Giorgia Meloni’s patron saint of nationalism Francis of Assisi won’t unite Italy

The future Saint Francis of Assisi aimed to die as he lived. Having basked for years in rugged Christian hardship, he ordered his body to be abandoned, naked and forgotten on the muddy autumn soil. It wasn’t to be. Instead, his followers brought Francis’s corpse to a chapel in the town. Two years later, he was canonised, and the Catholic Church built a soaring twin-church basilica for his tomb. 

The man born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, in 1182, has been defied ever since, and not merely by Franciscans. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni recently announced that his saint’s day, 4 October, is to be celebrated as a national holiday, a just reward for the man she called an icon of Italian identity. The move is partly economic — an extra day off implies a buoyant economy — but also represents the latest phase of a wider nationalist agenda. Over recent years, Meloni’s ruling party has cut taxes on Italian art, cut English from Italian documents, and even banned lab-grown meat in an attempt to defend the nation’s culinary heritage. 

This is hardly the meekness Saint Francis had preached. But, then, Meloni isn’t the first to politicise the friar either. Since Italy was united, over 150 years ago, Il Poverello (“The Poor Little One”) has been revived again and again, his story defaced for a shifting polemical present. And if that makes him vulnerable to any regime in need of a hero, it also obscures the real Francis: a medieval mystic who bathed in frenzied piety, and one who anyway seems snubbed in a land where the local still reigns. 

The modern obsession with Saint Francis began on the 700th anniversary of his birth, in 1882. That year, barely a decade after unification, the fresh-faced monarchy recalled the friar with gusto. There were new biographies and new magazines, such as The Echo of Saint Francis, which called him “Italian of heart and mind”. Art told a similar tale. One sculpture from 1882 shows the friar arms-outstretched, blessing a triumvirate of Dante, Giotto and Christopher Columbus. 

Equating Saint Francis with these well-worn civic heroes makes sense, given the 19th-century state’s awkward relationship with the Catholic Church. By 1870, as they united the peninsula under the tricolour flag, Italian troops had besieged the Papal enclave in Rome. Twelve years later, anticlericalism remained strong, with many nationalist leaders condemning the Church for its venality and obscurantism. But if they loathed the Church — Giuseppe Mazzini famously asked if priests really knew the Gospel — they couldn’t ignore the fact that most normal Italians disagreed. Embracing Saint Francis was therefore a way of integrating the Church into the new state. And if, to borrow a phrase, that made turning peasants into Italians slightly less challenging, Saint Francis was a plausible icon in other ways, too. For one thing, his modesty was the perfect foil to Papal pomp. For another, he wrote his famous Rule in an Umbrian vernacular familiar to Dante, meaning he could be retroactively cast as the father of modern Italian: helpful when roughly nine-in-ten subjects knew only dialect. 

If the Francis of the 1880s was a thoughtful theologian, font of the Renaissance and model for an enlightened kingdom on the make, other elements of his story would prove helpful in the following century. Before he embraced destitution, helping lepers and rebuilding churches, Francis was a knight. As a young man, he joined his native Assisi in a war against Perugia and was captured and imprisoned for a year. Later, deep into his ministry, he crossed the Mediterranean on a daring mission to convert a Muslim sultan. 

Not quite a ruthless killer, but certainly enough to be conscripted by fascism. That was obvious even before the Blackshirts seized power. In 1919, for instance, the poet and rabblerouser Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the town of Fiume. This Yugoslav port, now Rijeka, was claimed by Italian patriots, and D’Annunzio invoked the friar as his hoodlums ran riot. “Are not the poor of Fiume the favourites of Saint Francis?” His successors were even starker. Just as the constitutional monarchy he destroyed needed the support of the clergy, so too did Benito Mussolini. Hence the first 4 October holiday swiftly following, with Francis designated an Italian patron saint in 1939. The propagandaists got started too. Comparing Francis to Mussolini, one said they had the same liveliness of gaze and nobility of bearing. The only thing missing from Il Duce, he suggested, was a halo. 

