Patron Saint of Animals

Why St. Francis of Assisi?

Francis is the rare case where the popular image and the historical man broadly agree. He genuinely did address creatures as brother and sister, and he meant it as theology rather than sentiment: if God is Father, then everything God made stands in some relation to everything else God made. His Canticle of the Creatures extends that to the sun, the moon, wind, water, fire, and finally to death itself. The patronage is unusually well founded in official terms too. In 1979 Pope John Paul II formally named him patron of those who promote ecology, which is why his name attaches to environmental questions as readily as to pets. What is often lost is how uncomfortable the rest of his life was. The man who preached to birds also stripped in a public square to renounce his father’s wealth, embraced a leper when he was still repelled by leprosy, and walked into a sultan’s camp during a crusade to talk rather than fight. The gentleness toward animals is one visible edge of something much harder. For specific animals, other saints are traditionally invoked: St. Roch for dogs and St. Gertrude of Nivelles for cats.

Who was St. Francis of Assisi?

Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone was born about 1181 in Assisi, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, and spent his youth as the kind of young man his money allowed him to be. He went to war against Perugia, was captured, and came home after a year in a cell and a long illness a different person.

The break with his father was public and total. Summoned before the bishop over money he had given away, he stripped off his clothes in the square and handed them back, and lived from then on with nothing. What followed was not a plan: men began joining him, and the rule he wrote for them was so severe that Rome hesitated to approve it.

He preached to birds, which everyone remembers, and he also walked through a crusading army into the camp of the Sultan al-Kamil to talk rather than fight, which almost nobody does. In 1224, on Mount La Verna, he received the stigmata, the first recorded case. He died two years later at forty-four, having asked to be laid on the bare ground.

The feast: October 4

October 4, and in most parishes it is the day of the blessing of animals. People bring dogs, cats, rabbits, the occasional horse, and the priest blesses each one. It is one of the few days in the year when a church is full of noise nobody minds. The Transitus, a vigil marking his death on the evening of the 3rd, is kept in Franciscan houses.

How to ask their intercession

Many parishes hold a blessing of animals on or near October 4, and you can simply bring the animal. For a sick or dying pet, ask plainly. The Church has never treated grief over an animal as a lesser grief, and nothing about asking is inappropriate.