That morning, after having celebrated the mass, he was kneeling, immersed in reflections, when all of a sudden he heard a striking cry. Someone was yelling in the atrium mixing words of anger to complaints and sobbing. For a moment he tried to listen to the cry, thinking that maybe a beggar a little mad had entered the house. But he had the feeling of recognising the voice. He marked the page that he was reading and went down stairs. Once he reached the atrium, he stopped bewildered.
In the middle of the ample atrium there was Francis. It was him who yelled. The minute figure in the torn habit, the small head on the thin neck, the painful wrinkled eyes, the hollowed cheeks covered by a thin beard, and the bare feet. His hands were raised above his head and he agitated them in a desolate manner. In his cry could have been distinguished the words:
"What have you done, Friars! What have you done! My tears flow, I can not speak... Could it be that God called us to accumulate knowledge? To possess costly books? No! He said to me and to those who would follow me to become rough and ignorant people, as there has been up to now! We have to continue on this way, and not on the way of knowledge. But you, what have you done, disobedient friars?"
He stopped for a moment to swallow his tears that flowed on his cheeks.
"For the others," he restarted "knowledge can be beautiful and useful. But not for us. We must remember what the apostle says, that knowledge makes people conceited and generate pride. Could it be that you do not know what pride is? It is to be proud of what it is not ours, that we have received freely, by the divine grace! What will you get from the fact that you have read so many books, friar? Even if you learn to make miracles, you can’t pride yourself! The apostle said: the spirit makes us alive, the letter kills. Are you listening to me?"
Francis’ voice had become penetrating and irate.
"Listen! The letter kills! Kills those who pursue knowledge. Those who want to be considered more knowledged than others! Those who want knowledge for themselves and do not serve the others with life and with the example! Haven’t I told you! Our knights of the round table are those who live according to simplicity and humbleness. They, when they will die, they will hear the praise of the Father, since with their humbleness, with tears and prayer have contributed to redeem the world. Not because they have read so many books! Not because they have won an argument with another friar! Not because they have demonstrated to another that he was wrong! Oh, friars, how much am I suffering! You have enormously induced my anger! You are staying in a comfortable house and you are preparing to make competition of knowledge. Why being in a hurry to gather awards and praises? And in the meantime what is happening in the city in which you teach how to win intellectual competitions to conquer the miserable laurel? There quarrels, they are killing one another. Oh, friars, don’t you see all this? Is this the way you have to behave? The vainglory, the vainglory has blinded you. You are not able to see the hate, the hungry people, the killed ones!"
All of a sudden he changed his tune. Now he wasn’t talking any longer in a teary and acute way. His voice has become incisive, had become harsh and imperious:
"In the name of the Holy Obedience I want you to leave immediately this house of the vainglory!" he hit on the ground his barefoot. "Immediately! Abandon your comfortable pallets, abandon the books! Every thing! Every thing! Every thing! You have sworn to me obedience, and by pronouncing the oath to me you have sworn to God. I am responsible for you. I do not want that divine punishment falls upon you. Get out!"
They looked one another questioningly. They didn’t know if they had to obey Francis. What to do…? Did they really have to abandon everything: the silence, the books, the comfortable pallets, the knowledge that would make them equal to the friars of the order of the preachers…? And if in the city were bursting arguments or the people arrived to fight even the one against the others... wasn`t this a job of the city magistrate and of the city guardian... surely.
"Get out!" Was yelling Francis more and more quivering with anger.
"I will curse those who will not obey me!"
"Where do you want us to go? asked frightenly someone.
"Go to the house founded by Friar Bernardo!"
"But there, there is no place for everyone..."
"The minor Friar have no need for comforts!"
"Friar Maurice is in bed sick, he can`t walk..."
"Than carry him in your arms! Get out! Get out!"
"Friar Francis" in the name of the group of the Friars dismayed took the word Friar Stacia. "We are full of reverence in your regards... But indeed your request is incomprehensible... It seems even ridiculous... We have become a large order. Our Friars go around the world. It is necessary that they have knowledge and science. We have received this house so that we could deepen our knowledge... Things cannot always be as in the past, when we were only a small group of Friars wandering around Italy…
"Keep silent, Friar!" I order that all the Friars leave this house in the name of the holy obedience!"
