10/04/2026
Buona festa a tutti i Francesco e Francesca! Today is the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi, one of Italy’s two patron saints. This year is a round-numbered anniversary, as it marks 800 years since his “transitus” in 1226.
Did you know that, beginning in 2027, his feast day will again be a national holiday in Italy? Such is the importance of San Francesco.
The image below of san Francesco is considered to be the oldest extant one of the saint, from a fresco at the Benedictine monastery of Sacro Speco at Subiaco. We all know about San Francesco’s role as a mendicant friar, but did you know that he was also a poet?
His “Laudes creaturarum”, also known as the “Canticle of Creatures”, was written around 1224 and is considered to be one of the first poems—if not the first—written in the Italian vernacular. It is a peculiar sort of genre, obviously a hybrid of prayer, laud, and verse, written in a similarly hybrid language: Umbrian, Latin, and Italian. The poem is really an “Alleluia” and a “dies irae” [‘Day of Wrath’], a type of requiem prayer still used in the Latin rite mass. “Laudes creaturarum” has continued to influence us today, in Italy and the US, in the Church and outside of it.
Pope Francis’s encylical “Laudato si’” took its title and inspiration from St. Francis’s poem, and the poem has become part of liturgical and popular music. Italian singers such as Claudio Baglioni and Angelo Branduardi have set it to music.
Finally, “Laudes creaturarum” may have been on Dante’s mind when, in Inferno I, he had Virgil tell Dante the pilgrim the following:
“Ond’io per lo tuo me’ penso e discerno
che tu mi segui, e io sarò tua guida,
e trarrotti di qui per loco etterno;
ove udirai le disperate strida,
vedrai li antichi spiriti dolenti,
ch’a la seconda morte ciascun grida;” (Inf. I, vv. 112-117)
The “seconda morte” is, perhaps, Judgment Day, and has a particular resonance with this verse from the “Laudes creaturarum”:
“Ka la morte secunda nol farrà male.”
