National Register portal commentary — Matt D’Antuono’s reflection on St. Francis of Assisi’s teaching on “true joy,” published May 20, 2026, in the context of the “Year of St. Francis” proclaimed by the usurper Leo XIV. The article recounts the famous account from the *Fioretti* in which St. Francis rejects every natural notion of joy — scholarly prestige, political conversions, miraculous powers — and identifies true joy with enduring rejection, cold, hunger, and humiliation with perfect interior peace. The author applies this teaching to the modern Catholic father, suggesting that true joy would consist in facing the abandonment of the faith by one’s own family with serene trust in God. The commentary is, in itself, a rare and relatively faithful exposition of a genuine Franciscan text; yet it remains embedded within and uncritical of the conciliar apparatus that has systematically emptied such teachings of their supernatural force.
The Kernel of Truth: St. Francis Against the Religion of Comfort
Let us begin by acknowledging what is correct in this article, for even a broken clock tells the truth twice a day. Matt D’Antuono faithfully transmits the teaching of St. Francis as recorded in the *Fioretti*: “If I could meet this situation with peace and serenity, without getting upset, then I would have true joy.” This is, in substance, authentic Catholic ascetical theology. The identification of true joy with the cruciform acceptance of suffering, humiliation, and rejection — not with exterior success, emotional comfort, or worldly recognition — is as Catholic as the Cross itself.
St. Francis understood what the entire tradition confirms: “The kingdom of God suffers violence, and the violent bear it away” (Matt. 11:12). True joy, in the Catholic sense, is not a feeling but a virtue — a stable disposition of the will, rooted in charity, by which the soul rejoices in God even amid the most extreme contradictions. As St. Paul wrote from prison: “I have learned, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things in Him who strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:11–13).
The author correctly identifies the modern disease: “For us moderns, who practically worship comfort, it is next to impossible to embrace this lesson.” Indeed. The religion of comfort, of “self-care,” of emotional well-being as the highest good, is not Christianity but its precise opposite. It is the religion of the flesh, condemned by St. Paul: “For they that are of the flesh, mind the things of the flesh; but they that are of the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the wisdom of the flesh is death” (Rom. 8:5–6).
The Fatal Omission: No Mention of the Supernatural Order
And yet, for all its relative fidelity to the Franciscan text, the article commits the characteristic sin of omission that pervades every utterance of the conciliar sect: it says nothing — absolutely nothing — about the supernatural order as the necessary condition for the kind of joy St. Francis describes.
Let us be precise. The joy of St. Francis was not a psychological achievement. It was not the result of positive thinking, cognitive reframing, or “trust in God” as a vague natural disposition. It was the fruit of sanctifying grace operating in a soul in the state of grace, elevated by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and perfected by the gifts of the Holy Ghost — particularly the gift of fortitude and the gift of piety. Without these, no human being can endure rejection, cold, hunger, and humiliation with supernatural peace. The natural man, left to his own resources, will either despair or become hardened. Only the man in the state of grace, living the supernatural life, can rejoice in tribulation: “We glory also in tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, trial; and trial, hope; and hope confoundeth not, because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us” (Rom. 5:3–5).
The article speaks of “trust and surrender to Jesus” and “complete and joyful surrender inspired by the Holy Spirit,” but it never once mentions the sacraments as the ordinary means of obtaining and preserving this grace. Where is the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass? Where is Confession? Where is the doctrine that outside the true Church there is no salvation (*extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*)? Where is the teaching that the sacraments of the New Law confer grace ex opere operato — by the very performance of the rite, not by the subjective disposition of the minister or recipient?
This silence is not accidental. It is the hallmark of the post-conciliar apostasy. The conciliar sect, while occasionally permitted to quote pre-conciliar saints in a nostalgic or aesthetic key, systematically refuses to teach the doctrinal framework without which those saints’ words become mere moralism — inspiring perhaps, but salvifically useless.
The “Year of St. Francis”: A Usurper’s Patronage
The article is framed by the announcement that “Pope Leo has proclaimed the year of St. Francis.” Let us speak plainly. “Pope” Leo XIV — Robert Prevost — is not the pope. He is a usurper occupying the Vatican, the latest in a line of antipopes beginning with John XXIII, who convened the apostatical assembly known as Vatican II. He possesses no authority whatsoever to proclaim years, institute feasts, or bind the faithful in any way. His “proclamation” is a nullity — legally, morally, and spiritually void.
The true Church — the Roman Catholic Church, founded by Christ, governed by the laws He instituted, and preserved in her doctrine, worship, and governance by the Holy Ghost until at least 1958 — has no “year of St. Francis” proclaimed by this impostor. The true Church has the perennial liturgical calendar, the perennial Missal, the perennial Breviary, and the perennial teaching of the saints — all of which honor St. Francis on his proper feast day (October 4) with the proper Mass and Office, without the need for conciliar “years” designed to generate content for Catholic media and foster the illusion of continuity.
The very concept of a “year of St. Francis” proclaimed by a modernist antipope is a parody of the Church’s authentic jubilee tradition. Pope Pius XI proclaimed the Holy Year of 1925 to restore all things in Christ. Leo XIV proclaims a “year of St. Francis” to what end? To promote Franciscan joy as a psychological attitude? To generate feel-good content for the National Catholic Register? To distract the faithful from the fact that the structures occupying the Vatican are the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15)?
The Application to Family Life: Correct in Direction, Deficient in Doctrine
The author’s personal application of St. Francis’s teaching to the scenario of his wife and children abandoning the faith is, in its natural dimension, moving and not without merit. He writes: “If my wife and children all abandoned the faith and left me alone, helpless and despised, and I could receive that scorn with peace of heart and mind, maybe that would be true joy.”
