Your pilot for these past several years of verbal flights into “Phronesis” happens to be a member of the Secular Franciscan Order (SFO). I made my lifetime-profession into that canonically recognized “third order” of laypeople during the summer of 2001.

The decision was partly based on an intuition that the world (and I) needed, more than ever, the spiritual virtues which St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) has personified for centuries.

With my sense of urgency still increasing, it’s high time to compile here some thoughts and information regarding St. Francis. Indeed, there’s hardly a better time.

Pope Leo XIV has declared a special Jubilee Year of St. Francis, extending from Jan. 10, 2026, to Jan. 10, 2027. The Catholic Church is marking the 800^th anniversary of the death of Il Poverello (“the poor little one”), the patron saint of animals and ecology, as well as a historic voice of simplicity, peace, and compassion for all those on the world’s margins.

St. Francis, whose name our previous pope adopted as his own, died on Oct. 3, 1226, surrounded by his friars (brothers) at the home church of the three orders he founded, an iconic site called the Portiuncula (“the little portion”). Franciscans annually conduct a ritual remembrance of his “Transitus” from earthly life into the hands of “Sister Death.”

Among the gatherings held at this chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of the Angels and measuring only180 square feet, Francis received the religious vows of a woman who would later be known as St. Clare of Assisi; the two of them co-founded the “second order,” exclusively for women, later to be known as the Poor Clares.

This added to the “first” Order of Friars Minor (OFM), ordained priests and consecrated brothers devoted to living as minorum—those deemed beneath the nobles and first-class citizens.

My brothers and sisters, married or single, in the Ordo Franciscanus Saecularis are part of the Third Order of St. Franics. Don’t confuse us with Third Order Regular (TOR) men who take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, as required by their rule of life.

All Franciscan groups have a variety of apostolates and charisms. Our SFO rule prescribes living Gospel values in our families, at work, in parishes, in fraternities, and through ministry to the poor, infirm, and marginalized. The fraternities are local, regional, and national structures for meeting and praying together.

Popes, priests, consecrated men and women, and lay brothers and sisters have historical ties to the SFO. Notables who were professed as “seculars” (not an inherently negative term!) include Pope Paul VI, St. Francis de Sales, Mother Cabrini, St. Katharine Drexel, Spanish royals Ferdinand and Isabella, Christopher Columbus, St. Joan of Arc, and St. Thomas More.

There is also an Anglican/Episcopal religious order called the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis, welcoming ordained and lay people around the world, maintaining fellowship with Catholics in the SFO.

While we can only imagine what St. Francis himself might think about the name-dropping in which I engaged above, or about various people who have joined his Franciscan family over time, or about the bureaucratic categories which have complicated his trio of orders, we can be thankful that people continue devoutly to imitate the qualities of this admittedly eccentric saint.

There has been enough emulation—and sufficient recognition of today’s spiritual hunger—to propagate St. Francis’s global appeal. Pope Francis, a Jesuit, wrote much about him, and Pope Leo, an Augustinian, likewise integrates wisdom from the Poverello.

I asked Microsoft Bing AI if Francis is one of the most-written-about people in history, and it responded, “Very much so.” It noted that “a conservative scholarly estimate often cited informally is that well over 1,000 books have been written about him, although no complete catalog has been compiled.

The Franciscan qualities authors mention most constitute a timeless vision of love, hope, and peace. These are some of his special traits:

• The paradoxical joy of simplicity, humility, and resilience in suffering and sacrifice. A synchronicity of audacity and austerity.
• A reverence for creation, revealed in familial terms like “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon” and localized annually on the saint’s Oct. 4 feast day; that’s when pets are blessed at countless parishes.
• Compassion for the poor, which famously led Francis to embrace a leper and to accompany persons dismissed as “second-class citizens.”
• Loyalty to Church protocols and values, guiding his entrepreneurship as a team-builder and roaming preacher. Feeling unworthy, he never sought to become a priest.

