By Maria Wiering, OSV News
(OSV News) — Eight centuries ago, St. Francis of Assisi composed a poem that remains familiar today, inspiring hymns, art and the titles of two of the late Pope Francis’ teaching documents on integral ecology.
“The Canticle of the Creatures” includes tributes to “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon and Stars,” “Brother Wind” and “Sister Water,” all of whom give glory to God, their creator. Though perhaps less cited, it also praises “Sister Death.”
With the poem’s vivid imagery, what is not apparent is that St. Francis composed it a year before his death in 1226 around age 44, in weakened health and losing his sight. Despite his physical condition, he was believed to have been granted a great spiritual grace: the ability to see the world, including creation, in its redeemed form, elevated by the Incarnation.
The Franciscan order is celebrating the 800th anniversary of “The Canticle of the Creatures” throughout 2025. Meanwhile, the church is marking the annual Season of Creation from Sept. 1 to Oct. 4, St. Francis’ feast day.
Pope Leo XIV’s prayer intention for September is for “our relationship with all of creation.” “Let us pray that, inspired by St. Francis, we might experience our interdependence with all creatures who are loved by God and worthy of love and respect,” he said in a video presenting the prayer intention.
The “Canticle” is often misunderstood “as a nice little ditty about ‘how beautiful is the sun, is the moon,'” said Franciscan Father Murray Bodo, a poet and author deeply inspired by St. Francis. “The reality of the poem goes much deeper than that. It’s in the sounds, and it’s in the symbolism of the poem.”
A native of Gallup, New Mexico, Father Bodo, 88, ministers in a Cincinnati parish and to the people in the city suffering homelessness; but he has also spent decades leading pilgrimages to Rome as well as Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis spent most of his life. His most recent book of poetry is the forthcoming “Brother Wind and Air,” with its “Canticle”-inspired title.
“Part of my teaching was always on ‘The Canticle of the Creatures,'” he told OSV News. “First of all, it’s the first great Italian poem. It wasn’t really written down — it was sung by St. Francis.”
In 1224, St. Francis traveled about 70 miles north of Assisi to the mountain town of La Verna, where he ultimately received the stigmata, or the miraculous gift of the physical wounds of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. When he came down from the mountain, he was practically blind and hemorrhaging from the wounds, Father Bodo said. He was also suffering mentally and perhaps depressed, because he was dismayed about the Franciscans’ direction.
“He felt that they were abandoning Lady Poverty and weren’t living the poverty of Christ that was the great inspiration of Francis,” Father Bodo said.
The saint spent around two months in a little hut near the monastery of St. Clare of Assisi, the woman who followed his model of religious life and founded a community of likeminded religious sisters. St. Francis was sick — field mice ran over him, and he may have had tubercular leprosy, Father Bodo said. During this time, St. Francis was attended by Brother Leo, one of his closest religious brothers.
“He was so ill,” Father Bodo said. And then, “on one of these dark, dark days, he had this vision.”
St. Francis had cried out to God for help. Father Bodo described what came next: “He heard a voice that said, ‘Tell me, brother, (what) if in compensation for your sufferings and tribulation, you were given an immense and precious treasure: The whole mass of earth changed into pure gold, pebbles into precious stones, and the water of the rivers into perfume? Would you not regard the pebbles and the waters as nothing compared to such a treasure? Would you not rejoice?'”
St. Francis said, “Yes, Lord, of course I would rejoice in that.”
The Lord went on to tell him to rejoice in his infirmities, Father Bodo said, and told St. Francis, “As of now, you live in peace as if you were already sharing in my kingdom.”
From then on, for the remainder of his life, St. Francis lived with a vision of the natural world as redeemed in Jesus Christ. As he received that vision, “spontaneously he broke into this song of ‘The Canticle of the Creatures,’ praising God for all of creation,” Father Bodo said.
Notably, Father Bodo said, “it was sung in the Italian Umbrian dialect, and … you could see the greatness of the poetry. He used assonance, especially — variation of vowels and the sounds of vowels — to bring out the praise of God through creatures.”
The praise — which begins, in the Italian dialect, “Laudato Si’,” includes the four classical elements: earth, water, fire and air.
“He called them his brother and sister,” Father Bodo said, noting that the elements represented the full medieval cosmology. “He joins all of creation, and he a part of that, and praises God in one spontaneous song that even Dante (the great late medieval Italian poet) said was the first great Italian poem.”
St. Francis later added new stanzas to the original poem — one on forgiveness, directed at the feuding bishop of Assisi and the city’s mayor, and — as he approached his final days — one on death that begins, “All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape.”
St. Francis saw himself as a troubadour, or a medieval poet-musician, Father Bodo said.
“He would use troubadour songs on courtly love to preach, and he would sing one of the songs and then tell them (his followers), ‘This is the spiritual meaning of this song.’ And then he would go through and explain it,” the priest said. “And yet, he was not a learned man … but he was a man whose gift was inspiration. It came from God, and it came from a life lived in the Spirit. But you can see in the poem his love for words.”
In the “The Canticle of the Creatures,” St. Francis “reveals that he has become an extremely integrated person,” Father Bodo said.
“People thought he was nuts, because he was so poor and begging and gave up so much in order to walk in the footsteps of Christ,” he said. “But he ends up being one of the most integrated Christians.”
The poem resonates today, he said, because it leads people to examine their own relationship to creation.
“It’s a call to reverence for all of creation,” he said. “We are singers in our own way of God’s love as it is expressed in every creature, and to sever our relationship with the Earth or become indifferent to it is to break our relationship with God, because in this poem, God is revealed. Everything that is made has been redeemed by the life of Christ.”
Fittingly, the poem has been tied to environmentalism and care for creation, Father Bodo said, inspiring the name for Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on integral ecology, “Laudato Si'” (“Praised Be”) and the 2023 apostolic exhortation “Laudate Deum” (“Praise God”).
But ultimately, “The Canticle of the Creatures,” Father Bodo said, “is about the growth of an individual into what we could call holiness, someone who is transformed into an intimate and beautiful love of people and of God.”
Maria Wiering is senior writer for OSV News.
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