Marks of the Crucified: Saint Francis at La Verna by Jeff Callaway

Marks of the Crucified: Saint Francis at La Verna

by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

The mountain air at La Verna smelled of pine resin and cold stone, a wildness that had always suited Francis of Assisi. Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1181 or 1182, he had been a merchant’s son who walked away from wealth to teach a Gospel of radical poverty and tender charity. By 1224, the man the world now called St. Francis had become the living heart of a movement that drew thousands: the Order of Friars Minor he had founded, the Franciscan family of mendicants who believed that to follow Christ was to imitate him in everything—especially in poverty and in suffering.

Francis came to La Verna for silence and stripping. He had left Assisi, leaving behind a life of comfortable habit and social expectation, and spent his days in prayer, penance, and itinerant preaching. The mountain itself—La Verna, or Alverna, a crag in the Casentino Forests of the Arezzo province—was the right theater for an encounter with God: remote, rocky, a place to fast and to listen. He arrived with companions who would remember what happened: Brother Leo, Brother Masseo, and Brother Angelo, men who had watched him embrace lepers, preach to birds, and give away what little he owned. Francis’s life had always been threaded with extraordinary experiences—his vision at San Damiano that set him on the path of conversion, the call to repair Christ’s Church—but nothing prepared the world for what happened on that barren ledge in September 1224.

He went to La Verna for a forty-day fast. He fasted in preparation for Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, but the timing bore the shadow of another feast: the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrated on September 14. In seasons threaded with Gospel memory like this one, Francis sought a profound conformity to the Crucified. The forty-day retreat was not a private whim; by 1224 the Franciscan Order had already grown, attracting thousands of men who found in his poverty a Gospel lived to the bone. Francis’s life of radical giving and penance had made him a prophet to many and an irritation to some; internal and external tensions swirled around the Order even as the friars multiplied.

The vision itself was no mere pious imagination. Thomas of Celano—one of the earliest biographers and author of the Vita Prima—Bonaventure, Salimbene de Adam, and other chroniclers would preserve the core of the story for posterity. In the hush of that La Verna solitude, Francis saw a seraphic figure: a seraph with six wings, luminous, fiery, and formed with the imprint of the crucified Christ. The seraph descended, hovered, and revealed to Francis the unity of glory and suffering. The vision fused angelic splendor with the stark, bloody figure of the Crucified. It was not a symbol that Francis merely admired from a distance; it enveloped him, burning with love and pain together.

When the encounter ended, Francis bore the marks of that encounter on his own flesh. He received the five wounds of Christ: both hands, both feet, and the side. These were not private, interior signs alone. The wounds were corporeal, visible to later witnesses, and they bled at times. Medieval accounts described them as resembling nail piercings; some spoke of a circular nail-like impression, others of bleeding points. The side wound corresponded to the lance wound of the Gospel narrative. Some hagiographers even reported traces that suggested the marks of a crown of thorns on his forehead, though descriptions vary. Whatever the precise shape, the marks made him a living icon of the Passion: Galatians’ words—“I bear on my body the marks of Jesus”—were rendered literal in Francis’s flesh.

Francis’s reaction was not of triumph. The wounds were painful. They did not become septic; they bled but did not become infected, and until his final illnesses his body bore them without the kinds of rot or contagion that would have been expected from such open sores. He did not parade them about, either. He kept them hidden under his habit as much as he could, a sign of the humility with which he received even such a gift. Brother Leo, his closest companion, is the principal contemporary witness who described the aftermath. Thomas of Celano recorded the La Verna episode in his Vita Prima. Bonaventure, in his Legenda Maior, shaped the canonical Franciscan narrative that would standardize both the vision and the image of Francis receiving the stigmata. Salimbene de Adam’s chronicle gives later corroboration and anecdote. Brother Elias—Elia—would later tell the Franciscan houses in France of the wonder of Francis appearing “crucified” before death.

The Franciscan movement used the stigmata story to consolidate identity. The wounds were a dramatic divine confirmation of Francis’s lifelong program of radical imitation. To the medieval mind, which was attuned to signs and sacramentals, such a visible participation in Christ’s suffering authenticated a man who had, for decades, lived as if he had already died to the world. The title “Seraphic Father” arises in part from the seraphic character of the La Verna vision; the image of angelic fire indwelling the crucified Christ gave Francis a theological and poetic frame that friars and laity alike treasured.