"However, friar Francis... The same most reverend cardinal Ugolino , our protector, exhorts us to study..."
"What you are doing here, wicked Friar, is contrary to the rule! I will not forgive you if you do not obey me. And you, get out!"
Continuing in looking themselves one to the other, they left the house. Friar Maurice, the sick Friar, was brought out. Francis proceeded at the head of the procession. In the crowd of the Friars there was also Anthony. Without saying a word he had left the book open on the reading desk. In him there was no rebellion, only the sensation that once again in his life something incomprehensible was changing.
"That I can see, finally" he thought, "in front of me my way clear and straight…"
Only brother Peter Stacia didn't leave the house.
Francis took the Friars to the ancient house of friar Bernard Da Quintavalle, called Pugliola. It was a small house in which lived some Friar that didn’t study. After the arrival of the new Friars, in the house one could not move, the space was just enough so that the Friars in order to rest has to lie on the floor one close to the other.
Francis didn't stay with the Friars, but he went to the house which belonged to the order of the preachers.
Every time he was in Bologna he went to the Dominicans and passed the night in prayer in the small room in which two years before had ended the feverish run of the man that, likewise to Francis, had created a new order. The roads of the two founders sometimes drew near, sometimes moved away from each other. At a certain point Dominick has proposed to Francis to unite the two orders, but Francis has refused. Nevertheless, that approximation had caused an extraordinary change: Dominick during the first chapter of his order had renounced to the conspicuous donations and to the tithes that made his order rich and powerful; he had better re-established the original rules that imposed the holy poverty.
Dominick’s disciples had performed the big work of renovating the Catholic doctrine. In accordance to their motto, that said that the seed in the barns decays, and instead lives the seed which is sowed. Dominick had sent them to conquer the universities of the Athenaeums. While from Rome, after having been to Venice where he had met the cardinal Ugolino, he was going to Bologna, he wanted that his new expedition would have taken place in the direction of North, towards Poland, where he was expected by the Friars of Odrowaza. The illness that afflicted him for a long time has stopped him, here. He died, on a length of cloth extended on the ground, without ceasing to reproach himself of having done so little, of not having strengthened sufficiently his Friars, of not having prayed enough for the obstinate heretics, for the people of different faith, per the Hebrews, for the persecuted…
Francis, when the Dominicans led him into the room, that in memory of the founder, was not used and had remained unchanged since his death, laid himself with his arms open wide on the floor. Behind the closed door, the Friars heard his weeping and the words with which he addressed the dead person.
At dawn he left the house of the Dominicans and went to his Friars. Once they had been thrown out from the house of the studies, the friars, one after the other, drew closer to him asking to forgive them and assuring him that they would remain faithful to the rule. They too had prayed during the night. Francis, crying this time for the emotion, embraced each and every one of them. He was kissing the friars on their forehead, and they tried to kiss his hand, although he tried to shield it from them.
When Anthony drew closer to Francis, Francis grabbed both his hands and fixed his eyes on him.
"Then it is you, Anthony of Portugal?"
"Yes Friar."
"You are the Friar who was sent to Rimini?"
"I…"
"Is it true that the fish listened to you before anybody else?"
Anthony smiled timidly.
"I do not know, Friar… That is what they said. Others have assured that it was that way. I, haven’t seen anything of such. Certainly, I spoke to the fish… just as one can speak to the trees, to the clouds…However just like this, as one speaks to the trees, to the clouds…
Francis didn’t loose the grasp of his hands, small and bony. He continued to look at Anthony in his eyes.
"Are you a theologian?" he asked again "Have you studied?"
"I studies when I was at the canonical."
"Why did you come to us?"
"I want to die for the faith, as the Friars minor killed by the sultan of Marocco."
Francis assented with the head.
"God" he said "doesn’t want not even our blood, He is the only one who knows what to ask of us. I have spoken with the sultan of Egypt. I thought that he was going to give the order to kill me. However he listened to my words, and then he re-sent me back unharmed to the field of the knight of the Crusade. He asked if between the Christians there were many like myself… I answered that as crazy as myself I didn’t believe that there were many… We should not aspire not ever the martyrdom if it is not God who offers it to us. Only his will…"
Suddenly Francis contracted himself.