As the dictatorship became more aggressive, it also imagined Francis as a rifle-toting crusader. When Italy attacked Abyssinia, in 1935, the mayor of Assisi argued the invaders were following the “bloody footsteps of the Franciscan missionaries”. And just as the 19th century remade Saint Francis in chiselled stone, the fascists employed the new medium of film. One excellent example is Frate Francesco, a 1927 biopic that blends Franciscan unity with national pride. “It must be a very Italian film,” said the director, “a triumph of faith and beauty to demonstrate that we Italians are still capable of standing up to foreign competition.” 

Saint Francis has proved just as flexible since 1945. His love of charity made him a hero of postwar socialism, his love of animals the patron saint of ecology. By the time you reach Margaret Thatcher’s famous speech, which wrongly attributed a later prayer to Il Poverello, Francis begins to feel less like a real historical figure — and more like a cypher, a vessel for whichever statesman needs him at the time. 

There’s an irony here. On the one hand, Francis’s supple biography, made suppler still by the passage of time, means he can easily be twisted this way or that, by Romantic liberals, or jackbooted thugs, or indeed by Right-wing populists whose approval ratings are down. At the same time, however, that very impermanence means Francis, whatever his guise, can never truly enter Italian hearts. For whenever he does, someone else will soon recast him. Explaining the importance of Meloni’s holy day — itself reviving one axed in 1977 — a member of the ruling party claimed it would restore “to the public sphere a pillar of our collective memory”. That’s unsurprising from yet another government that values good relations with the Pope. But the question remains: which public sphere, and which collective memory? If Francis’s posthumous journey tells us anything, it’s that polemic by one ideologue will only be usurped by the next. 

But if echoes of the flesh-and-blood friar endure, in his elegant prose and his lust for adventure, the cleric as a whole was far more arcane. He was, after all, a man who had a dream-time revelation to remake the celestial city here on Earth, and who gave up his possessions so freely that his merchant father disowned him; a man who then stripped to his skin, and declared he’d own nothing, and who fled to the woods singing a French ballad — yet who emerged to found an order that conquered all Europe. The real Francis, as far as we can tell across the chasm of centuries, was a man who blessed captured rabbits, and who admonished the birds to thank God for their wings. 

I’d love to see Meloni describe these hair-shirt passions to her voters, if only because it would force her to ground Francis in something more interesting than politics. It would be funny too: that his bewildering world of medieval devotion could accommodate anything as prosaic as Giorgia Meloni feels laughable, particularly when churchgoing is far lower now than it was in 1882. And yet, in another irony, freeing Francis from the vagaries of modern discourse might actually make him a more appealing national figure. 

The fact is that, whatever the shrill insistence of Meloni and the rest, many are simply unwilling to embrace a truly Italian identity, new books proclaiming Francis a proto-nationalist notwithstanding. According to a 2021 poll, just 20% of citizens identified primarily as Italian, an 8% drop from a decade earlier. Another survey found that half feel closer to their city or region than they do the country as a whole. 

Perhaps that’s to be expected in a nation so young. But what’s undeniable, too, is that these sentiments are reflected in practice. Regionalism remains common from the Alps to Sicily, both politically and across the wider culture: not least when it comes to sainthood. In 2017, to give one example, officials in Rome tried to ban the Venetian authorities from flying the Banner of Saint Mark, an artefact of the city’s ancient republic. “It’s a flag with more than 1,000 years of history,” lamented one local politician. 

And if the evangelist is more admired here than Saint Francis, you can spot the same pattern across the peninsula. The Milanese are sometimes called “Ambrosiani” after their patron Saint Ambrose. In Naples, Saint Januarius Day is a time for frantic celebration, as his blood-stained relics are paraded through the streets. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence, where like equivalent days elsewhere, his feast is an unofficial holiday. Taken together, anyway, it hints again to the enduring power of the local in a land where Rome remains weak — and explains once more why centralisers are so desperate for their Francis. 

And what of Il Poverello himself? From a purely religious perspective, he doubtless remains popular. Visit Assisi, with its vast double church, and you can find plenty of trinkets for sale. But unlike Francis’s political cult, these commemorations feel wholly unstudied, a universe away from that pompous talk of public spheres and collective memory. Think of it as a kind of revenge, for a man who only ever wished to be forgotten, with his ballads and his rabbits and his birds. 

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