A Saint Before Our Divisions: Saint Francis in Anglican and Catholic Prayer
- Fiach OBroin-Molloy
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
When I placed the first Saint Francis Catholic rosary beside the Anglican prayer beads, one question followed me to the workbench: is Saint Francis too Catholic for Anglican prayer beads?
A Catholic rosary designed for the Francis collection seemed immediately understandable. But would an Anglican set carrying the Tau cross feel equally at home—or would it seem as though I had placed a distinctly Catholic devotion into Anglican hands?
The short answer is that Saint Francis is deeply at home within Anglican Christianity. The longer answer is more interesting, because it requires neither pretending that Francis was not Catholic nor pretending that Catholic and Anglican approaches to the saints are identical.
They are not identical. The differences are real, and for some Christians they matter greatly.
Yet Francis lived before the particular division that would later separate the Church of England from Rome. He belongs to the Christian history from which both Anglican and Roman Catholic life in these islands developed. Anglicans have not merely borrowed him as an attractive medieval personality. They commemorate him in worship, sing words drawn from his Canticle of the Creatures, and continue to live a Franciscan vocation in religious communities today.
Francis does not make every disagreement disappear. He does offer a place where Christians on different sides of a later division can recognise something they received before it. Shared inheritance is not the same thing as shared practice.
Francis was Catholic—before Anglicanism existed
It would be historically false to turn Francis into a sort of Anglican before Anglicanism. He was a man of the medieval Western Church. He sought approval for his way of life from the pope, remained committed to the sacramental life of the Church and founded a movement that developed within communion with Rome.
But Francis died in 1226, more than three centuries before the English Reformation. During his lifetime, Christians in England and Francis in Italy belonged to the same Latin Church. The first Franciscan friars reached England in 1224, while Francis was still alive. From Canterbury they soon established a presence in London and Oxford, becoming part of the religious life of medieval England.
This is the limited but important meaning of calling Francis “a saint before our divisions”. Christianity was not free of division in the thirteenth century; the separation between Eastern and Western Christianity was already a reality. Francis lived, however, before the division between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. His story entered English Christian life before the word Anglican named a separate communion.
Shared inheritance does not mean neutral inheritance. Francis was not a vague spiritual figure who floated above doctrine, Church or sacrament, nor a denominational blank waiting for later Christians to colour him in. Both Catholics and Anglicans encounter a recognisably medieval Catholic saint. The point is that Anglicans encounter him as part of their own pre-Reformation Christian history too.
Francis in Anglican worship
There is a simple factual answer to the concern that Saint Francis might be “too Catholic” for Anglicans. The Church of England’s Common Worship calendar keeps 4 October as a Lesser Festival for Francis of Assisi, Friar, Deacon and Founder of the Friars Minor. It appoints Scripture readings and a collect that turns from Francis’s humility towards knowing Jesus Christ crucified. Common Worship: Daily Prayer also includes A Song of Francis of Assisi, drawn from the Canticle of the Creatures.
Here in Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church’s calendar likewise commemorates Francis of Assisi, Deacon and Friar on 4 October.
This is more than an informal admiration for his love of animals. Francis is named within the Church’s ordered life of prayer.
The wider Anglican Communion is diverse, and its provinces do not all use one identical calendar. Yet Francis is commemorated widely. Churches mark his feast, use his words in worship and draw upon his witness in work for peace, simplicity and the care of creation. The Anglican Communion’s Season of Creation, for example, concludes on 4 October, the feast of Saint Francis.
An individual Anglican may still have little personal devotion to saints. Another may come from an evangelical parish where saints are mentioned mainly as historical examples. Another may belong to an Anglo-Catholic church in which the language, images and devotions surrounding the saints feel very close to Roman Catholic practice. “Anglican” does not describe one devotional temperament.
That variety is not a reason to avoid Francis. It is a reason to speak about him carefully.
A living Anglican Franciscan family
The clearest evidence that Francis is not foreign to Anglican life is found not in a calendar but in people who have shaped their lives around his example.
The Anglican Society of Saint Francis includes First Order brothers and sisters who live in community under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The Community of Saint Clare forms its Second Order, centred especially upon contemplative prayer. The Third Order includes women and men, married and single, lay and ordained, who follow a Franciscan Rule within ordinary life, work and Christian community.
These communities are part of a modern Anglican Franciscan movement rather than an unbroken institutional survival from medieval England. Their vocation is nevertheless substantial and lived. They do not simply borrow Francis’s affection for birds or his reputation for gentleness. Their rules turn towards the more demanding centre of his life: following Jesus Christ through prayer, simplicity, service, renunciation, love and reconciliation.
The Society of Saint Francis speaks openly of its gratitude for Franciscans in other Christian communions, particularly Roman Catholic Franciscans, and of a shared vision of Christ’s love. That relationship does not require either community to deny the separation between them. It allows a common Franciscan calling to become one of the places where friendship can grow across it.
The eight-hundredth anniversary of the friars’ arrival in England made this visible in 2024. Anglican and Roman Catholic Franciscans prayed and walked together in Canterbury and London. One part of the pilgrimage moved from Morning Prayer at Anglican Southwark Cathedral to Mass at the Roman Catholic St George’s Cathedral.
They did not pretend there was only one cathedral. They walked from one to the other.
Remembering a saint and asking a saint to pray
Catholics and Anglicans can therefore honour the same saint while differing over what that honour means in prayer.