"Friar Anthony" he said unexpectedly with imperious tone. "I order you, to take off your clothes, to leave only what is necessary to save your modesty, and to go immediately on the plaza of the city and to deliver a sermon on the need of harmony and love. Do you understand?"
"Yes. I will go." Answered Anthony. He loosened the knot of the rope, he made his dress go through his head. He kneeled to take away his sandals. Francis’ eyes didn’t stop to look at him.
"Do you allow me, friar" he asked "that I go to place my clothes in the room where I sleep?"
Instead of an answer he felt the small hard hand of Francis placing itself on his arm.
"You will not go in any place. Put back your habit. I wanted only to try you out. Were you really ready to go?"
"Since you had given me the order…"
"You will go, but a bit later, and you will not go naked. In the city they are preparing a big fight. The two families with insane fury are gathering the allies. Certainly it will come to a struggle and the shedding of blood. People will be killed. It will be like a deluge that floods everything. I want you to go in the plaza and speak to them. Try to hold back them! Find the proper words! Move their hearts! People who hate each other so much can’t possible love God. And when they would have forgotten the goodness of God, they leave the way open for the heretical sects to come and poison them with their teachings… You have already learned about those unhappy people?"
"Yes. I have met them."
"They define God, who has created this beautiful world, a Satan! We have to save them as well. Friar Anthony, last night I thought of you. You will be very necessary to me. Do not think that I refuse knowledge and science. I am only afraid of the vainglory. I prayed the Madonna to indicate to me the man… You love her don’t you?"
"I venerate her since my childhood."
"Come, let’s kneel. Let’s pray her. Yesterday I was angered towards the friars. It is my fault... It is important to love, and not to be angered... I will go to Friar Peter, I will speak with him... I wouldn’t want him to leave us. Let’s pray Friar Anthony. Let’s ask her to help us...."
It was true. In the city there was obviously a preparation for something. The roads were deserted, the passer-by confined to slip out in a hurry from house to house. In a distant point, beyond the walls one could hear a growing noise similar to the grumbling of a storm that was approaching. Even the air seemed suffocating and dense. Anthony walked and the shuffling of his rough sandals resounded in the gallery of the deserted roads. He kept on praying:
"Holiest mother, teach me and help me." A woman who saw him told him:
"Don’t go there, Friar. They are fighting there and could kill you!"
He didn’t even slow down his footstep.
Beyond a turn there was a flock of pigs. In that place there raised in the middle of the road a heap of refusals. The group of animals had gathered there. They rooted in the garbage puffing with satisfaction. They raised for an instant the head and they fixed their small eyes on the figure of the religious that approached them. But they returned immediately to the their meal. They were not afraid of people. Nobody sent them away them from the road. The citizens appreciated the function of the pigs, by eating the refusals thrown out by the citizens, they were actually cleaning the streets. If it hadn’t been for those animals, the garbage would have buried the city.
In order to cross the road, Anthony had to squeeze himself on the walls of a house. Suddenly he came up with an idea. He stopped. Looking at the fat, graceless backs, the pigtails amusingly curled and the snouts that rooted greedily, he said:
"Brothers pigs, listen. You serve with devotion the people: you clean up the city and you give your bodies to feed men. Even if you serve them in this way, they call you dirty animals. What injustice! It is us who dirty the ground to deserve the definition of dirty. Brothers pigs, you are animals of peace. You do not fight not between yourselves neither against other animals, neither against people. You bear patiently your destiny and our claims. Once upon a time you did more than this: when Jesus allowed the demons to enter inside you, you threw yourselves in the lake. Before you were the wealth of men, and such wealth had rendered them enslaves of Satan. Bu suffering death you freed man from the temptations that troubled him…"
A resounded clamor of yelling people was approaching the place where Anthony was speaking to the animals. It was a crowd armed with swords, spites and hatchets. The armed throng was running towards another armed throng ready to repel the aggressors. The two groups were getting closer and closer. The howling and the bellowing became more and more threatening. But unexpectedly the two groups halted because the road had been obstructed, as a barricade, by a flock of pigs who were happily eating while Anthony addressed them with a sermon.
