Carlo CARRETTO, I, Francis: 40th Anniversary Edition. (Robert A. Barr, trans.) Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2022. xx + 139 pages, pbk, $18.00. ISBN ‎ 978-1-6269-8478-3. Reviewed by Thomas SIMMONS, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069.

In his biography of Francis of Assisi, G.K. Chesterton observed that there were three possible approaches to the topic. One: The author may attempt a story of the saint purged of God; as a secular history of great man. Two: The author may write a biography which is both theologically enthusiastic and defiantly devotional, while it adheres closely to Saint Francis as Saint Francis understood himself and his medieval world. Three: The author may write from a present-day viewpoint as a sympathetic outsider.

The first approach, Chesterton concluded, would be like undertaking the biography of a North Pole explorer without mentioning the North Pole; that is, it would be unintelligible. The second presented only one difficulty; that it was impossible. The third was the one selected by Chesterton. And it is also the one selected by Carlo Carretto PFE (1910-1988), an Italian religious who was vigorously pursued social activism and opposed fascism before taking his vows and relocating to the Algerian desert.

I, Francis – as the title suggests – is told in the first person. It is an imagined autobiographical account. Thus, one might suspect, the approach of the author would follow the first one described by Chesterton: telling the life experiences of Saint Francis from his own 13th century perspective. But, as Chesterton surmised, such an approach would be unintelligible (unless the author relied on extensive footnoting or other tricks) since Francis’ authentic viewpoints would be too untranslatable.

Instead, Carretto’s imagined auto-biography adopts Chesterton’s third approach – telling the story of the saint from the same stance as its readers; that is, from a contemporary perspective. He does so by allowing the saint to pen his own memoirs in the present day. Thus, the slim book begins: “I was born in Assisi, in Italy, eight hundred years ago. And eight centuries later I still remember a thing or two” (1).

Carretto concedes that his reimagining of the saint necessarily includes something of himself, the author. He acknowledges: “I was tempted to call this little volume My Francis, and this would surely have been more precise” (114). Perhaps the saint who emerges from the pages is a touch more Carretto than Francis, such as when he claims, “I admire Che Guevara” (28).

Nevertheless, this is undeniably a charmed and a charming tale told with a slightly modern vibe. It reaches its heights in the narrator’s description of Saint Clare of Assisi (a modernist herself, as the patron saint of television). It reaches its greatest depths when Francis relates his stigmata: “Now I understood why the world was so strange to me when I had not yet experienced this adventure or felt this fire. But I also understood that everyone, and everything, would be saved” (104).  
Forty years after its initial publication, Carretto’s book remains an excellent introduction to Saint Francis of Assisi.