He showed his love of humanity in countless ways, foreshadowing Pope Leo XIV’s recent message for the 2026 World Day of Social Communications. The pontiff’s document urged us to honor the human voice and face as indelible counterpoints to imagery manipulated by artificial intelligence.

Centuries earlier, Francis accentuated the tangibility of wonder during Christmastime in the little town of Greccio. He created the first Nativity “creche” scene populated by living persons and animals, driving home the reality of Jesus’s incarnation, an awesome gift to humanity, deserving our full attention.

The saint was also a peacemaker par excellence, even though as a teenager he was a soldier for Assisi in a battle with the neighboring city of Perugia.

Francis returned from that war and, inspired by dialogue with the Lord, assertively withdrew from his affluent family and developed a hopeful mendicant’s approach to reality. One might call it dynamic tranquility.

As Google AI reminded me, Francis traveled far to scenes of carnage in 1219. He “crossed battle lines during the Fifth Crusade” to meet the Sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil, “seeking peaceful dialogue rather than violence.” The sultan allowed Francis and another friar, both unarmed, to enter his camp and share the Gospel message.

This did not put an end to the broader conflict, but the Sultan admired Francis’s bravery and readiness to communicate about God. A providential light pierced the darkness. To this day, Franciscans have been granted “custody of the Holy Land,” meaning they serve the resident Christians and guard their numerous holy places, as reported by Aleteia. A film called The Sultan and the Saint documents this relevant saga of religious diplomacy.

There’s much more to be said about this saint, and I doubt there is much about his personal impact on me that has remained untold in a thousand books. Nevertheless, there is one unusual observation I can add as a writer. It continues to prod my thoughts as a Substack student of culture.

In 2009, I was privileged to have an article printed in The Cord, the nationwide “Franciscan spiritual review” which was published quarterly by Saint Bonaventure University. I wrote about a visceral concern growing inside: symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) which I had diagnosed not only in myself, but in society.

America was already experiencing  the now-endemic distractions we associate with digital media. These include the abstraction of ideas, the polarization of people, the allure of artificiality, the anxious relationship with reality, the inability to effectively address our most vexing problems, and the demands for “cut to the chase” brevity in news soundbites, popular entertainment, and the newfangled “tweets” that Twitter introduced.

My article, “Francis and the Short-Attention-Span World,” nominated Il Poverello as an unofficial “patron saint for an ADD-ogenic world.” In his impulsive youth, he aspired to glory and adventure within a bubble of privilege. But after his conversion, his lively relationship with Jesus turned him toward the highest goals. It sparked his deep penitence over injustice and redirected his imagination toward peace and true happiness. He became a compelling voice and face of poetic appreciation, practical virtue (phronesis), and self-denial.

Francis can “help us fully experience the grace-filled joys to which we have numbed ourselves and hear in the zephyr our God who demands a receptive-yet-restless soul,” I wrote. This is the saint who teaches solid appreciation of and full participation in, purposeful human personhood. He shows that stewardship of a human and divine ecology, both orderly and beautiful, can replace absent-mindedness and cynicism.

He does this because his life (and death) attune us to the “big picture” of transcendence, centered on the Gospel. He invites us to see  the “whole context” that redeems us from the captivity of materialistic, mechanistic obsessions. We can draw strength from his alternative attentiveness to the sinful yet sublime world, I wrote, saying the mind frame was “at once true to his unique personality and true to the grace of God in his life.”

Perhaps this combination of qualities is a glimpse of connections Pope Leo and other faithful leaders will expand upon in 2026, guided by celebration of St. Francis and caution about AI as this year’s spiritual priorities. My recollection of the mission statement I was developing in 2009 renews my hope in a preferential option for the human.

May this reflection on transitions and connections—synergies between the big and the small, sacrifice and joy, humility and creativity—help all of us face a jubilee year of wrestling with the truth, and wrestling for the truth.

Francis models how to address these challenges by digging deeply into the grit of reality while rising above it through a transformative life with Christ. As modern communication drives us to distraction, we can refresh our focus by receiving the blessing Francis loved to give, “May the Lord give you his peace.”

Image from Microsoft Bing’s AI Co-Pilot.