The howling for the strugglers stopped. The belligerents remained open mouthed, puzzled. The belligerent groups didn`t want to strike the animals that were intent to eat. The howling transformed itself in a buzz of voices. Someone unexpectedly yelled:
"Listen to what the friar minor is saying!"
"Listen! Listen!" repeated some voices. All went silent. Everybody keep silent. The sonorous voice of Anthony was now clearly heard:
"Brothers pigs, be thankful to God that made you his servants. God wants that his will be done by the beings that he has created. Brothers pigs, be thankful to God who created you as mild animals, who do not struggle against their brothers and sisters. You do not know what hate is. The Lord has granted to every one, life, and this life belongs to him. It is not allowed to man to raise his hand against another man. He, who kills another man, not only takes the life of man away but takes away what belongs to God. He throws even the soul of the other in damnation thus burdening his soul of a terrible sin. What good can anyone get if one kills soul and body? "
The silence persisted. Men and animals were absorbed to listen to the words of the preacher. Therefore the swords raised, the lances, the halberds began to be lowered. The two threatening waves, separated entirely by the barrier of tens of bodies well fed, started to retreat. The last ones to retreat were the heads of the strugglers.
"Friar Anthony, friar Anthony" Francis was speaking with enthusiasm. "Let’s be thankful to Christ and to his Holiest Mother. You have stopped them...
"Not I."
"It were your words who stopped them and those beautiful animals! O, naturally, both in your words and in their innocence there was God. Now I know what I will do: I will send you to France, in the cities taken over by the heretics. You will speak to them and you will convert them."
"If this is your will..."
"Yes. I will order you to go there, even if I will be sad to separate myself from you. It was God who made as meet. We complete one another. But now God wants you to leave for a crusade, without weapons, without anger, only with words and love."
"When do you want me to leave?"
"As soon as winter passes. For now occupy yourself with this city. I must say to you that I have spoken to Peter..."
"Has he humbled himself?"
"No.... It is my fault... As soon as I misbehave and I let my anger take over, God immediately punishes me. That poor Peter wants knowledge and glory, but only for himself. He wants to shine... I can’t allow him to ruin my Friars. Yet I love him…"
On Francis’s hollow cheek there was a tear.
Chapter 25
Chapter 25
That morning, after having celebrated the mass, he was kneeling, immersed in reflections, when all of a sudden he heard a striking cry. Someone was yelling in the atrium mixing words of anger to complaints and sobbing. For a moment he tried to listen to the cry, thinking that maybe a beggar a little mad had entered the house. But he had the feeling of recognising the voice. He marked the page that he was reading and went down stairs. Once he reached the atrium, he stopped bewildered.
In the middle of the ample atrium there was Francis. It was him who yelled. The minute figure in the torn habit, the small head on the thin neck, the painful wrinkled eyes, the hollowed cheeks covered by a thin beard, and the bare feet. His hands were raised above his head and he agitated them in a desolate manner. In his cry could have been distinguished the words:
"What have you done, Friars! What have you done! My tears flow, I can not speak... Could it be that God called us to accumulate knowledge? To possess costly books? No! He said to me and to those who would follow me to become rough and ignorant people, as there has been up to now! We have to continue on this way, and not on the way of knowledge. But you, what have you done, disobedient friars?"
He stopped for a moment to swallow his tears that flowed on his cheeks.
"For the others," he restarted "knowledge can be beautiful and useful. But not for us. We must remember what the apostle says, that knowledge makes people conceited and generate pride. Could it be that you do not know what pride is? It is to be proud of what it is not ours, that we have received freely, by the divine grace! What will you get from the fact that you have read so many books, friar? Even if you learn to make miracles, you can’t pride yourself! The apostle said: the spirit makes us alive, the letter kills. Are you listening to me?"
Francis’ voice had become penetrating and irate.
"Listen! The letter kills! Kills those who pursue knowledge. Those who want to be considered more knowledged than others! Those who want knowledge for themselves and do not serve the others with life and with the example! Haven’t I told you! Our knights of the round table are those who live according to simplicity and humbleness. They, when they will die, they will hear the praise of the Father, since with their humbleness, with tears and prayer have contributed to redeem the world. Not because they have read so many books! Not because they have won an argument with another friar! Not because they have demonstrated to another that he was wrong! Oh, friars, how much am I suffering! You have enormously induced my anger! You are staying in a comfortable house and you are preparing to make competition of knowledge. Why being in a hurry to gather awards and praises? And in the meantime what is happening in the city in which you teach how to win intellectual competitions to conquer the miserable laurel? There quarrels, they are killing one another. Oh, friars, don’t you see all this? Is this the way you have to behave? The vainglory, the vainglory has blinded you. You are not able to see the hate, the hungry people, the killed ones!"
