rossellini, who was in Assisi to promote her one-woman show “Darwin’s Smile”, in which she plays apes, dogs, cats, chickens and peacocks, in addition to Darwin himself, in an effort to promote appreciation for nature and the emotional world of animals – all of which, Rossellini says, falls under the spiritual mantle of the great saint who spoke to the wolf of Gubbio and who preached to the birds.
This background comes to mind in light of a personnel move by Pope Francis on 19 January – and which had many puzzled at the time – in his appointing Franciscan Father Enzo Fortunato, previously head of the press office of the Sacro Convento in Assisi, to the brand-new position of director or communication for St. Peter’s Basilica.
Fortunato is a well-known figure in the Italian media world who’s got a Facebook following approaching 500,000. Nonetheless, the appointment begged the question: Why does a papal basilica need a spokesman, especially since the Vatican already has its own press office and an entire dicastery devoted to communications, with hundreds of personnel at its disposal?
The answer might be that Francis wants something different out of St. Peter’s Basilica, beyond simply amplifying the institutional communication in which the Vatican already engages.
He seems to want to build an “Assisi on the Tiber”, transforming St. Peter’s into something like the Sacro Convento: a nerve centre and mouthpiece for a particular spirituality – in this case, not that of Francis of Assisi, clearly, rather more so that of (Pope) Francis of Rome.
That impression is reinforced by the fact that Fortunato now joins the current Archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica, Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, a fellow Franciscan whose previous role was custodian of the Sacro Convento and the basilica in Assisi from 2013 to 2020.
The Pope’s vision seems to be that while the Holy See Press Office and the Dicastery for Communications can handle the political and ecclesiastical messaging of his papacy, the spiritual broadcasting now will come from a team at St. Peter’s Basilica that is not part of the institutional culture of the Vatican, but which is beholden to him and shaped by his own spiritual outlook.
Whether that vision will succeed, or whether it’s simply a prescription for more confusion in communications, remains to be seen. What’s for sure, however, is that it makes the possibility of a new “Assisi on the Tiber” a fascinating experiment to track.
Photo: Assisi. (Photo credit: Simone Bolletta.)
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