The annual service at the capital's central church in honour of the patron saint of animals welcomed a host of pets and their owners on Saturday morning. Continue reading

"If the you of five years ago doesn't consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually."

It's a great sentiment, but my malarkey radar went off at the attribution to Merton.

This language of "growing spiritually" is awfully modern for someone who died half a century ago and dedicated his adult life to a religious tradition that he believed contained, at its foundations, an unchanging truth.

And, sure enough, it's not from Merton. People who have searched through his actual writings haven't been able to find it.

My own (admittedly lazier) search using Google Books also turned up nothing authentic.

There are plenty more where this came from: quotes that have circulated ad infinitum on social media but can't be traced to the famous religious figure who allegedly said them. Here are some popular ones.

The Prayer of St. Francis?

I was crushed to find out the famous prayer "Lord make me an instrument of your peace," is not actually from St. Francis.

This is one of the only prayers I have memorized — thank you, Sarah McLachlan and Buffy — and it was read at my wedding. I love this prayer.

But it's an early-20th-century French prayer that somehow got stuck on the back of an image of St. Francis, and much like a modern-day meme tends to forever cement a connection between words and pictures, the association was born.

By World War II, people were calling it the Prayer of St. Francis, and we've never looked back.

"Be the change"
Since I used this quote in at least two speeches before I found out that Mahatma Gandhi never said it, I'm now officially part of the problem. I'm wicked sorry. Continue reading

• Jana Reiss is a senior columnist at Religion News Service where the above article was first published.

But as Pope Francis explained to journalists three days after his election, he also chose the name Francis because St. Francis of Assisi is "the man of peace. ... He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace."

What kind of peacemaker will Pope Francis be?

First, we must acknowledge that Pope Francis comes to the international stage with no training and little experience.

He was educated as a chemist before entering the seminary, where his training was heavy on literature, philosophy and theology.

But to think of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as a hick totally ignorant of the world outside Argentina would be a mistake. Continue reading.

Source: National Catholic Reporter

Image: AFP/Getty Images

"A Christian cannot coexist with the spirit of the world," he said, speaking in a room of the Assisi archbishop's residence where St Francis shed himself of his rich clothes and embraced a life of poverty.

Worldliness, the Pope said, "leads us to vanity, arrogance, pride. And this is an idol, it is not of God."

Those who try to act as Christians without renouncing their worldly attitudes become "pastry-shop Christians", the Pope said — "nice sweet things, but not real Christians".

"The worldly spirit kills; it kills people," he continued. "It kills the Church."

While he spoke of the need to purify the Church, Pope Francis poked fun at anxious Catholics who had predicted in the media that he would "strip the bishops, the cardinals, himself" during his visit to Assisi. He assured listeners that he intended only to strengthen the Church by eliminating distractions.

The Pope said he directed his invitation not merely to the hierarchy but to all the Church's members, and that he sought renunciation of spiritual complacency as well as of material riches.

"When the media speak of the Church, they believe that the Church means priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals and the Pope," he observed. "But the Church is all of us and we all have to strip ourselves of this worldliness."

In a homily at a Mass he celebrated in the square outside the Basilica of St Francis, the Pope disputed popular misconceptions of St Francis and his legacy.

The common association of St Francis with the cause of peace and love for creation is badly incomplete, he said.

The peace which Francis received, experienced and lived "is the peace of Christ, which is born of the greatest love of all, the love of the cross", the Pope said.

"Franciscan peace is not something saccharine. Hardly. That is not the real St Francis. Nor is it a kind of pantheistic harmony with the forces of the cosmos. That is not Franciscan either; it is a notion some people have invented."

Sources:

Catholic News Service

Vatican Radio

Catholic News Agency

Image: Free Republic

Editor's note: After his election to the papacy this week, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina chose Pope Francis as his name. It's an homage to Saint Francis of Assisi, the 13th century Catholic friar and preacher who founded the beggar-monk movement through his Franciscan order. He emphasized a life of asceticism and humility, and created a powerful voice for the poor the church couldn't ignore. SPIEGEL's history magazine, SPIEGEL GESCHICHTE, published the following article about the influence of the new pope's namesake in 2010.

It was one of those nights when young people made their happy, noisy way through the streets of Assisi. With a good meal and more than a few rounds of drinks behind them, they danced and sang loudly as they navigated the alleyways of this central Italian town.

Not all of Assisi's residents were amused. One commented sourly that the young people had "filled their stomachs to bursting and now are despoiling the city squares with their drunken songs."

This particular group of merry youths was headed up by one Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, known as Francesco, around 22 years old at the time. The scion of a wealthy and well-respected cloth merchant family, Francesco had a penchant for extravagant clothes and enjoyed the good things in life. As a sign of his elevated position among the other young men, he was never seen without a walking stick swinging jauntily from his hand, and he was well-liked thanks to a propensity for picking up the group's tab after a night of revelry.

Francesco's inebriated companions took no particular notice when their leader lagged behind on this particular evening. When they did finally realize and turn back, they found Francesco lost in an ecstatic reverie, as if struck by lightning, in the middle of the street. "Suddenly he was visited by the Lord's spirit and his heart filled with such joy that he could neither speak nor move," one chronicler later wrote. Continue reading

Sources

• Spiegel Online
• Image: Fine Art America