The God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ is a personal God: “Our Father” who addresses each of his daughters and sons by name and calls him or her into a unique and unrepeatable kinship with God’s own self. Jesus related to God as a trusting child to a loving parent, and he invited his disciples to do the same.

The worldview of St. Francis was formed by this Christian understanding of God as personal and of God’s creation as reflective of the divine image. Francis saw the world  as a vast network of concrete interpersonal relationships. Everything and everyone was born of the same divine parent. Therefore, everything and everyone was brother or sister to every other creature and a distinctive individual of priceless worth. The late 13th century Franciscan philosopher and theologian, John Duns Scotus, built on Francis’s insight by arguing that a thing can only be fully known when we grasp its individuality and uniqueness, what he called its “this-ness.” (John Duns Scotus, Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation).

Like St. Francis’s approach to everyone he encountered, Franciscan education is based on love of the human person and on reverence for his or her God-given dignity. It values each individual as a gift. It sees that person as a son or daughter of “Our Father,” to be treated not as a commodity, a number or an object, but as a beloved brother or sister.