The 800th Anniversary of the Transitus of Saint Francis

Fr. Scott Haynes

October 3, 1226 – October 3, 2026

Eight hundred years ago this evening, as the light faded over the Umbrian countryside, Saint Francis of Assisi prepared to die.

It was Saturday, October 3, 1226. Francis was only about forty-four years old, but his body had been worn down by years of penance, travel, illness, and suffering. Two years earlier, at La Verna, he had received the sacred stigmata, bearing in his own flesh the wounds of the Crucified Christ. By the autumn of 1226 he knew that his earthly pilgrimage was nearly finished.

Francis had been staying at the bishop's residence in Assisi, but he did not want to die amid the comparative comforts of the city. He asked his brothers to carry him down the hill to Saint Mary of the Angels, the Portiuncula, the tiny chapel so closely associated with the beginning of his vocation. There he had heard the Gospel command to go forth in poverty. There the first Franciscan brothers had gathered. There Saint Clare had begun her religious life. Francis wished to finish his earthly life where so much of his new life in Christ had begun.

The word Transitus means a passing or crossing over. For eight centuries Franciscans have remembered the evening of October 3 not merely as the anniversary of Francis's death, but as his passage from this world into eternal life.

As death approached, Francis wanted to possess nothing. According to the early tradition, he asked to be placed upon the bare earth, stripped of his clothing, so that he might leave the world as the poor man he had tried to become for Christ. Even death itself he had learned to call "Sister Bodily Death."

This was not because Francis despised life. Quite the opposite. Few saints seem to have delighted so intensely in God's creation. He loved the sun and moon, fire and water, birds and animals, fields and flowers because he saw them as creatures coming from the hand of the same Father. Yet precisely because he loved creation as God's gift, he knew that he could not grasp it as his possession.

And so at the end, Francis opened his hands.

He asked that the Gospel according to Saint John be read beginning with the account of the Last Supper: "Before the festival day of the pasch, Jesus knowing that his hour was come, that he should pass out of this world to the Father..." (John 13:1).

How fitting those words must have sounded in that little community. Christ's hour had come. Now the hour of His poor servant had come as well.

Francis then prayed Psalm 141 (142 in modern numbering), the prayer of a man who has nothing left except God:

"I cried to the Lord with my voice: with my voice I made supplication to the Lord."

Saint Bonaventure records that after these mysteries had been fulfilled, Francis "fell asleep in the Lord."

Tradition even remembers the creatures joining the farewell. Bonaventure relates that although darkness was approaching, a great flock of larks circled above the place of Francis's death, singing as though creation itself were bidding farewell to the man who had spent his life teaching men to recognize creation as the handiwork of God.

The following day, October 4, Francis's body was carried toward Assisi. The procession stopped at San Damiano so that Saint Clare and her sisters could venerate him. His body was then placed in the Church of San Giorgio. Less than two years later, on July 16, 1228, Pope Gregory IX canonized him. In 1230 his remains were transferred to the new Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi.

What Francis Says to Us 800 Years Later

Eight centuries have passed, but Francis's final evening still asks us a searching question:

What will remain when everything we have accumulated must finally be surrendered?

Francis spent his life learning the answer.

Not money. Not reputation. Not possessions. Not accomplishments. Not even the body itself. Christ remains.

The poverty of Saint Francis was therefore much deeper than owning few things. His deepest poverty was the willingness to stand before God with empty hands. He gradually surrendered his ambitions, his security, his plans, his reputation and finally his own life.

That is why the Transitus is strangely joyful.

Francis did not approach death as a man who believed that everything was being taken from him. He approached it as a man who had spent his whole life learning how to give everything away.

There is a lesson here for us.

We spend enormous energy trying to control tomorrow. We worry about what might happen, protect what we possess, defend our reputation, replay injuries, and imagine countless futures that may never arrive. Francis points toward another way: place everything into the hands of God and attend faithfully to what He asks of you today.

Our Lord tells us:

"Be not therefore solicitous for tomorrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."(Matthew 6:34)

Francis eventually lived those words with astonishing simplicity.

The man who once dreamed of becoming a knight ended his life lying upon the earth. The merchant's son who had once delighted in fine clothing possessed almost nothing. The young man who had wanted the world to notice him became the Poverello, the Little Poor Man. And yet eight hundred years later, the world still remembers him.

There is a beautiful paradox in that. Francis became great precisely because he stopped trying to become great. He became rich because he chose Christ as his treasure. He became free because there was increasingly little that the world could take away from him.

On this 800th anniversary of his Transitus, perhaps the best way to honor Saint Francis is not simply to admire him. It is to imitate him in one concrete act of surrender.

Forgive someone. Give something away. Visit someone who is lonely. Go to Confession. Spend time before the Blessed Sacrament. Stop rehearsing an old resentment. Put down the phone and pray. Tell God about the thing you are most afraid of losing and then place it deliberately into His hands.

Francis did not become Saint Francis in a single heroic moment. He became a saint through thousands of smaller acts of surrender until, on the evening of October 3, 1226, only one surrender remained. His life itself. And having practiced surrender for so many years, he was ready.

Eight hundred years later, the little chapel at the Portiuncula still stands. Pilgrims still travel to Assisi. The friars still gather on October 3 to remember their father's passing. The world in which Francis lived has disappeared almost entirely, yet his witness remains startlingly fresh: You do not need to possess everything in order to be joyful. You do not need to control everything in order to have peace. You do not need to fear losing everything when Christ is your everything.

One day each of us will make our own transitus. May Saint Francis teach us to live now in such a way that, when that hour comes, we too can surrender ourselves peacefully into the hands of the Father.

Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.