A Caricature of St. Francis

I love my cat.

She was found, malnourished, flea infested, covered in burrs and scratches from other cats, in a dumpster behind the nursing home where my mother worked, in the dead of winter. Unwilling to let this tiny creature, that she imagined was a kitten, die in the snow, Mom brought her home, cleaned her up, fed her, and took her to the vet. She had aspirations of handing her off to our pet rescue, but they were full up, and anyway, they said, “Black cats are harder to place—people think they’re bad luck.” The universe’s cat distribution system had, for better or worse, added a third cat to my mother’s household.

Razzle reached a tenuous detente with the other female cat in the house—it was a classic cold war, the two occasionally scuffling over coveted territory like the top of the dining room table, but otherwise mostly just staying out of each other’s way. Occasionally, Aniko, who had been raised from a kitten in our house alongside an anxious but doting adult Maine Coon that we had adopted at the same time, would go out of her way to antagonize Razzle to try and establish dominance. That was usually when she found out the hard way that Razzle had spent her first year of life scrapping and mostly didn’t fight because she didn’t want to. Eventually, my spouse and I were getting our first apartment together and offered to take Razzle so my mother could enjoy more domestic tranquility.

Razzle has been with us for eight years. She’s around fourteen years old now…a mellow, but healthy senior cat. We routinely sit beside her and simply ask her, “Razzle, did you know that you’re a perfect cat?”

Is she a “perfect” cat? Well, aside from the occasional hairball on a pillow or forgetting her manners and jumping on a kitchen counter… yes… which as far as I’m concerned is about as perfect as it gets. She’s good natured and affectionate without being too clingy. She greets us when we’ve been gone from the house. She’s patient and easy-going and has never once injured any of her humans, even if we probably had it coming. Whenever one of us is sick or feeling low, she curls up beside them and begins to purr.

I absolutely adore her. She’s a good friend.

I say all this because I want to make it abundantly clear that I understand how important pets are in people’s lives and what I’m about to say is not meant to minimize that.

But we’ve got to talk about St. Francis, babes. Because I fear we’re missing the point.

St. Francis of Assisi is best known as the patron saint of animals, and rightly so— he preached the Gospel to the birds, after all. As a consequence, people who love animals often find themselves drawn to him. Other than Mary the Blessed Mother, he’s probably the saint whose likeness is most commonly found in people’s gardens. In The Episcopal Church, we often observe his feast day with pet blessings, a highlight of many a church lady’s liturgical year.

This is fine. On the one hand, I think it’s probably a really good way to reject the human-focused view of the Gospel as being merely for humanity’s benefit, rather than a promise of restoration for all Creation. On the other hand, in reducing Francis’s legacy to a day to celebrate our pets (an extension of ourselves in many ways) we miss out on telling the fullness of his story. After all, we remember the lives of the saints and ask them to pray for us because they lived lives that required the same kind of courage we often need.

In many ways, Francis is the perfect saint for American Christians to try to emulate.

Born in the late twelfth century, Francis was the son of a wealthy Italian cloth merchant and a French noblewoman. He had a happy childhood lived in ease and grew into a young man who loved culture, sports, and fashion and was well liked by his many rich friends. Things changed when he became a prisoner of war for a year after joining a military campaign and became severely ill. This traumatic experience caused him to radically re-evaluate his life, though it was still some time before he fully “became” Francis. After years of escalating rejection of the way of life his family had raised him for, Francis renounced his father’s support in court, stripping naked on the spot.

Francis renounced his family’s wealth and privilege and instead chose to live rough and beg, not for his own benefit, but to literally rebuild crumbling churches and care for lepers. He later committed himself to an ascetic life of poverty and eventually founded the Franciscan order. He preached penitence, love, and peace, even when not authorized to do so, focusing on the radical solidarity of the incarnation. "Your God is of your flesh, He lives in your nearest neighbor, in every man."¹ Francis’s commitment to the poor, the indigent, and the sick was at the root of his work. His focus on nature and animals was an expression of both his humility and his understanding that God’s concern is for all creation, not merely for humanity.

I remember once sitting in a diner by myself, and overhearing a conversation between two women at the booth behind me. They were talking about how dangerous the part of the city where I lived was (it also happened to be where most Black folks and a good number of poor folks in the city lived) and how that was to be expected because of how “those people” are. I rolled my eyes and tucked into my $5 cheese omelet and platter of potatoes. As I was picking over the last of my potatoes, my attention once again wandered back to the conversation at the booth behind me. The conversation had turned to one woman’s new rescue dog—a pit bull.

“It’s so unfair that people are prejudiced against pitties! They’re such sweet dogs! They just need loving homes and good handlers.”

That this woman could extend grace to a breed of dogs but not to her neighbors, and correctly identify that behavior is often driven by environmental factors and how one is treated by others rather than some kind of inherent moral status was not lost on me. That I’d heard variations on this theme many times before made me deeply sad. The deep sin at the core of so much suffering in this world is our very human tendency to objectify our fellow human beings while personifying objects that act as stand-ins for our own egos. Here was a case study in this tendency, separated from me only by the hard wood of a diner booth.

To offer grace to folks, I think a big part of the reason why many people are inclined to this particular variation of extending grace to a dog they would not extend to their fellow human actually has a lot to do with the way we tend to self-identify with our pets. There’s a long-standing joke that people tend to have pets, dogs especially, who look like them. I’m reminded of the scene at the beginning of the original “101 Dalmatians” where Pongo (the eventual Dad Dalmatian) is looking out the window at women walking their dogs, and each pair looks like a matching set, even down to the way they move. It stands to reason, then, that people who feel misunderstood or marginalized in some way (for instance, straight, cisgender women living in a patriarchal society where no choice they make is “good enough”) would gravitate towards a dog breed that is similarly misunderstood and marginalized, and would, in turn, strongly advocate for that animal’s inherent goodness and value against prevailing cultural narratives.

Nonetheless, our failure to further extend that wisdom to other people continues to separate us from God, one another, and all creation. It is a sin.

St. Francis understood that disdain for the poor and the marginalized was a sin, and so he chose poverty. He put on the same clothes as his neighbors in poverty. He lived on what people were willing to freely give. If one were to ask him what he was about, this is probably what he would have said.

So yes, bless the animals, by all means. But we ought not to forget the actual point of who St. Francis was and what he was about.