Silent Radical!

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

Gal 6:14-18; Mt 11: 25-30

The feast of St. Francis of Assisi invites us to consider ‘integral ecology’ as the holistic prism to respond to the spiritual, ecological, and moral crises of contemporary times.

Pope Francis underscored and promoted the idea of integral ecology, which recognizes the interconnectedness between environmental care, social justice, and respect for individual dignity. It emphasizes that we cannot address environmental problems in isolation because they are intrinsically connected to social, economic, and cultural issues like poverty, unemployment, and marginalization. Put differently, the ‘cry of the earth’ cannot be addressed by overlooking the ‘cry of the poor.’

Likewise, integral development encompasses the well-being of the whole person and all of humanity. Hence, the word ‘development’ transcends mere economic prosperity to include spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, social, cultural, and ecological aspects of human flourishing.

In my view, integral ecology is the right prism to understand who St. Francis of Assisi was, what he opposed in his time, and what he put forward as the solution. We should not forget that St. Francis’ love of God’s creation, his fight against materialism, and his option for radical poverty are so deeply interconnected that one cannot be explained away from the other. 

Creational Love: St. Francis’ love towards God’s creation was not mere tokenism. His words ‘Brother Sun’ and ‘Sister Moon’ are not just metaphorical. Instead, he loved every created reality in relational terms and considered each of them a member of his own family. Hence, we can find the sibling love present in his concern for the entire created order. From the way he considered every creation of God bearing the inherent dignity, we can find that he maintained a rightly ordered love and could love everything rightly. 

Against Materialism: As a man who saw every creature with its inherent dignity, St. Francis abhorred any attitude or practice that objectified the created reality. Thus, his fight against materialism of his day proceeded from his conviction that, in love of God’s creation, we must renounce any materialistic tendencies. This is why St. Francis could opt for poverty and detachment by choosing to walk naked when his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, promoted consumerism. Thus, in rejecting his father, St. Francis rejected a worldview that was keen on commoditizing God’s creation. 

Radical Poverty: His fight against materialism that objectified and otherized God’s creation while promoting unchecked consumerism culminated in his radical poverty that was fulfilled in a mendicant life. By settling for a life of total renunciation, St. Francis showed that poverty was not misery, and simplicity was not weakness. In a world that was worried about luxury and decency, St. Francis and his confreres opted for the coarse and dirt-absorbent brown robe or cassock to prove that any place, however dirty or filthy, could still be a place for God’s mission.

In sum, St. Francis helps us understand that the worldly crisis is primarily spiritual, and therefore, we have to guard ourselves against the desire to dominate, exploit, and consume. This is the reason Pope Francis commented that the throwaway culture started with things and ended with humans. 

In a world driven by greed and waste, St. Francis, the silent radical, inspires us to embrace poverty as a way of life. 

Let us pray that we may find God in all things as St. Francis of Assisi did, through our rightly ordered love. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar