How St Francis Took On the Arms Lobby

The world loves Hollywood violence and many Americans worship guns even though those are used in increasingly frequent massacres. Fr Patrick Noonan OFM says that the adoration of weapons is nothing new — and St Francis of Assisi stood up to it.

Guns and bombs are seen by many as the solution for most problems. Guns for self-defence and getting even, and bombs for solving international political problems. Like Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza… For many people, it’s a modern malaise.

But wait! People did the same in the time of St Francis — and the 13th-century saint would be the first to tell you that. Indeed, there was a period in his life when the sword and dagger were extensions of himself, and he displayed it self-consciously whenever he sauntered into the best ale houses in Assisi. It was the time when he lived by the sword and nearly died by it too — his early life.

The powerful, “patriotic” gun lobby in the United States is of the same mind as the early Francis. With their openly displayed weapons, they remind me of some nervous whites in the apartheid era who conspicuously and publicly brandished guns.

Enter the “Wild West”. The US gun lobby reminds us, without intending to, that the Wild West — the raw rough frontiers of America, where life was cheap and violence natural — has not yet been won. They somehow tell us that the crusty pioneers of the plains are still with us and that only fools and dummies would swagger around a frontier town unarmed.

Today in the US, guns are so easily available that a high-noon shooting at Tombstone can break out at any moment in any school and church, any hospital and supermarket, any cinema or concert venue, or any place where crowds gather. Even monasteries are targeted, as it was when an old man wielding an assault rifle shot four monks, killing two, at Conception Abbey in Missouri in July 2002.

On cinematic evidence, Hollywood is still shooting down aggressive aliens, shadowy spectres in TV paranormal investigations, and weird sci-fi monsters clanging flatfooted over first-world metropolises. The culture of death by gunshot wounds is still alive and well.

To appeal to the gun lobby in the US to reduce their mortal dependence on lethal weapons is like asking Wild Bill Hicock or Billy the Kid to leave their Winchesters and six-shooters at the entrance of Deadwood in South Dakota in 1873. It could not be done. A sheriff could never enforce it. Not even that unlikely multicultural pair, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, could do it.

The Hollywood effect

The American tinsel screen has always demonstrated to us, the planet at large, that life’s problems are ultimately solved by a “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”. Or in the language of today, when the hand of our righteous hero in downtown New York is caught in a close-up camera shot, slipping into an office drawer to retrieve a little-used 9mm parabellum. As he readies the breach for action, his determined face says it all, Clint Eastwoodesque. We know the end is nigh for someone soon!

This free lesson in violent conflict resolution “impresses and inspires” criminals around the world as the American movie makes its rounds to every city, town and village on earth. Criminals living on the poor peripheries of the world love the sound of American gunfire solving everyday problems. They even copy them.

According to one recent survey, the average American child has observed 18000 fictional killings before graduating high school. In 2020, some 45000 people died in the US from the barrel of a gun, in a country where statistically every resident owns a gun.

St Francis’ subversion

In St Francis’ time, most people carried their weapons for self-defence. It was part of their dress. The sword-and-dagger lobby were happy with that arrangement; it was never questioned. Popes and clergy carried arms to war, too. They had to defend the Church and its lands and properties from marauding warriors, roaming Saracens, paid mercenaries, local warlords and foreign armies. It was taken for granted.

What a shock then when St Francis, out of the blue, told his followers not to carry arms. Period. They had nothing to defend he told them. “He must be stark raving mad,” his contemporaries and followers, many of whom were proud of their military careers, concluded. Should you lay down your arms when you should be defending the Papal States and joining the pope’s crusades?

Francis’ father reportedly went into a rage, once again. How could his son do business without proper cover, he barked? Without defensive weapons? But Francis was talking to the early friars and lay members. He was addressing another way of life, thereby undermining family and society values of the time — and nailing them into a coffin by telling the brothers in no uncertain terms not even to carry coins. He was deconstructing “the artificial levers of power and privilege” in society and in the Church.

This was the real St Francis. The quietly subversive St Francis. The undomesticated St Francis. The Francis who freed himself to be led by the spectacular promptings of the Holy Spirit. Blessed be the peacemakers!

Fr Patrick Noonan is a Franciscan priest working in the Archdiocese of Johannesburg.

This is an updated and edited extract from his book St Francis Uncensored. See a film on the book at