The Poverty of Riches

Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. The unusually high regard with which he is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: sanctity based first and foremost on his deliberatepursuit of poverty. In this book, Kenneth Baxter Wolf takes a fresh look at Francis and the idea of voluntary poverty as a basis for Christian perfection. Wolf's point of departure is a series of simple but hitherto unasked questions about the precise nature of Francis's poverty: How did he go abouttransforming himself from a rich man to a poor one? How successful was this transformation? How did his self-imposed poverty compare to the involuntary poverty of those he met in and around Assisi? What did poor people of this type get out of their contact with Francis? What did Francis get out ofhis contact with them?...

First sentence: Sometime in September 1226, only a few weeks before he died, a blind and bedridden Francis dictated his Testament, in which he recalled the circumstances that had led to his conversion some two decades before.

Year

2003

Language

English

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Editions

3

Pages

176

ISBN

9780195158083

Data source: Wikidata