It was in Gubbio, my stopping point at the middle of these two stages, that Francis had another famous interaction. This one involved no human, though, but rather a wolf. The town had been harried, terrorized by this wolf for weeks, as it even fed on some of the residents. Francis, we’re told, intervened, scolding the wolf for its bad behavior and threatening it with punishment. Instead, though, he brokered an arrangement between “Brother Wolf” and the Gubbio townsfolk, through which the wolf agreed to leave the people alone in exchange for them supplying him with food. Of course, when I arrived in Gubbio, I wished the hungrier wolf might have still been around, to chase off the Spartan Race folks who had taken over the town, filling it with obstacle courses and signage.
In any case, these two stages have spurred my thinking about the relationship between Francis and the natural world, in part because civilization has largely receded to the margins. Between Valfabbrica and Gubbio, the Via di Francesco covers somewhere between 36 and 40km, depending upon how you measure it, and the only town along the way is essentially a suburb of Gubbio. There’s one pilgrim hostel along the way, near the midpoint, an isolated and famous place, well known for its service to pilgrims. However, it hasn’t yet opened for 2025, so aside from a few agriturismi, there are zero businesses along the way, and certainly no opportunities to grab a coffee or a snack. Meanwhile, there is at least one bar on the walk from Gubbio, about 8km into the stage, but after that it too becomes a walk through sparsely-populated hills, all the way to Pietralunga. Suddenly, the Via di Francesco, which required very little planning or preparation from day to day, got a little more complicated!
At the same time, though, I’ve seen my first deer of the trip over the past couple days, along with some furry brown and black squirrels. I know the folks at home will be underwhelmed by any reference to squirrel sightings, given their ubiquity in the Pacific Northwest, but this qualifies as an event over here!
Francis was named the Patron Saint of Ecology in 1979 by Pope John Paul II. It’s not merely because of that lupine peace accord. No, it’s connected more to the scene from which you’re most likely to come in contact with Francis on a day to day basis, in a garden, preaching to birds. In 1213, shortly after Francis determined to live according to the gospels, going out into the world and spreading the good word, he found himself near Bevagna. Birds were gathered in a field, of all different varieties. And so, Francis went to work, addressing them as his brothers and sisters, and calling upon them to praise God for his love, for providing them with feathers and wings, homes and nourishment. The birds acknowledged the message, bowing their heads and spreading their wings, refusing to leave until after he made the sign of the cross.
Perhaps no Christian figure is more deserving of having a pilgrimage route created based upon his life, given Francis’s remarkable record as a pilgrim, as well as his repeated retreats into nature for prayer and reflection. There aren’t many caves between La Verna and Rieti that he didn’t shelter in at some point over the years. Of course, that also makes it more of a challenge to pin down a singular route, given how far-ranging his perambulations were, which speaks to why there are so many variants, so many versions of the Via di Francesco.
While it’s commonplace to refer to Francis as a nature lover, GK Chesterton and Jon Sweeney alike push back on such framing. The problem is in the generalized, abstract nature of the term, a collective notion of “nature.” As Chesterton put it, “But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.” Sweeney is more direct, writing that Francis “did not love nature because he never loved anything or anyone in the abstract. To love nature is akin to loving everyone and everything in the universe, and we know that is impossible for a mere human. Francis’s gift of caring was specific.” Hendrik Viviers spotlights Francis’s “Canticle of the Creatures” as a perfect example of this specificity: “It praises Brother Sun for its light and splendour, reminding of God. Sister Moon and the stars capture the attention with their beauty. Brother Wind determines the weather and Sister Water gives sustenance to life. Brother Fire is praised for its heat at night, and Sister Mother Earth produces and sustains fruit, plants and herbs that we need to live from.”
It feels like you’re missing the point when you criticize Francis for his naïve idealism, but I can’t help but have that reaction when considering the man as an ecologist or environmentalism, and it circles back to that resistance to generalization. To understand nature, to be able to preserve it effectively, to avoid all manner of unintended consequences, we have to be able to understand it as a complex system of interwoven elements. It’s not as simple as thinking of nature the way we do our pets, a process of anthropomorphizing that imposes human qualities on non-human creatures.
That’s not to invalidate what Francis has to offer as a celebrator, a cherisher of nature, or as a corrective measure against the Genesis 1:26–28 mandate to subdue the earth. If I don’t see solutions to environmental degradation in Francis, or viable strategies for mitigating those threats, at least I see some semblance of an ethical jumping-off point, a spiritual orientation from which we might proceed to build something more concrete.
And I suppose that’s where I am with Francis on the whole. A lovely man. A Christian model I can get behind. But not a practical model for how to live; after all, the Franciscans of today have broken rank with him on any number of points he stressed during his life.
When I arrived in Pietralunga today, I thought I had stumbled across a perfect conclusion to this post, one last link to the theme. In the center of town, there’s a statue of a tree stump with an axe stuck into it. A story about logging, or deforestation–perfect! Alas, the story turns out to be quite different, though still entertaining, and an interesting connection to the “hanged innocent” narratives of the Camino. On 11 September 1334, a pilgrim passed through Pietralunga named Giovanni di Lorenzo. Unfortunately, he was unjustly accused of killing a man while in the town, and was thus sentenced to death. As the blade fell, though, Lorenzo turned to the image of the Holy Face, and in the same moment the axe blade turned, evading the killing blow. All kinds of documentation survives related to this miracle, preserved in the Cathedral of Lucca.
Today, the story has been transformed into a festival, complete with a strong-man challenge. Gubbio can have its Spartan Race for all I care; I’ll take Pietralunga’s Biroccio race. The Biroccio was a very heavy cart used in medieval Italy to carry the condemned to their execution. The modern reconstruction weighs 430kg. Representatives from each of Pietralunga’s five districts take turns pushing the cart, trying to complete the course in the shortest possible time. Perhaps its an awkward reimagining, given the innocence of the figure at the center of the story, that this modern version seeks to rush the offender to the chopping block as fast as humanly possible. Nonetheless, the only head getting chopped these days is that of the cinghiale. Apologies to Brother Boar.