All of a sudden he changed his tune. Now he wasn’t talking any longer in a teary and acute way. His voice has become incisive, had become harsh and imperious:
"In the name of the Holy Obedience I want you to leave immediately this house of the vainglory!" he hit on the ground his barefoot. "Immediately! Abandon your comfortable pallets, abandon the books! Every thing! Every thing! Every thing! You have sworn to me obedience, and by pronouncing the oath to me you have sworn to God. I am responsible for you. I do not want that divine punishment falls upon you. Get out!"
They looked one another questioningly. They didn’t know if they had to obey Francis. What to do…? Did they really have to abandon everything: the silence, the books, the comfortable pallets, the knowledge that would make them equal to the friars of the order of the preachers…? And if in the city were bursting arguments or the people arrived to fight even the one against the others... wasn`t this a job of the city magistrate and of the city guardian... surely.
"Get out!" Was yelling Francis more and more quivering with anger.
"I will curse those who will not obey me!"
"Where do you want us to go? asked frightenly someone.
"Go to the house founded by Friar Bernardo!"
"But there, there is no place for everyone..."
"The minor Friar have no need for comforts!"
"Friar Maurice is in bed sick, he can`t walk..."
"Than carry him in your arms! Get out! Get out!"
"Friar Francis" in the name of the group of the Friars dismayed took the word Friar Stacia. "We are full of reverence in your regards... But indeed your request is incomprehensible... It seems even ridiculous... We have become a large order. Our Friars go around the world. It is necessary that they have knowledge and science. We have received this house so that we could deepen our knowledge... Things cannot always be as in the past, when we were only a small group of Friars wandering around Italy…
"Keep silent, Friar!" I order that all the Friars leave this house in the name of the holy obedience!"
"However, friar Francis... The same most reverend cardinal Ugolino , our protector, exhorts us to study..."
"What you are doing here, wicked Friar, is contrary to the rule! I will not forgive you if you do not obey me. And you, get out!"
Continuing in looking themselves one to the other, they left the house. Friar Maurice, the sick Friar, was brought out. Francis proceeded at the head of the procession. In the crowd of the Friars there was also Anthony. Without saying a word he had left the book open on the reading desk. In him there was no rebellion, only the sensation that once again in his life something incomprehensible was changing.
"That I can see, finally" he thought, "in front of me my way clear and straight…"
Only brother Peter Stacia didn't leave the house.
Francis took the Friars to the ancient house of friar Bernard Da Quintavalle, called Pugliola. It was a small house in which lived some Friar that didn’t study. After the arrival of the new Friars, in the house one could not move, the space was just enough so that the Friars in order to rest has to lie on the floor one close to the other.
Francis didn't stay with the Friars, but he went to the house which belonged to the order of the preachers.
Every time he was in Bologna he went to the Dominicans and passed the night in prayer in the small room in which two years before had ended the feverish run of the man that, likewise to Francis, had created a new order. The roads of the two founders sometimes drew near, sometimes moved away from each other. At a certain point Dominick has proposed to Francis to unite the two orders, but Francis has refused. Nevertheless, that approximation had caused an extraordinary change: Dominick during the first chapter of his order had renounced to the conspicuous donations and to the tithes that made his order rich and powerful; he had better re-established the original rules that imposed the holy poverty.
Dominick’s disciples had performed the big work of renovating the Catholic doctrine. In accordance to their motto, that said that the seed in the barns decays, and instead lives the seed which is sowed. Dominick had sent them to conquer the universities of the Athenaeums. While from Rome, after having been to Venice where he had met the cardinal Ugolino, he was going to Bologna, he wanted that his new expedition would have taken place in the direction of North, towards Poland, where he was expected by the Friars of Odrowaza. The illness that afflicted him for a long time has stopped him, here. He died, on a length of cloth extended on the ground, without ceasing to reproach himself of having done so little, of not having strengthened sufficiently his Friars, of not having prayed enough for the obstinate heretics, for the people of different faith, per the Hebrews, for the persecuted…
Francis, when the Dominicans led him into the room, that in memory of the founder, was not used and had remained unchanged since his death, laid himself with his arms open wide on the floor. Behind the closed door, the Friars heard his weeping and the words with which he addressed the dead person.
