“Incarnation” is a big word, and one with a distinctively Christian cast. Indeed, the Incarnation is the heart of the Christian faith: the belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the most complete, yet succinct statement of who God is. Jesus is the Word of God made human, God’s self-revelation “in the flesh” (cf. John 1:1-14).

St. Francis was profoundly moved by this central doctrine of Christianity. The Feast of the Incarnation (Christmas) was his favorite holiday, and he enriched its celebration by organizing the first Christmas crèche. (Thomas of Celano, Life of St. Francis, I:XXX, 84-87)Because God had become human in the mystery  of the Incarnation, Francis was convinced that God could be found in the world, in the joys and sorrows of everyday life, in ordinary places and in ordinary people. He believed that the “Most High” can be met in what seems “most low.” The Almighty can be encountered in the powerless. The Infinitely Beautiful can be seen in the misshapen features of lepers, and the All-Good and All-Loving can be discovered in the modest company of the outcast and the poor. ).

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. 

The Catholic tradition places a high premium on community. It teaches that God is not an isolated individual, but a Trinity of persons, a communion of love. It teaches that men and women, made in the divine image, are by their very nature social creatures who only come into their own when they enjoy all the rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities of being full members of a community. Communal worship around the table of the Lord in the Eucharist is the source and summit of life in the Catholic community, and human solidarity and concern for the common good are hallmarks of Catholic social teaching.

St. Francis was committed to fostering life-giving communities and to extending the boundaries of those communities so that no one and no thing were excluded from them. He saw all of creation as one, big extended family. He chose to live in the world as a brother to all. He insisted that the friars were to love and care for each other as a mother loves and cares for her children. He sent his brothers on their missionary journeys not singly, but two by two, so that they might bear more credible witness to the gospel values of community and mutual affection.  He sought to restore lepers, the poor and other  social outcasts to full membership in the human community. And, by word and example, he tried to restore humanity itself to full membership in the cosmic community of “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon” and “Mother Earth.” (St. Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Creatures). 

Like St. Francis, the education that bears his name is not only personal; it is profoundly communal. While it encourages individual achievement among its students and prods them to move beyond their comfort zones, it also provides a welcoming and inclusive home, a supportive community in which students are expected to participate in a spirit of mutual respect and to which they are expected to contribute in a spirit of mutual service. Franciscan education is committed to providing ample opportunities for common worship, and it seeks to comprehend, cherish and sustain the profound interrelatedness and integrity of all of creation. It takes place within a community of shared values, and it prepares its students to take their places in a global, indeed, cosmic community as responsible citizens and careful stewards of the world’s resources.

Jesus’ first words in St. Mark’s gospel are a summons to renewal: “Reform your lives and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). In the Judeo-Christian tradition, religious faith and practice lead to human transcendence, to personal and communal transformation, to a continuous, life-long change of heart, mind, attitudes and behaviors.

St. Francis’s shorthand for this ongoing process of renewal and transformation was the simple but often misunderstood word, “penance.” Francis insisted that he and his friars were to live a life of “penance.” They were to do “penance.” They were to preach “penance.” (See, for example, Francis’s Testament, Later Admonition and Exhortation, and the Earlier Rule, XXI)  In other words, they were to be models of personal transformation as well as instruments of renewal in the Church and in the society around them.

Like the preaching of St. Francis, Franciscan education is more than informative; it is transformative. It rejects the secular model of “value-neutral” education and is  committed to a more traditional understanding of education as the value-based intellectual, moral and spiritual formation of men and women: formation that is on-  going and life-long; formation that leads to an ever greater openness to truth, beauty, goodness and love; formation that results in an ever more attentive, intelligent, reasonable, compassionate and responsible embrace of our world.

God is absolute mystery, beyond the power of human minds to know or human words to express. The Christian tradition asserts that the least wrong way of speaking about this unutterable mystery of God is to echo the First Letter of John and to say, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love carries us more deeply into the divine mystery than the sum of all of our ideas, concepts and logical conclusions about God. God is love, and God draws us to God’s self through the desires and affections of the human heart, through what and who and how we love. Divine love is both the origin and the fulfillment of all our human desires.

