FRANCIS OF ASSISI (Giovanni Francesco Bernardone, 1181/2–1226) was a Christian saint and the founder of the Franciscans. John was Francis's baptismal name, but a fondness for France on the part of his merchant father and an acknowledgment of the national origin of his mother prompted the parents to call him Francis. Endowed with a jovial disposition and the means to pamper it, Francis enjoyed the good life of his times; this life was, however, interrupted when his hometown warred with neighboring Perugia. Inducted, imprisoned, and then released, Francis returned home with his military ambitions dampened. A business career with his father held no attraction.

Francis's conversion was the culmination of a period of prayerful reflection in a local grotto, an encounter with a leper, an invitation from God to repair Assisi's abandoned chapel of San Damiano, and Francis's study of Matthew 10, which imparted to him...