St. Francis of Assisi, Pater Seraphicus (SAU 040)

One of the epithets of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) is Pater Seraphicus. In 1224, while meditating on Mt. Alvernia in the Apennines on Christ’s Passion, St. Francis had a vision. He beheld a seraph, a six-winged angel of the highest order, on a cross. In response to his prayer to more closely imitate Christ, the angel gifted St. Francis with the stigmata, the wounds in the wrists and feet from nails and in the side from a lance that were inflicted on Jesus. The wounds bled on and off until his death two years later. + This figure of St. Francis derives from Hippolyte Flandrin’s rendition of the saint in the Church of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris. Between 1848 and 1853, Flandrin painted 160 saints against a patterned gold ground in procession in two files converging on the altar--males on the right, females and families on the left. St. Francis is grouped with the founders of religious orders. The landscape here appears only in the devotional print. The church in the background is San Damiano, the church St. Francis was commissioned by Christ to rebuild in an earlier vision that metaphorically stood for reforming the Church at large. + Feasts: September 17 (Stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi); October 4 (Life of St. Francis himself) + Image Credit (SAU 040): Antique image in chromolithography of San Francisco De Asís [St. Francis of Assisi], probably originally published in an unnumbered Franciscan series by the Socièté de St. Augustin, Bruges, Belgium, late 19th century, from the designer’s private collection of religious ephemera.