The mountain remembered. Pilgrims began coming to La Verna to touch the rock where Francis knelt. A small chapel, the Cappella delle Stimmate, marks the spot. The site remained in Franciscan custody and developed chapels and facilities for visitors. A relic—venerated rock—became an object of devotion for travelers seeking tangible connection to the man who bore Christ’s wounds. Artists who painted Francis from the thirteenth century onward learned the iconography: a seraph above Francis’s bowed shoulders, wings shadowing the friar’s back; the five wounds visible through habit or in close-up devotion; the figure of the crucified Christ printed into Francis’s own cost of flesh. The La Verna geography—the cliff, the silence, the wilderness—helped narrate the encounter as the fitting setting for a soul burned by love.

Contemporaries took notice. Word of the stigmata spread not by rumor alone but by testimony. Brother Leo’s records and the writings of Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure made the La Verna event a keystone of Francis’s life-story. Many later printed lives of Francis leaned on these canonical texts. The papal curia received word of the event, and the stigmata formed part of the miracle reports that cohered around Francis in the months and years before his death. In the Franciscan community the story served to defend the sanctity of Francis’s rule, especially his call to evangelical poverty, during times when opponents accused the friars of radicalism and impropriety. The order’s identity—its preaching, its devotion to the poor, its insistence on Gospel simplicity—was strengthened by the token of suffering stamped on its founder.

The stigmata did not restore Francis to perfect health. His body continued to decline—he suffered with blindness, ulcers, and frailty in his final years. The wounds themselves did not fester into the kinds of gangrenous proofs that the world fears; contemporaries emphasized their miraculous non-septic nature. Yet the reception of the wounds intensified his physical suffering and deepened his interior conformity with Christ. He continued to minister, to bless, to write short prayers and canticles like the “Canticle of the Creatures,” which would later serve as a lyrical testimony to a man who had been formed by a sacramental vision of creation and of the Crucified.

The stigmata played a decisive role in the rapid canonization process. Francis died on October 3, 1226, and within two years—by 1228—Pope Gregory IX had canonized him, moved by the torrent of testimonies to his holiness and the miraculous signs that accompanied his life and death. The wounds were present at burial in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. Those who prepared his body and participated in exhumations and translations later attested to the presence of the marks. Lady Jacoba de Settesoli, a lay friend of Francis who attended his deathbed, and Brother Elias were among those who observed these marks and helped transmit the memory.

When hagiographers wrote, they drew on more than the single miraculous scene. They collected testimony of Francis’s other wonders—levitation, prophetic sayings, healings. Over time, medieval miracle literature framed the stigmata among a constellation of sanctity: visible signs that a man had become, in the words of scripture, conformed to Christ. The stigmata also gave fuel to devotional trends that emphasized sharing in Christ’s suffering as a path to holiness. St. Paul’s bold claim, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus,” provided the scriptural lens through which medieval Christians understood Francis’s bodily signs.

Within this framing, the stigmata became a theological and liturgical resource. Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior did more than narrate; it shaped the liturgy, images, and popular prayers linking Francis to the Passion. The Franciscan liturgical calendar eventually included commemorations that remembered the La Verna event and its meaning. Clergy and friars preached the La Verna story in towns, reading it aloud in sermons and processions. Lay confraternities and penitential societies imitated Francis’s devotion, organizing public acts of contrition and prayer rooted in the example of the seraphic friar.

Yet the story is not without variation. Different accounts emphasize varied details—a crown of thorns; the precise look of the wounds; whether nails were visibly embedded; how long the bleeding occurred. Medieval authors shaped narratives as hagiography demanded, and historians now note that oral transmission and rhetorical aims account for some differences. Still, the central fact—Francis bore the five wounds visibly and was transformed by the encounter—appears consistently in the earliest and most authoritative documents.

For Francis’s contemporaries, the phenomenology of the wounds mattered. Witnesses testified that the wounds sometimes exuded blood and that the blood was perceived as not causing contagion. The wounds often caused Francis severe pain, and his face at times showed the marks of suffering, possibly like the crown of thorns. Brother Leo’s testimony, Thomas of Celano’s Vita Prima, and Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior became primary sources for the canonization process, which depended on multiple eyewitness accounts of miracles. The testimonies were used not only to canonize Francis but to anchor the Franciscan movement’s authority amid contested ecclesial politics.

The stigmata shaped Francis’s image beyond ecclesial papers and into art. Medieval and renaissance artists made images in fresco cycles, panels, and manuscripts that showed a seraph over Francis’s shoulders, wings spread, a crucified Christ impressed within the angel. Sometimes Francis appears in levitation—a sign also linked to other mystical episodes in his life. Artistic language adopted and amplified the story; images of Francis embracing the Crucified became an emblem of Franciscan piety.

