Frances–it’s hard not to read of her life and feel that she was a deeply troubled woman and yet another onewhose extreme behavior in secreting and tormenting herself was held up as virtuous as a way to overwrite a history of sexual abuse, instead perpetuating a very twisted notion of what sacrifice and godly living mean.
As a child in Rome of the late 1300s, Frances was so pious and so pure, according to Butler, “that she would not suffer [allow] her own father to touch even her hands, unless covered.” Not only this, but by age 11, Frances begged her parents to be allowed to enter a convent. Instead, her parents married her off. Yes, age 11. What happened in that home that Frances did not want her father to so much as touch her hands, wanted to be anywhere but home, and was sent to be some man’s child bride–all by age 11? These dots are not difficult to connect.
As a wife? Frances fell sick almost immediately. She did not socialize. She found no joy in anything but “prayer, meditation, and visiting churches.” Frances scrupulously obeyed her husband, available at any time to his beck and call, denying him nothing…so much so that “for forty years that they lived together, there never happened the least disagreement”–clearly, Frances having no will of her own. She and her husband got along so well that “she was permitted by him to inflict on her body what hardships she pleased.” So her gracious husband allowed Frances to become anorexic, to cut her flesh with hooks, to drink what little water she took from a skull (you read that right), and to severely punish whatever part of her body she felt had sinned (such as sharply biting her tongue if she felt she spoke amiss). At some point in their marriage, they agreed to stop having sexual relations (it’s chalked up to her husband’s godly continence), and so Frances used this freedom to begin an order of nuns where she took upon herself the lowliest of tasks until her dying day.
Not surprisingly, “St. Frances prayed only for children that they might be citizens of heaven”–rather than, I should imagine, slaves of their own earthly homes.