When Saint Francis Saved The Church Analysis

In Jon Sweeney’s lecture and book, “ When Saint Francis Saved The Church”, he spoke about Francis leading a revolutionary life. There were two points that helped support with Francis leading a revolutionary life. Those points were friendship and poverty. Sweeney spoke about how important friendship and poverty was to Francis. These points helped with Francis learning what kind of person he would be and do with his life. The first point, Sweeney spoke about was friendship. Friendship was a part of Francis leading a revolutionary life. According to Sweeney’s lecture, the beginning to the end of Francis life was based entirely on true and unique gift for friendship. During this time, we many people weren’t friends with each other like the way Francis was. There were clear and distinct lines of gender, religion and status, but Francis crossed all of these lines (Sweeney, 2014,18). He began his religious life looking to the Gospels in order to imitate the life and follow the expectations of Jesus, and through that endeavor, he discovered how to be a
Francis lived his life around poverty. He gave everything up in order to have a personal connection with God. In Sweeney’s lecture, he explains Francis view on poverty. Francis said that being poor was a sure way to understand the message. Giving away all of his belongings allowed him to focus on God. Francis thought if you owned things, then you had to protect them and if you had to protect them, you may even be tempted to use violence against someone (Sweeney, 2014, 77). Poverty was a way of discovering his identity before God. Francis thought that possessions would affect the relationship between him and God. He was a mendicant, voluntarily poor Christian who relied on the goodness of others or on Gods grace, for daily needs (Sweeney, 2014, 74). This is what Francis based his life on. He didn’t use money to buy anything but relied on God to provide for