26th Week of Ordinary Time C – Friday – October 3rd, Transitus of Our Seraphic Father, Saint Francis of Assisi

This transition from the earthly reality to the eternal dwelling is what we call the Transitus. A beautiful image comes to mind when I reflect on it: the peace and joy with which Saint Francis breathed his last breath. He did not face death with fear. Many of us tremble at the thought of death, but not the saints.

Even Jesus, in the Gospels, is recorded to have sung only once in his life—at least as far as Scripture tells us. And that was on the night he went out to his death. After the Last Supper, they went to the Garden of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, singing.

As Franciscans, we too are called to embrace death as part of God’s creation—not as an end, but as a passage into true life. We can learn to see our trials, sufferings, and eventual death as a doorway to the Father. Our sufferings become a purification before we pass through that door.

On the evening of his death, our seraphic father Francis asked to be laid naked on the ground, showing his radical poverty to the very end. Yet he was not alone. His brothers surrounded him, singing the Canticle of the Creatures, which he himself had composed.

My brothers and sisters, especially those of us in the Franciscan family, fraternity is not simply a convenience. It is not that people are there merely to serve us, but that we live and die together. The Christian life is never solitary. It is communion. And so, when we picture the friars surrounding Francis, laid bare on the floor and covered with the tunic of a brother, we must ask ourselves: How do we accompany one another—especially the weak, the sick, and the dying?

Francis wanted to die poor, just as he had lived poor, in imitation of Jesus, who was stripped of everything before the crucifixion. Our Lord, even of his garments, was deprived, showing that he was totally dependent on the Father. Poverty, for us, is not misery, but freedom. Detachment allows us to live more fully and to die without clinging. We can ask ourselves: What are we still holding on to that prevents us from freely loving God and others?

Tradition also tells us that, on the night of his death, Francis received the Body of Christ, uniting his passing with the Paschal Mystery—the eternal Passover, the eternal transition in Christ from this world to the next. The Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives. Our own death, like Francis’s, must be a Eucharistic death, a self-offering. For we become the One whom we consume—Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve, and to lay down his life as a ransom for many.

My dear friends, Francis did not cling to life, but entrusted himself with confidence and joy to the mercy of God. The Transitus is not an evening of sadness, but of hope and joy. Death is not the end of the story—it is the passing into eternal communion with God.

And so, my dear brothers and sisters, as we celebrate this evening, let us ask Saint Francis to intercede for us and for our loved ones. May we too be so united to Jesus that whatever sufferings may come, we can offer them up like Christ himself, to the glory of the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And may God bless you: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.