Author Weaves Mystery Around Saint and Stigmata

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) St. Francis of Assisi, painted and sculpted with a bird on his shoulder and a lamb or wolf at his feet, may be the most popular Christian saint, inside the Roman Catholic Church and out. Francis is revered as the patron saint of Italy, animals, merchants and ecologists. His […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) St. Francis of Assisi, painted and sculpted with a bird on his shoulder and a lamb or wolf at his feet, may be the most popular Christian saint, inside the Roman Catholic Church and out.

Francis is revered as the patron saint of Italy, animals, merchants and ecologists. His statue stands watch over countless parks and private gardens. Stories flourish about his humility, his poverty and his love of the natural world.


And now John Sack of Jacksonville, Ore., is telling another story about the saint so beloved by Catholics, Episcopalians and many who don’t often set foot in any church. In his new novel, “The Franciscan Conspiracy” (RiverWood Books, $24.95, 342 pages), Sack wraps a real-life mystery about the saint around a pair of love stories. He poses a controversial theory about how Francis received the stigmata, the five wounds to his hands, feet and side that parallel the wounds of the crucified Jesus. Francis is the first person outside the Bible who is said to have received them.

“There was some controversy, even in Francis’ day, about the authenticity of the stigmata,” Sack, 66, says. He came across the arguments in the 1980s as he worked on a young-adult novel about the saint. When he learned that Francis’ remains had been hidden within an Assisi church for more than 500 years and only discovered in 1818, Sack wondered why. That, he says, was the beginning of “The Franciscan Conspiracy.”

Comparisons to Dan Brown’s best-seller “The Da Vinci Code,” which readers love and the Catholic Church laments, are inevitable. But Sack says he finished his manuscript in 1994, long before Brown’s novel debuted in 2003. Sack shopped his manuscript to several publishers, who said there was no market for medieval mysteries. A publisher in Ashland, Ore., bought it, but publication was delayed until July.

As he talks about his novel, Sack, a retired technical writer, is careful to distinguish between fact and fiction. Raised a Catholic, he insists that his story is not an attack on the church, the religious orders that trace their origins to Francis or on his saintly reputation. But Sack’s book touches on the life and death of Francis, the disagreements that divided his followers, the suppression of early biographies and the doubts that arose about his stigmata.

Sack’s detective is Friar Conrad, who reluctantly leaves his hermitage to try to decode a message from his late mentor, Fra Leo, who had been a companion of Francis. Conrad’s story begins in 1271, 45 years after Francis’ death.

“Who mutilated the Companion? Whence the Seraph? The first of Tomas marks the start of blindness; the Testament sheds the first shards of light. The dead leper’s nails are crusted with truth,” Leo writes. Conrad risks everything to solve this religious riddle and, at the end of the novel, he has his own qualms about his conclusions.

“In many ways, he is me,” Sack says. “We went through the same process, weighing all the evidence.” They came to the same conclusion and the same question: If Francis’ stigmata was not the result of an encounter with God, does it damage his reputation as a saint?


Sack, at least, doesn’t think so. He agrees with another of his medieval characters, Matteus, who argues in the novel that Francis’ spiritual experience is more important than its physical manifestations.

“When an emperor rewards a soldier’s valor with some impressive token,” Matteus says, “people cheer the man. Yet the token is only a sign of the valor that earned it. … I’m more inspired by his lifetime of spiritual attainment, which even I can try to emulate, than by a stigmata forever beyond my grasp or even my imagination.”

So why were the earliest biographies of Francis suppressed, and why was his body hidden for so many years? In his novel, Sack describes how early Franciscan leaders supplanted the earliest stories with their own versions and decided to hide the remains to protect them from relic seekers.

Sack rejects what he calls “the party line,” arguing that Francis’ body was vulnerable to those who wanted to steal it between his death and its secret entombment.

“It was only after I did the research, looked into the legends, that I began to think there might have been another reason.” Sack says some church leaders wanted to cover up the real cause of the stigmata. For a while, he thought about putting his 13 “proofs” into a nonfiction article and publishing it in a Christian magazine. But members of his writing group encouraged him to write a novel that would appeal to more readers.

“All the evidence is there (in the mystery),” he says. “I’ll let the readers draw their own conclusions.”


MO/JL END HAUGHT

(Nancy Haught is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of the statue of St. Francis, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

With sidebar, RNS-STFRANCIS-HISTORY

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