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The Denver Catholic Register gives more details on Chaput's remarks.

Christ's words to St. Francis, `repair my Church,' apropos for today

By Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

The archbishop's column this week is excerpted and adapted from remarks he delivered June 22 to graduates of the School for Pastoral Leadership, Archdiocese of San Francisco.

Before I was a bishop and even before I became a priest, I was a Capuchin Franciscan. The Capuchins were a reform movement within the Franciscan community. They wanted to get back to the real St. Francis: the radical, simple St. Francis. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that Francis of Assisi has always had a big place in my life. History calls Francis the vir Catolicus — the embodiment of everything a Catholic believer should be: a person filled with faith, joy, simplicity, courage, charity and zeal for Jesus Christ. Francis had all these qualities, and of course even non-Catholics remember him because of his love for animals and nature, and his witness for peace.

But what many people overlook is that Francis lived in an age very much like our own. Francis was not just a loving man. He was also a formidable one, because he had to be. The 13th century was a time of great political unrest and great confusion and corruption in the Church. Francis began his life submerged in that world. He was comfortable. He was selfish. He was shallow. But finally, he was also hungry for something more in his life — and once he found it, he pursued it without compromise. What Franciscans remember about St. Francis is his demand that we live the Gospel sine glossa — without gloss, without excuses, without interpretations to make discipleship easier or more comfortable.

Francis was a revolutionary in the truest sense. He wanted a radical commitment to holiness from his brothers, holiness in the root meaning of the word. Holy doesn't mean good, and it doesn't mean nice — although holy people are always good, and they're also frequently nice. Holy means "other than." Francis wanted to be different, as Jesus was different. Francis wanted to live in the presence of God, as Jesus did. He wanted to live and act in ways "other than" the ways of this world.

What distinguished Francis from all the other reformers of his day was one simple thing. He understood that he could never live out his love for God alone, or even with a group of friends. He needed the larger family of faith Jesus founded. So he never allowed himself or his brothers to separate the Gospel from the Church, or the Church from Jesus Christ.

Francis was always a son of the Church. And as a son, he sometimes scandalized his brothers because he always insisted on fidelity and obedience to the Holy Father and reverence for priests and bishops — even the ones whose sins meant they didn't deserve it. What Francis heard from Jesus on the Cross of San Damiano was not "replace my Church" or "reinvent my Church," but "repair my Church." And he did that in the only way that lasts — one stone at a time, with the living stones of his own life and the lives he changed through his personal witness.

If we want to be disciples and make disciples; if we want to repair the Lord's Church in the shadow of a terrible sexual misconduct scandal; we need to understand that new policies and programs and reforms in the Church will be important. We certainly need them. But without saints, nothing we do will work. Without holy men and women on fire with Jesus Christ, in love with His Church, and zealous in preaching the Catholic faith through their words and actions, nothing will work.

We can't give what we don't have. If Jesus Christ and a real Catholic identity don't burn in the interior cathedral of our hearts, we can never possibly rebuild the external life of the Church in the world.

http://www.archden.org/archbishop/docs/6_26_02_san_fran.htm

St. Francis of Assisi

St. Francis of Assisi
Feast Day: October 4, 2007
(1182-1226)

Francis of Assisi was a poor little man who astounded and inspired the Church by taking the gospel literally—not in a narrow fundamentalist sense, but by actually following all that Jesus said and did, joyfully, without limit and without a mite of self-importance.

     Serious illness brought the young Francis to see the emptiness of his frolicking life as leader of Assisi's youth. Prayer—lengthy and difficult—led him to a self-emptying like that of Christ, climaxed by embracing a leper he met on the road. It symbolized his complete obedience to what he had heard in prayer: "Francis! Everything you have loved and desired in the flesh it is your duty to despise and hate, if you wish to know my will. And when you have begun this, all that now seems sweet and lovely to you will become intolerable and bitter, but all that you used to avoid will turn itself to great sweetness and exceeding joy."
     From the cross in the neglected field-chapel of San Damiano, Christ told him, "Francis, go out and build up my house, for it is nearly falling down." Francis became the totally poor and humble workman.
     He must have suspected a deeper meaning to "build up my house." But he would have been content to be for the rest of his life the poor "nothing" man actually putting brick on brick in abandoned chapels. He gave up every material thing he had, piling even his clothes before his earthly father (who was demanding restitution for Francis' "gifts" to the poor) so that he would be totally free to say, "Our Father in heaven." He was, for a time, considered to be a religious "nut," begging from door to door when he could not get money for his work, bringing sadness or disgust to the hearts of his former friends, ridicule from the unthinking.
     But genuineness will tell. A few people began to realize that this man was actually trying to be Christian. He really believed what Jesus said: "Announce the kingdom! Possess no gold or silver or copper in your purses, no traveling bag, no sandals, no staff" (see Luke 9:1-3).
     Francis' first rule for his followers was a collection of texts from the Gospels. He had no idea of founding an order, but once it began he protected it and accepted all the legal structures needed to support it. His devotion and loyalty to the Church were absolute and highly exemplary at a time when various movements of reform tended to break the Church's unity.
     He was torn between a life devoted entirely to prayer and a life of active preaching of the Good News. He decided in favor of the latter, but always returned to solitude when he could. He wanted to be a missionary in Syria or in Africa, but was prevented by shipwreck and illness in both cases. He did try to convert the sultan of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade.
     During the last years of his relatively short life (he died at 44) he was half blind and seriously ill. Two years before his death, he received the stigmata, the real and painful wounds of Christ in his hands, feet and side.
     On his deathbed, he said over and over again the last addition to his Canticle of the Sun, "Be praised, O Lord, for our Sister Death." He sang Psalm 141, and at the end asked his superior to have his clothes removed when the last hour came and for permission to expire lying naked on the earth, in imitation of his Lord.

Comment:

Francis of Assisi was poor only that he might be Christ-like. He loved nature because it was another manifestation of the beauty of God. He did great penance (apologizing to "Brother Body" later in life) that he might be totally disciplined for the will of God. His poverty had a sister, humility, by which he meant total dependence on the good God. But all this was, as it were, preliminary to the heart of his spirituality: living the gospel life, summed up in the charity of Jesus and perfectly expressed in the Eucharist.

Quote:

"We adore you and we bless you, Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all the churches which are in the whole world, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world" (St. Francis).