At dawn he left the house of the Dominicans and went to his Friars. Once they had been thrown out from the house of the studies, the friars, one after the other, drew closer to him asking to forgive them and assuring him that they would remain faithful to the rule. They too had prayed during the night. Francis, crying this time for the emotion, embraced each and every one of them. He was kissing the friars on their forehead, and they tried to kiss his hand, although he tried to shield it from them.
When Anthony drew closer to Francis, Francis grabbed both his hands and fixed his eyes on him.
"Then it is you, Anthony of Portugal?"
"Yes Friar."
"You are the Friar who was sent to Rimini?"
"I…"
"Is it true that the fish listened to you before anybody else?"
Anthony smiled timidly.
"I do not know, Friar… That is what they said. Others have assured that it was that way. I, haven’t seen anything of such. Certainly, I spoke to the fish… just as one can speak to the trees, to the clouds…However just like this, as one speaks to the trees, to the clouds…
Francis didn’t loose the grasp of his hands, small and bony. He continued to look at Anthony in his eyes.
"Are you a theologian?" he asked again "Have you studied?"
"I studies when I was at the canonical."
"Why did you come to us?"
"I want to die for the faith, as the Friars minor killed by the sultan of Marocco."
Francis assented with the head.
"God" he said "doesn’t want not even our blood, He is the only one who knows what to ask of us. I have spoken with the sultan of Egypt. I thought that he was going to give the order to kill me. However he listened to my words, and then he re-sent me back unharmed to the field of the knight of the Crusade. He asked if between the Christians there were many like myself… I answered that as crazy as myself I didn’t believe that there were many… We should not aspire not ever the martyrdom if it is not God who offers it to us. Only his will…"
Suddenly Francis contracted himself.
"Friar Anthony" he said unexpectedly with imperious tone. "I order you, to take off your clothes, to leave only what is necessary to save your modesty, and to go immediately on the plaza of the city and to deliver a sermon on the need of harmony and love. Do you understand?"
"Yes. I will go." Answered Anthony. He loosened the knot of the rope, he made his dress go through his head. He kneeled to take away his sandals. Francis’ eyes didn’t stop to look at him.
"Do you allow me, friar" he asked "that I go to place my clothes in the room where I sleep?"
Instead of an answer he felt the small hard hand of Francis placing itself on his arm.
"You will not go in any place. Put back your habit. I wanted only to try you out. Were you really ready to go?"
"Since you had given me the order…"
"You will go, but a bit later, and you will not go naked. In the city they are preparing a big fight. The two families with insane fury are gathering the allies. Certainly it will come to a struggle and the shedding of blood. People will be killed. It will be like a deluge that floods everything. I want you to go in the plaza and speak to them. Try to hold back them! Find the proper words! Move their hearts! People who hate each other so much can’t possible love God. And when they would have forgotten the goodness of God, they leave the way open for the heretical sects to come and poison them with their teachings… You have already learned about those unhappy people?"
"Yes. I have met them."
"They define God, who has created this beautiful world, a Satan! We have to save them as well. Friar Anthony, last night I thought of you. You will be very necessary to me. Do not think that I refuse knowledge and science. I am only afraid of the vainglory. I prayed the Madonna to indicate to me the man… You love her don’t you?"
"I venerate her since my childhood."
"Come, let’s kneel. Let’s pray her. Yesterday I was angered towards the friars. It is my fault... It is important to love, and not to be angered... I will go to Friar Peter, I will speak with him... I wouldn’t want him to leave us. Let’s pray Friar Anthony. Let’s ask her to help us...."
It was true. In the city there was obviously a preparation for something. The roads were deserted, the passer-by confined to slip out in a hurry from house to house. In a distant point, beyond the walls one could hear a growing noise similar to the grumbling of a storm that was approaching. Even the air seemed suffocating and dense. Anthony walked and the shuffling of his rough sandals resounded in the gallery of the deserted roads. He kept on praying:
"Holiest mother, teach me and help me." A woman who saw him told him:
"Don’t go there, Friar. They are fighting there and could kill you!"
