As the feast of the Portiuncula approaches each August 2, I find myself returning to the small chapel where Francis first gathered his brothers and where Clare stepped into the life of the Gospel. This year, I want to bring that memory home — not to Assisi, not to a congress hall, but to the cotidiano: the ordinary, unremarkable ground where most of us actually live our faith. What does a thirteenth‑century friar’s walk into a Sultan’s camp, or a papal gathering of religious leaders, have to do with your Tuesday? Your Wednesday? Or any other ordinary day? More than it first appears.
A Grace Small Enough to Fit a Life
The Portiuncula is not a cathedral. It is one of the small, ruined churches Francis rebuilt with his own hands, so modest that it now sits, almost shyly, inside the far grander basilica built around it. And yet it is the place where he first received the brothers and Clare into the Gospel way of minoritas. It is the little portion of land from which he sent the friars out two by two into the whole world.
The most consequential sending in Franciscan history did not happen from a place of power. It happened from a room barely large enough to hold twenty people in prayer.
This matters for how we imagine our own cotidiano. We tend to assume that the significant things — the things God cares about — happen elsewhere: in the dramatic decision, the public stand, the once‑in‑a‑lifetime encounter. The Portiuncula insists otherwise. The little church is where the sending began. Our little portions — our rooms, our kitchens, our commutes, our shift changes — are not the waiting room before the spiritual life. They are where it happens. Our cotidiano is where we encounter God and where God finds us.
Peacemakers, Not Soldiers
My original essay spent a long time undoing two famous paintings: Francis daring the Sultan’s holy men to an ordeal by fire, and Clare driving off attacking Saracens with the Eucharist raised like a mighty sword. Neither occurred that way.
What the historical record recounts is quieter and, I think, more useful for our purposes today. Hoping for martyrdom, Francis crossed into the Sultan’s camp not as a combatant but as a guest, dressed in a rough patched habit that resembled the robes of the Sufi holy men who had shaped the Sultan’s own spiritual formation. He was welcomed, listened to, and sent home alive — having neither converted the other nor been martyred. The only fire present was that of the Holy Spirit moving both men to listen to each other as brothers. Francis left the encounter alive and changed.
Clare, for her part, could not have physically driven anyone off. She was too frail and unable to stand. What the witnesses at her canonization describe is a woman who, with the Blessed Sacrament brought before her at the threshold of the refectory, lay before it and prayed not only for her sisters’ safety but, I want to believe, for the safety of the very people threatening them.
Neither of them fought. Both made peace, and both did so from a position of vulnerability rather than strength.
Our own cotidiano is full of Saracens: the neighbor whose politics alarm us, the relative we have stopped talking to, the friend who ghosts us, the coworker whose faith — or lack of it — we quietly judge. The temptation is always toward the dramatically painted version of the story: the ordeal by fire, the vindication. The Spirit of Assisi asks something less satisfying and more difficult: showing up in the room of the person we fear and praying for and with them rather than against them.
Living Quietly Among the Rest
After his return from Egypt, Francis wrote into his Rule of Life a two‑fold instruction for the brothers living among Muslims: first, to live simply and quietly as minores (second‑class persons), admitting to being Christian without argument or debate; only afterward, and only if the Spirit clearly inspired it, to preach at all.
The friars who were killed in Morocco a year later did the opposite. They argued, they insulted, and they died for it — a testimony less to holiness than to how quickly quiet witness curdles into contest and one‑upmanship.
This is an uncomfortable mirror for our own moment, saturated as it is with argument and division. So much of our daily discourse, online and off, rewards exactly the posture Francis warned against: winning the exchange rather than living the witness. The socio‑spiritual question worth sitting with is not what you would say to the people who trouble you, but whether you are willing to simply live faithfully among them first — and let speech guided by the Holy Spirit, if it comes at all, come later and rarely.
The Pardon That Needed No Battlefield
Here is the detail from the original essay I most want to recover for our cotidiano. Plenary indulgences in Francis’s day were, as a rule, earned by fighting in the Crusades or making huge donations to the Church. Francis asked Christ for something else entirely: that anyone who entered this one small chapel, confessed, and prayed for pardon would receive the same full remission — no battlefield required, no donation needed.
Miraculously, he got Rome to ratify it. He effectively made the entire economy of the Crusades’ grace obtainable by walking into a room the size of a bedroom and being honest before God. His was an anti‑war move and a move that put all social classes on an even praying field.
That is the socio‑spiritual heart of the Pardon of Assisi: grace was never rationed out only to the heroic or the violent or the wealthy. It was always available in the small, repeatable, unglamorous act. Confession. Prayer. Eucharist. Presence. Entering the little chapel wherever you happen to find it — which is to say, your actual life, your cotidiano.
¿Y qué? Where This Leaves Us
John Paul II, gathering religious leaders at Assisi in 1986, said something I return to often: that peace is built through a thousand small acts of daily living, and that in the ordinary way we treat the people around us, we are always already choosing for or against it.
That is the Spirit of Assisi translated into our cotidiano. Not a summit. Not a crusade, holy or otherwise. A thousand small choices, repeated, in spaces too modest to be painted by anyone.
So as the feast of the Portiuncula approaches, I am not asking you to travel to Assisi. I am asking where your own little chapel already is: the car before you walk into the house, the five minutes before the shift starts, the meal where the hard conversation keeps getting postponed.
Go in. Confess what needs confessing. Confess you are a sinner. Confess your faith in the Triune God. Pray for the well‑being of Pope Leo. Pray for the person you would rather not. Give Eucharistic thanks. Let pardon and well‑being (pax et bonum) be as available to you today as they were to a thirteenth‑century penitent walking into a rebuilt ruin outside Assisi.
¿Y qué? Now it is your cotidiano, and your turn to live the Spirit of Assisi.
Adapted from “Francis, Clare and the Ecumenical Spirit of Assisi,” One in Christ, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2012)