Send article

How St Francis of Assisi was persuaded to become an itinerant preacher.

Having nothing was not, of course, the essence of his poverty: on the contrary, the conviction that he already possessed everything – everything, that is, that mattered, was the key to his freely chosen poverty. His poverty, in other words consisted in letting go of everything that blurred or distracted from what mattered most. Francis was outwardly poor because he was inwardly rich.