{"id":23702,"date":"2025-12-17T14:56:37","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T19:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/?p=23702"},"modified":"2025-12-17T14:56:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T19:56:52","slug":"a-sacrament-to-be-remembered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/a-sacrament-to-be-remembered\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sacrament to be Remembered"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2026 marks eight hundred years since the Transitus\u2014the passing of St. Francis of Assisi from this world to eternal life. To remember his death is to remember how he lived: utterly rooted in God\u2019s Word. Francis did not only preach the Gospel; he returned to it repeatedly, letting it shape his every action and desire. For him, remembering Christ was not a pious thought\u2014it was a way of life.<\/p>\n

As his final hours drew near, Francis asked to be carried to the little chapel of the Portiuncula, \u201cwhere he first came to know perfectly the way of truth.\u201d Seventeen years earlier, it was there that he had first understood the Gospel call to total dependence on God. To die in that same place was not an act of nostalgia but of faith: a return to the beginning, to the root of his vocation.<\/p>\n

There, rejoicing at the approach of \u201cour Sister Bodily Death,\u201d Francis asked the brothers to sing The Canticle of the Creatures once more, adding a final verse of praise \u201cfor Sister Death.\u201d The song was his last sermon. Then he asked to hear the Passion of the Lord from the Gospel, to be read aloud. The Gospel his final companion. Finally, he requested to be laid on the ground, clothed in sackcloth and ashes, and so he passed from this life, his wounds radiant, his soul seen rising \u201cbright as the sun.\u201d In him, the Word had become deed; his very body became a living sign of God\u2019s mercy\u2014a sacrament to be remembered.<\/p>\n

What made Francis radiant was not perfection but habit\u2014the steady, humble return to God through prayer, Scripture, and fraternity. He imitated Jesus by remembering Him constantly. For Francis, to remember was to belong again to God. And for us, in an age full of noise and forgetfulness, his witness could not be more timely. He reminds us that all creation, and every human life, is nestled within God\u2019s story of salvation. We are not forgotten; we are remembered into being.<\/p>\n

At our House of Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland, the friars celebrated Transitus alongside students at Archbishop Curley High School in Baltimore. In song and prayer, we re-enacted that night of 1226, with young people donning habits and walking in Francis\u2019s footsteps. My novitiate classmate, friar Vincent Mary Ouly, offered a reflection that captured it well: \u201cWe do what we believe, and we believe what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the pattern of Francis\u2019s life\u2014and it remains the pattern of our faith. We pray the Creed to remember what we believe. We celebrate the Eucharist to remember Christ\u2019s sacrifice and make it present again. We listen to Scripture to remember Who walks with us, and to rouse ourselves to walk with Him in return.<\/p>\n

To remember Francis\u2019s passing, then, is to return once more to the Word, to the living Christ who still calls us by name. In doing so, we become what we proclaim\u2014a Church that is itself a sacrament to be remembered, a sign of God\u2019s saving love for the world.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2026 marks eight hundred years since the Transitus\u2014the passing of St. Francis of Assisi from this world to eternal life. To remember his death is to remember how he lived: utterly rooted in God\u2019s Word. Francis did not only preach the Gospel; he returned to it repeatedly, letting it shape his every action and desire....","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":23705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2025-winter-newsletter-rooted-in-sacred-memory"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-29 15:47:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23704,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23702\/revisions\/23704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.franciscansusa.org\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}