He didn’t even slow down his footstep.
Beyond a turn there was a flock of pigs. In that place there raised in the middle of the road a heap of refusals. The group of animals had gathered there. They rooted in the garbage puffing with satisfaction. They raised for an instant the head and they fixed their small eyes on the figure of the religious that approached them. But they returned immediately to the their meal. They were not afraid of people. Nobody sent them away them from the road. The citizens appreciated the function of the pigs, by eating the refusals thrown out by the citizens, they were actually cleaning the streets. If it hadn’t been for those animals, the garbage would have buried the city.
In order to cross the road, Anthony had to squeeze himself on the walls of a house. Suddenly he came up with an idea. He stopped. Looking at the fat, graceless backs, the pigtails amusingly curled and the snouts that rooted greedily, he said:
"Brothers pigs, listen. You serve with devotion the people: you clean up the city and you give your bodies to feed men. Even if you serve them in this way, they call you dirty animals. What injustice! It is us who dirty the ground to deserve the definition of dirty. Brothers pigs, you are animals of peace. You do not fight not between yourselves neither against other animals, neither against people. You bear patiently your destiny and our claims. Once upon a time you did more than this: when Jesus allowed the demons to enter inside you, you threw yourselves in the lake. Before you were the wealth of men, and such wealth had rendered them enslaves of Satan. Bu suffering death you freed man from the temptations that troubled him…"
A resounded clamor of yelling people was approaching the place where Anthony was speaking to the animals. It was a crowd armed with swords, spites and hatchets. The armed throng was running towards another armed throng ready to repel the aggressors. The two groups were getting closer and closer. The howling and the bellowing became more and more threatening. But unexpectedly the two groups halted because the road had been obstructed, as a barricade, by a flock of pigs who were happily eating while Anthony addressed them with a sermon.
The howling for the strugglers stopped. The belligerents remained open mouthed, puzzled. The belligerent groups didn`t want to strike the animals that were intent to eat. The howling transformed itself in a buzz of voices. Someone unexpectedly yelled:
"Listen to what the friar minor is saying!"
"Listen! Listen!" repeated some voices. All went silent. Everybody keep silent. The sonorous voice of Anthony was now clearly heard:
"Brothers pigs, be thankful to God that made you his servants. God wants that his will be done by the beings that he has created. Brothers pigs, be thankful to God who created you as mild animals, who do not struggle against their brothers and sisters. You do not know what hate is. The Lord has granted to every one, life, and this life belongs to him. It is not allowed to man to raise his hand against another man. He, who kills another man, not only takes the life of man away but takes away what belongs to God. He throws even the soul of the other in damnation thus burdening his soul of a terrible sin. What good can anyone get if one kills soul and body? "
The silence persisted. Men and animals were absorbed to listen to the words of the preacher. Therefore the swords raised, the lances, the halberds began to be lowered. The two threatening waves, separated entirely by the barrier of tens of bodies well fed, started to retreat. The last ones to retreat were the heads of the strugglers.
"Friar Anthony, friar Anthony" Francis was speaking with enthusiasm. "Let’s be thankful to Christ and to his Holiest Mother. You have stopped them...
"Not I."
"It were your words who stopped them and those beautiful animals! O, naturally, both in your words and in their innocence there was God. Now I know what I will do: I will send you to France, in the cities taken over by the heretics. You will speak to them and you will convert them."
"If this is your will..."
"Yes. I will order you to go there, even if I will be sad to separate myself from you. It was God who made as meet. We complete one another. But now God wants you to leave for a crusade, without weapons, without anger, only with words and love."
"When do you want me to leave?"
"As soon as winter passes. For now occupy yourself with this city. I must say to you that I have spoken to Peter..."
"Has he humbled himself?"
"No.... It is my fault... As soon as I misbehave and I let my anger take over, God immediately punishes me. That poor Peter wants knowledge and glory, but only for himself. He wants to shine... I can’t allow him to ruin my Friars. Yet I love him…"
On Francis’s hollow cheek there was a tear.