Sept 23

Scripture: Romans 6:1–4

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Meditation

From his article "Special Year of Saint Francis: A Mirror for Our Age," by Séamus Mulholland OFM

To mark the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi (October 3, 1226), the Church has proclaimed a Special Year of Saint Francis from January 10, 2026, to January 10, 2027. This Jubilee Year continues the grace of the recently concluded Ordinary Jubilee and invites all the faithful to live as pilgrims of hope, inspired by the life of Saint Francis, his humility, poverty, mercy, and love for Christ and peace.

As the Church marks the eight centuries since the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, we are confronted not with a gentle saint of birdbaths and garden statues, but with a figure whose life poses uncomfortable, piercing questions to our contemporary existence. The Special Year of Saint Francis arrives at a moment when our world desperately needs what he embodied, yet resists with equal desperation the cost of his discipleship. To truly encounter Francis is to face a prophet who strips away our illusions about what it means to follow Christ in a world drunk on comfort, power, and self-preservation.

Francis’ embrace of Lady Poverty was not a romantic retreat from the world but a frontal assault on the spiritual bankruptcy of affluence. When he stripped naked in the public square before his father and the bishop, he was not merely renouncing his inheritance, he was declaring war on the tyranny of possession that holds the human soul captive. Eight hundred years later, we live in civilisations built upon the very materialism Francis rejected, where our identities are forged in the fires of consumption, where our worth is measured by what we own, control, and display.

The challenge Francis presents to our age is uncompromising: Can we honestly claim to follow Christ while our lives remain fundamentally organised around accumulation? The average person in the developed world lives with a material abundance that would have made medieval lords envious, yet we experience unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, and spiritual emptiness. Francis understood what we have forgotten; that every possession we cling to is a potential idol, every comfort we cannot surrender is a chain, every security we build is a fortress that keeps God at a distance.

This is not a call to mere aesthetic simplicity or fashionable minimalism, which often becomes just another form of consumer identity. Francis’ poverty was theological, not trendy. It emerged from his overwhelming encounter with the Crucified Christ, whose divine poverty, the kenosis of the Incarnation, revealed that true riches lie in complete dependence on the Father. When we read of Francis begging for stones to rebuild San Damiano, or kissing lepers, or sleeping on the bare ground, we are not observing quaint medieval piety but witnessing the logical consequences of taking Christ’s words seriously:

If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor (Matthew 19:21).

The question pierces: What would our churches look like if we actually believed this? What would our own lives look like? Francis forces us to confront whether our faith is genuine transformation or merely religious decoration on lives fundamentally indistinguishable from our secular neighbours in their appetites, ambitions, and anxieties.

Musical Selection

Prayer