Francis himself left little in the way of autobiographical detail about the La Verna event. He wrote brief prayers, blessings, and canticles; most of the narrative came from companions and later hagiographers. But his rule, his sermons, and his lasting reputation testify to a soul whose theology was not abstract but deeply incarnated: poverty as Gospel, humility as path, visible sharing in Christ’s suffering as the highest testimony. The La Verna stigmata fit that spiritual biography like a final stanza.

Historically, scholars read the event within its thirteenth-century context. The high medieval world had a rich sacramental imagination and a cultural hunger for saints whose bodies bore the marks of sanctity. The development of the cult of saints made the stigmata’s reception intelligible: signs were expected, miracles circulated, pilgrims sought relics and holy places. The stigmata turned La Verna into a place of pilgrimage, and the rock where Francis knelt became a touchstone for the devout. Pilgrims sought not only miracles but the silent witness of a life transfigured by innocence and humility.

Over the centuries, Francis became a prototype for later stigmatics. Modern figures like Padre Pio get compared to Francis because Francis was the first well-documented medieval case of stigmatization. The comparison is not a contest but a lineage: one model of sanctity reaching forward to another. The story’s theological resonance—on redemptive suffering, on conformity to Christ, on mystical union—continued to inform spiritual writers, preachers, and theologians. Medieval theologians used Francis’s stigmata to reflect on the relation between body and soul, on the possibility of being physically caught into Christ’s Passion without losing one’s reason or faith.

The Franciscan Order kept the La Verna memory alive not for triumphalism but as an exhortation. The wounds were not currency to trade for temporal power. Francis refused to monetize his fame. He did not seek material gain from the phenomenon; he remained scrupulously reluctant to turn holiness into social advantage, reinforcing the sense that the stigmata was a gratuitous divine gift. The story of the wounds was a spiritual admonition: holiness will be costly; it will mark you in places the world can see; yet such marks are not proof of status but of conformity and gift.

Different chroniclers offered different emphases. Theodoric of Apolda and other medieval writers produced poetic pieces referencing the wounds; Bonaventure wrote with theological craft; Thomas of Celano with companionship’s memory. Brother Elias sent word to France, while Lady Jacoba tended Francis in his final hours. The wounds were visible at burial and later exhumations; witnesses reported them, using ocular proof to ground an already vast devotional movement.

The stigmata’s enduring power is not merely historical curiosity but devotional fuel. For a devout Catholic who holds the event as fact, La Verna is not a story to be shelved but a living summons: to poverty, to compassion, to bearing one another’s pains as Christ bore ours. Francis’s life—his prayer, his poverty, his preaching to birds, his tenderness to lepers—culminated in a sign that tied him not only to an ancient text but to a living sacrament of suffering. The wounds were a badge of radical identification with Christ and a clarion to those who would follow.

Even as modern historians bring nuanced readings—acknowledging oral transmission, literary shaping, and cultural expectations—the core remains: Francis, born Giovanni, founder of the Franciscans, received a seraphic vision on La Verna during a forty-day fast; that vision caused him to receive the five wounds of Christ visibly and painfully; the wounds bled, did not rot, and were observed by companions and later witnesses; the event helped fuel the cult that led to his rapid canonization in 1228 by Pope Gregory IX; La Verna became a pilgrimage site with a chapel and a venerated rock; artists and poets transformed the image; Bonaventure and Thomas of Celano codified the narrative; Brother Leo, Brother Elias, Lady Jacoba, and others carried eyewitness testimony; Francis’s final years were marked by physical decline but also deepened conformity to the Crucified.

The Franciscan story after La Verna continued in chapels and carols, in frescoes and canticles. The stigmata shaped the order’s identity, helped its liturgical memory, disciplined its spirituality, and gave future generations an image to contemplate whenever they met suffering. Francis’s wounds were not a spectacle for the curious but a sacrament for the suffering: a visible participation in what the Gospels would call the Passion, given to a man who had spent his life teaching that to be truly Christian is to be crucified to the world and to live wholly for God and neighbor.

We remember him now with gratitude: the seraphic figure above the friar’s bowed shoulders, the five wounds that made his body a Gospel in the flesh, the chapel at La Verna where pilgrims still kneel, and the generosity of a man who refused to make holiness into merchandise. The La Verna encounter remains, for the faithful, a pinnacle of mystical participation, an embodied answer to Paul’s claim, and a call to bear one another’s wounds with charity. Francis’s life and wounds challenge us still: to lay down our lives for the poor, to love the Crucified in the concrete, and to accept, with humility, whatever marks true discipleship lays upon us.

~ by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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