On the 21st September, at San Damiano, I participated in the celebration of the centenary of the Canticle of the Creatures. Standing before the Crucifix that spoke to Francis, I recalled that "the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor are inseparable." As I spoke those words, my heart was heavy thinking of Gaza, Ukraine, and the many places where today only the cry of pain resounds.
Francis composed the Canticle in the autumn of 1225, blind and ill, yet capable of transforming his frailty into universal praise. Today, faced with images of war that parade across our screens, we risk instead a blindness of the heart, a numbness to evil, a complicit silence. We seem to stand mute before logics of extermination that should make us cry out in horror.
"Praised be you, my Lord, for those who forgive for love of you" - this verse of the Canticle, added by Francis during a conflict between the bishop and the mayor of Assisi, sounds today like a provocation. Forgiveness is not an escape from reality, but recognition that only through reconciliation can we find pathways to integral peace.
But how can we speak of forgiveness while too many children die under bombs? How can we sing "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" while the earth is bloodstained and witnesses so many people fleeing their homeland? Perhaps here lies the hardest lesson the Lord offers us: conversion cannot be merely personal, it must become social, political, prophetic.
The encyclical Laudato Si' has taught us that everything is connected. Today's wars are not separate from the ecological crisis, from inequality, from the economy that kills. The logic that destroys our common home is the same that destroys peoples. Like the ancient prophets, we are called to denounce "those who trample upon the poor," even when the poor is an entire people under siege.
The shame we feel in the face of our silence must become a starting point, not a destination. Francis saw his experience of frailty transformed into the beginning of conversion and compassion. We can transform our helpless pain into active witness, into words that break silence, into gestures that sow reconciliation.
The Canticle teaches us a "grammar of relationships": everything is brother, everything is sister. Even those we consider enemies today. This is not naivety, but Gospel radicalism that alone can break the logics of death.
San Damiano sends us back into the world with the mandate to "repair our common home." We cannot do this while ignoring the wounds that war inflicts on this home. The peace that Francis sang is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. In fact, justice today demands that we do not remain silent, that we do not look the other way, that we become seeds of peace and hope even when all seems lost.
The Lord is teaching us that our time calls for the same boldness as Francis: to transform suffering into praise, pain into prophecy, silence into words that liberate. Laudato si', mi' Signore-Praised be, O my Lord- even through the trial that purifies and converts us.