Catholic teaching understands the saints as alive in Christ and joined to the Church on earth within the communion of saints. A Catholic may ask Saint Francis to intercede in much the same spirit that one Christian asks another for prayer. The saint is not treated as divine; adoration belongs to God alone. The request is made in the belief that death does not sever the communion created in Christ.
The Catholic Catechism says plainly that the saints share in the Church’s living tradition of prayer and that Christians may ask for their intercession. For a Catholic, “Saint Francis, pray for us” is therefore an ordinary and recognisable form of Christian prayer.
Many Anglicans approach the saints differently. The Church of England’s historic Articles of Religion reject what they call the “Romish Doctrine” concerning the invocation of saints. In much Anglican worship, a saint is commemorated by addressing prayer to God: giving thanks for that life and asking for grace to follow its faithful example. Francis may be remembered, his words may be sung and his witness may shape a person’s discipleship without prayer being addressed to him.
Other Anglicans, particularly within Anglo-Catholic traditions, are comfortable asking the saints for their prayers. Anglican practice cannot honestly be compressed into a single rule observed in every parish and by every person.
The important distinction is this: an Anglican who does not invoke Saint Francis is not necessarily rejecting him, and a Catholic who asks for his intercession is not worshipping him. Both may be trying, within their own Church’s language, to let the witness of Francis direct attention towards Christ.
Two prayers, one direction
A Catholic might pray:
Saint Francis, pray for us, that we may follow Christ in humility and carry his peace.
An Anglican who does not invoke saints might pray:
God of peace, we thank you for your servant Francis. Teach us, by his example, to follow Christ with simplicity, mercy and joy.
These prayers do not say exactly the same thing. It would be unhelpful to pretend otherwise. Yet their direction is not difficult to recognise. Neither makes Francis the final destination. Both ask that a remembered life should change the life being lived now.
This is one reason Francis travels so readily across Christian boundaries. His witness is unmistakably centred upon Christ. His embrace of poverty was an attempt to follow the poor and crucified Christ. His work of repair began with a call from Christ. His greeting of peace, care for those kept at the margins and kinship with creation grew from his response to the Gospel.
Francis is not shared because he can be reduced to harmless kindness. He is shared because the life he asks Christians to look towards is the life of Jesus.
Catholic rosaries and Anglican prayer beads
The same care is needed when making devotional objects. A Catholic five-decade rosary and a set of Anglican prayer beads may both be held in the hand, but they are not interchangeable.
The Catholic Rosary has an established pattern shaped by the Our Father, the Hail Mary and meditation upon the Mysteries of Christ. A Saint Francis medal or Tau may give a particular rosary a Franciscan dedication, but the rosary itself is not a prayer addressed to Francis.
The modern 33-bead form usually called Anglican prayer beads uses a different arrangement and allows greater freedom in the prayers chosen. It may be used with Scripture, a collect, the Jesus Prayer, the Psalms or a short repeated prayer. It is not used by every Anglican and carries no single Communion-wide prescribed text. I have written a separate guide to Anglican prayer beads for readers who would like to explore that form more fully.
Bringing both forms into one Saint Francis collection should not mean blurring them. The Catholic rosaries remain recognisably Catholic. The Anglican beads do not quietly impose a Catholic invocation of Francis. Their structure leaves the person praying free to use the language of their own tradition and conscience.
The Tau cross helps hold the collection together. It is closely associated with Francis, but it points first towards the Cross of Christ. An Anglican may carry it as a Christ-centred sign shaped by Francis’s example. A Catholic may carry the same sign within a fuller devotion to Francis and ask for his intercession. The object does not have to settle the difference in order to serve prayer honestly.
Made in a shared year of remembrance
This is the spirit in which I have approached the new range: Catholic rosaries in maple and bronze or jade and antiqued brass, Anglican prayer beads in jade, a Franciscan Crown and a simple leather Tau necklace.
The forms are different because the traditions of prayer are different. Their materials and the governing Tau connect them without pretending that every person will pray with them in the same way. Each piece is specially made during the eighth centenary year of the Transitus of Saint Francis, 1226–2026.
An anniversary like this can become an occasion for claiming a saint more firmly as “ours”. Francis offers a better possibility. Catholics need not surrender the distinctly Catholic shape of his life or their belief in his intercession. Anglicans need not adopt devotions that sit uneasily with their conscience in order to receive his example. Both can meet him truthfully.
That truthfulness may itself be Franciscan. Peace is not created by pretending that differences do not exist. It begins when we no longer need difference to become hostility.
Francis lived before the separation between Canterbury and Rome. Eight centuries later, his memory remains active on both sides of it: in Catholic churches and Anglican calendars, in Roman Catholic orders and Anglican friaries, in the Rosary and in forms of prayer addressed directly to God.
He does not belong to a featureless space between traditions. He stands within the Church of his own age, pointing beyond himself to Christ. Perhaps this is precisely why Christians divided by later history can still recognise him.
At the workbench, the distinction remains visible: five decades in one hand, four weeks in another. The prayer may take a different form. The invitation beneath it is shared—to follow Christ more simply, to repair what has been broken and to carry peace.
A shared saint does not make our Churches the same. He may still help us recognise one another.
May the Lord give you peace.
Sources and further reading
Francis of Assisi in Common Worship: Lesser Festivals — The Church of England
Catechism of the Catholic Church: Guides for Prayer — The Holy See
Rosarium Virginis Mariae: On the Most Holy Rosary — The Holy See
The History of the Anglican Third Order — TSSF European Province
The 800th anniversary of the arrival of the friars in England — Society of Saint Francis
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