As we celebrate the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi on October 4th, I’m reminded of a story told of the Saint and the Wolf of Gubbio.
This wolf terrorized the people of Gubbio, killing their livestock and even people. And nothing they could do seemed effective against it.
So Francis, as the story goes, went to negotiate peace between the townsfolk and the wolf. The townsfolk would agree to feed the wolf, look after its basic needs, and the wolf would agree to leave them alone.
Bishop James Ruggieri, Bishop of Portland, Maine, recently spoke of this story on his podcast, Auspice Maria. Speaking on the topic of evangelization, Bishop Ruggieri made the point that we can regard secular culture in a similar fashion.
We can be like the townsfolk of Gubbio, living in constant state of fear of this cultural “Wolf,” or we can approach it as Saint Francis did.
“St. Francis shows another way,” the Bishop says. “He didn’t destroy the wolf. He converted the relationship between the wolf and the people.”
I recently read something interesting about this story of Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (I tried to find the source to cite, but couldn’t come up with it). But it made the point that this story is not part of the Saint’s original biographic materials. It seems this story was added to later hagiographies, initially taking the place of the story of Francis’s visit to Sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil. In the middle of the Crusades, Francis reminded the Church of Christ’s call to love our enemies and he sought peace in the midst of war.
This historian I was reading seemed to think that in later years, as these holy wars continued, this story was uncomfortable and inconvenient and thus was replaced with an account of Francis taming a wolf.
Politicians like to distract us with their Culture Wars, but the Church, as Bishop Ruggieri reminds us, “doesn’t have to be afraid of the wolf, of secular culture,” nor of the cultural Other we are led to war against. Like Francis, “we are called to meet it with faith, with peace, with courage,” to meet it with Christ’s love.
It begins with loving our neighbor as ourself, with loving even those we might perceive as enemies.
As Dorothy Day said, “‘Love your enemies.’ That is the hardest saying of all. Please, Father in Heaven who made me, take away my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh to love my enemy. It is a terrible thought — ‘we love God as much as the one we love the least.’”