Word: assisi
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Twelve sackclothed vagrants with no visible means of support gathered in A.D. 1210 in the little Italian hill town of Assisi and started what Danish Roman Catholic Historian Johannes Jorgensen called "the most powerful attempt since Christ to make the world truly Christian." Their leader was a gentle little man who began life as a gay young gallant with a yen for glory-until, riding off to war at 22, he heard a voice ask, "Why do you desert the Lord?" Not long after, Francis of Assisi turned to prayer and fasting. Haled into an episcopal court for selling some...
...White Russia who became a disciple of Hasidism. This was a movement of holy men (zaddiks) and their followers who reacted against the arid, hairsplitting Talmud-boring of 17th century Judaism with a kind of joyous mysticism; they have often been compared to the followers of St. Francis of Assisi. Shneur Zalman burned with Hasidism's hitlahavut (spiritual enthusiasm), but he recognized the need for organization and teaching as well, and he steered a middle course between mystical rapture and the traditional emphasis on study. He gave his followers and their descendants a highly organized religious school system...
Thomas Aquinas was clearly too rarefied for advertisers, and St. Francis of Assisi too poor. St. Dominic was out of the question; he had recommended that people wear the same set of clothes both winter and summer...
...children at famed Fatima, Portugal (1917); St. Catherine Labouré (1830), who heard the rustle of silk one night and received instructions from Mary herself about the miraculous medal that is now worn by hundreds of thousands. Stigmatists exist today who, like the first of them, St. Francis of Assisi, exhibit the wounds of Christ's crucifixion...
...Assisi one day last June, Don Giovanni Rossi knelt in chapel before the Blessed Sacrament. Outside, a man pounded down the steep, cobbled street loudly singing a popular tune. Don Giovanni's prayer faltered, and he thought ruefully: "If only that fellow were singing of Jesus, my mind wouldn't wander...