The Franciscan tradition places great emphasis on the place of the will and the role of human affections and desires in shaping our lives, particularly our life with God. St. Bonaventure believed that no one can ascend to union with God unless he or she is a “person of desires.” (St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey Into God, Prologue, 3) Certainly, St. Francis was such a person. He was both passionate and compassionate. His writings brim with lyricism and enthusiasm. His emotions are evident on every page. He tells the story of his own conversion as a radical reversal of  his feelings toward lepers: the “bitter” became “sweet,” those he once feared and despised became the special objects of his empathy, solicitude and kindness. (St. Francis of Assisi, The Testament, 1-3) The friars who knew Francis best attested to his passionate love for God and God’s creatures. Francis’s “bias in favor of affection” colored his attitudes toward education. His companions said that “he preferred that they be good through love rather than be dilettantes through curiosity.” (The Assisi Compilation, 47) He spurned “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Either knowledge was in the service of love or it was useless information; it was both vain and in vain.

St. Bonaventure said that “great as [the intellect] is in itself, its nature is to move the affect . . . to move a person to love.”(St. Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, 1:13) Franciscan education has as much to do with opening the heart to love as it does with opening the mind to truth. It values interpersonal skills as much as intellectual abilities. It encourages passion for one’s field of study certainly, but it also promotes compassion for one’s neighbor in need. It defines human flourishing not in terms of how much one gains for oneself but how much one gives of oneself to others.

Jesus said to his disciples:  “whoever wishes to become great among you must be  your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be the slave of all.” He went on to say that he had come “not be served but to serve” (Mark 10:43-45). In the pivotal chapter of St. John’s gospel, Jesus gets up from the table after a final meal with his disciples and begins to wash their feet. The one they call “Teacher” and “Lord” performs for them an act of Middle Eastern hospitality usually reserved for the lowest slave in the household. “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you,” Jesus tells the future shepherds of his flock (John 13:15). Clearly, the concept of servant-leadership is nothing new in the Christian tradition.

St. Francis wanted this servant attitude of Christ to be mirrored in his own life and in the lives of his followers, especially the leaders among them. He frequently referenced the story of the foot-washing in John’s gospel. He told the friars: “Let no one be called superior, but let everyone in general be called a lesser brother. And let one wash the feet of the other.” (St. Francis of Assisi, The Earlier Rule, VI:3-4). To those who exercised authority “in the world,” Francis wrote: “Let the one to whom obedience has been entrusted and who is considered the greater be the  lesser and the servant of the other brothers.”(St. Francis of Assisi, Later Admonition and Exhortation, 42)  In word and deed, Francis taught that the best leaders are self-effacing stewards who put the common good of all ahead of their own personal gain.

Franciscan education trains the servant-leaders of tomorrow. It considers the pursuit of an education to be a privilege, not an entitlement, and believes that with great privilege comes great responsibility for those who are not so privileged. The service dimension of Franciscan education goes deeper than the promotion of “volunteerism.” It encourages students—the future leaders of our society—to see themselves as humble servants and to understand their life’s work as service in solidarity with their brothers and sisters, especially the least among us. 

The Catholic intellectual tradition is home to some of the greatest minds in human history. It has produced men and women of faith who have applied their intelligence and learning to the deepest questions that haunt the human spirit: questions about  the ultimate mystery of God, questions about life’s meaning and purpose, questions about what constitutes human happiness and what contributes to a rich, full life, as well as questions about our obligations to the source of all life and to those with whom we share life in this world. It is a tradition of inquiry that, at its best, has refused to divorce right thinking from right living, theory from practice, reason from faith, theology from spirituality, or pursuing the truth from seeing the beautiful and doing the good. In short, the Catholic heritage is a wisdom tradition.

St. Francis could be tough on those whose book learning became a source of pride in themselves and a source of power over others. He questioned whether those who know more necessarily know better. He was certain that those who know more are not necessarily better people. But he was no less certain that wisdom is a virtue. Indeed, in his Salutation of the Virtues, “Queen Wisdom” comes first, along with what he considered to be her twin sister: “holy pure Simplicity.”(St. Francis of Assisi, Salutation of the Virtues, 1)  For Francis, the surest signs  of the wise person are humility, personal integrity, lack of pretension and a preference for right action over mere words when sharing one’s learning with others. St. Bonaventure captured the sapient nature of the Franciscan tradition when he wrote: “[Let no one] believe that reading is sufficient without emotion, speculation without devotion, investigation without wonder, observation without joy, work without piety, knowledge without love, understanding without humility, study without divine grace, reflection without divinely inspired wisdom.” (St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey Into God, Prologue 4)