Solidarity in suffering and poverty went back to shared origins: to the crucifix, to the image of the man-God dying and without clothes. Francis and Camillus grew at the school of the crucifix. Their work started with the cross and they allowed themselves to be led under its guidance. From the crucifix of the Church of San Damiano Francis at prayer listened to the words that were to become a programme for his life: ‘Go Francis and repair my house which as you can see is in ruins’. ‘From that moment onwards’, Celano observes, ‘the compassion of the crucified Christ was fixed in his holy soul and…the stigmata were impressed deeply in his heart’.

Francis wanted this experience to be portrayed, as was the case with all the great experiences of his life. It was not enough for him to be a witness to himself: he wanted to bind himself in front of a community and give his feelings a public dimension. Like when he said goodbye to his father and wedded Our Lady Poverty, or when he had himself bound by a cord around the neck and dragged naked in front of the assembly of the faithful, or, when he was dying, he had himself placed naked on the ground. He was not satisfied with his statement being of words alone. He flanked this with the act of a theatrical performance. Francis had a deeply lyrical temperament and did not want only to live the events of his history: he celebrated them as a solemn rite. Christmas, the event of the baby Christ which he especially looked forward to, was celebrated by him for the first time by making a crib where before the observer there appeared the stages of the birth of Jesus and the figures that accompanied it: the Virgin, Joseph, the angels, the shepherds and the Wise Men.

So it was with the passion of the Lord which was translated into a stage performance in front of the people. Francis aimed at people’s hearts, lit up their imaginations and profoundly moved people with what he was proclaiming. The history of the crucified Christ had to capture people and for this reason he renewed it by creating a high temperature climate. But although this portrayal was to pass, the image of the cross had to go down into the souls of people and remain impressed in them. To this end, Francis conceived for his Order a ‘habit of penitence made in the form of a cross’ to bear witness, in the words of Celano, to ‘the mystery of the cross so that just as his mind was clothed in the crucified Lord, so the whole of his body would be clothed externally in the cross of Christ’.

Something similar to what happened with Francis in the little Church of San Damiano also took place with Camillus in St. James’ Hospital in Rome when Christ on the crucifix, detaching his arms from the cross, comforted him about the continuation of his mission: ‘Tell me what is afflicting you, pusillanimous one. Continue for I will help you, for this is my work not yours’. The crucified Christ entered his life and was never to leave him. Camillus wanted to have on his habit the sign of the cross in order ‘to demonstrate that this is a religion of the Cross…so that those who want to follow our way of life will get ready…to follow Jesus Christ unto death’. He wanted it to be dark red ‘because more like the true wood of the most holy Cross on which the Redeemer of the World died and was appended’.

Every day in the wards of hospitals or in the streets, wherever Camillus was in contact with the sick, he encountered Christ on the crucifix who became for him a daily partner. Not only did he think about him and pray to him but he also housed him, fed him, gave him water to drink and clothed him. He gave himself and in his self-giving he felt that he was the beneficiary. ‘This crucified Christ’, he exclaimed, ‘has helped me and comforted me a great deal: and certainly I do not merit all the graces he has done me’. He attributed to him the merit of founding the Institute: ‘In the foundation of this little plant a lion heart could have lost himself, as well as a miserable man such as I am, if the crucified Christ had not helped and comforted me’. The signs of the cross were also impressed on his afflicted body: his leg with its sore, the corns on his feet, his kidney stones, the hernia in his groin, and the tumour in his stomach. In his testament he declared his self-abandonment to the crucified Christ, to whom he commended himself like the prodigal son who went back to his father and the good thief who called for mercy.

The passion of Christ was impressed in Francis with the signs of his stigmata. In the year 1224, two years before his death, the poor man of Assisi retired to La Verna, where in rapture, when contemplating the crucified Christ, he received the wounds of the cross. Now his body as well proclaimed the crucified Christ. He no longer needed to look outside and raise his voice. He had become at one with the suffering Christ. ‘True love of Christ had transformed the one who loved into an image of the beloved’. ‘The friend of Christ’ was ‘completely transformed into a visible portrait of Jesus Christ crucified through martyrdom of the flesh, but through the fire of the spirit’. In the loneliness of La Verna, Francis became the protagonist of a disconcerting experience before which we are amazed spectators. We like to think with Bonaventure of an ‘untamable fire of love for the good Jesus which erupted in him with the flashes and flames of charity’.