From his article "Special Year of Saint Francis: A Mirror for Our Age," by Séamus Mulholland OFM
Francis challenges us to see that creation care is inseparable from the spiritual life. Every act of consumption is a spiritual decision. Every choice about how we use resources is a confession about who we believe God to be and what we believe we are owed. The planet groans under the weight of human desire run amok, the very desire Francis crucified in himself. Until we are converted from our addiction to comfort, convenience, and excess, our environmentalism will remain shallow, a rearrangement of deck chairs while the ship of creation founders.
True Franciscan ecology demands sacrifice. It demands we actually change how we live, not merely how we feel about planetary suffering. It requires that we interrogate our entitlement to constant climate control, instant transportation, and cheap goods produced by exploited labour and environmental devastation. Francis’ love for creation was born from his love of poverty; only those who have been freed from the tyranny of need can relate rightly to the earth. Here again, the saint of Assisi confronts our convenient compartmentalisation, revealing that spirituality, economics, and ecology form an indivisible whole.
Francis’ pursuit of peace was not the conflict-avoidance of the comfortable but the costly reconciliation of the cross. When he travelled to meet Sultan Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade, risking martyrdom to preach the Gospel to the Muslim leader, he embodied a peace-making that transcended mere tolerance or dialogue. Francis sought conversion, his own and the Sultan’s, to the crucified Christ, the Prince of Peace who makes peace through the blood of his cross.
Our age speaks endlessly of peace, justice, and reconciliation, yet we remain trapped in tribal hatreds, political polarisation, and the violence of tongues if not always of swords. We want peace without repentance, reconciliation without transformation, justice without mercy. Francis understood that true peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of Christ, and Christ comes bearing a cross.
The Franciscan peace greeting, ‘May the Lord give you peace’, is not a wish for tranquillity but a bestowal of Christ himself. It demands that we become instruments of that peace, which means we must be willing to absorb hatred without retaliation, injustice without vengeance, violence without returning it in kind. This is the peace of the crucified, and it costs everything.
In a church and culture fractured by division, Francis calls us beyond our competing certainties to the foot of the cross, where all human pretensions are revealed as dust. He challenges both progressive and traditionalist, both activist and contemplative, to examine whether our pursuit of truth has been corrupted by the will to power, whether our defence of righteousness has been poisoned by self-righteousness. The peace Francis offers requires that we die to the need to be right, vindicated, and victorious in our causes, trusting that God alone will vindicate his truth in his time.