The instinct is correct: the test of true charity is not prosperity but adversity, and the greatest adversity a Catholic father can face is the loss of his family — not to death, but to apostasy. This is precisely the kind of suffering Our Lord foretold: “And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son; and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. And you shall be hated by all men for My name’s sake” (Matt. 10:21–22).
But here again, the article’s deficiency is fatal. It presents this scenario as a hypothetical spiritual exercise, without once addressing the actual cause of the mass apostasy of Catholic families in our time: the conciliar revolution itself. It is not some abstract spiritual trial that is destroying Catholic families. It is the systematic destruction of the faith by the very structures that claim to represent the Church. It is the poisoned “Mass” of Paul VI, the heretical catechisms, the ecumenical syncretism, the religious liberty of Vatican II, the demolition of Catholic education, the corruption of religious orders, and the silencing of faithful priests. The abandonment of the faith by Catholic families is not a mysterious trial sent by God in the abstract; it is the direct and foreseeable consequence of the apostasy of the conciliar sect.
A truly Catholic treatment of this subject would not merely say, “If your family abandons the faith, accept it with peace.” It would say: Your family is being systematically led into apostasy by the conciliar structures, and you have a strict duty to resist this apostasy by every means available — by seeking the true Mass, the true sacraments, the true doctrine, and by separating yourself from all communion with the modernist sect. This the article does not say. It cannot say it, because it operates within the framework of the very system that is causing the apostasy it laments.
The Linguistic Register: “Gentle Image,” “Birdbath,” “Garden Gnome”
A word must be said about the tone. The article opens with a dismissive reference to “the ‘saint of the birdbath’” and closes with the phrase “the Christian garden gnome.” This is the language of the conciliar Catholic media — superficially pious, but laced with a condescension toward the saints that reveals a fundamentally naturalistic mentality. St. Francis of Assisi is not a “garden gnome.” He is a canonized saint of the Roman Catholic Church, a deacon, the founder of one of the greatest religious orders in the history of Christendom, the recipient of the stigmata — the actual, physical wounds of Christ — and a figure of such sanctity that he is called “the second Christ” (*alter Christus*) by no less an authority than Pope Pius XI.
To speak of him as a “birdbath saint” or a “garden gnome” is to reveal that the author, for all his good intentions, has not fully escaped the debased aesthetic of the conciliar era — an era in which the saints are reduced to decorative figures, their radical sanctity domesticated into something suitable for garden statuary and feel-good commentary. The true St. Francis — the man who stripped himself naked in the public square to renounce his father’s goods, who kissed lepers, who received the stigmata on Mount La Verna, who fasted for forty days on bread and water — is not a “garden gnome.” He is a warrior of Christ, and his teaching on joy is not a gentle meditation but a battle cry against the spirit of the world.
The Cross Is Extreme — But the Article Pulls Its Punches
The author writes: “St. Francis pushes us to see that the Gospel is extreme because the Cross is extreme.” This is true. But the article itself is not extreme. It does not draw the conclusions that St. Francis’s teaching demands.
If the Cross is extreme, then the Church must be extreme — extreme in her separation from the world, extreme in her condemnation of error, extreme in her demands on the faithful. The true Church, before the conciliar apostasy, was precisely this. She condemned liberalism as a mortal sin (Syllabus of Errors, prop. 77–80). She taught that the Catholic religion must be the sole religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others (Syllabus, prop. 77). She declared that the Roman Pontiff “can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” is a false and condemned proposition (Syllabus, prop. 80). She taught that error has no rights, that religious liberty is a pernicious error, and that the Church has the right and duty to use temporal power, when necessary, to protect the faith.
Does the article draw any of these conclusions? Does it say that the “joy” of St. Francis is incompatible with the conciliar doctrine of religious liberty? Does it say that the “surrender to Jesus” demanded by St. Francis requires the rejection of the entire Vatican II apparatus? Does it say that the “peace and serenity” of which St. Francis speaks is impossible without the true sacraments, which are found only outside the conciliar structures?
It does not. And in this silence lies its fundamental failure. It presents St. Francis’s teaching as a beautiful spiritual ideal, detached from the concrete doctrinal and institutional framework that alone makes it possible. It is, in the end, a conciliar article about a pre-conciliar saint — which is to say, it is an article that uses the saint to reinforce the very system that has betrayed him.
Conclusion: True Joy Requires the True Church
Let us conclude with the truth that the article approaches but never reaches. True joy, as St. Francis taught, is the fruit of perfect conformity to the will of God in the midst of extreme suffering. But conformity to the will of God is not a vague, subjective disposition. It requires the objective means of grace: the true faith, the true sacraments, the true Church.
The true Church is not the conciliar sect. The true Church is the Roman Catholic Church as she existed before the apostasy of Vatican II — the Church of the unchanging Creed, the unchanging Mass, the unchanging moral law, the unchanging social reign of Christ the King. Outside this Church, there is no salvation. Outside this Church, there are no true sacraments (or, at best, sacraments of doubtful validity administered by ministers of doubtful authority). Outside this Church, there is no true joy — only the模拟 of joy, the psychological substitute, the natural virtue that imitates supernatural charity but cannot replace it.
St. Francis knew this. He was obedient to the Pope — the true Pope, the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ. He did not seek joy in subjective experience but in objective submission to the Church. If we would have the joy of St. Francis, we must do as he did: submit to the true Church, receive the true sacraments, profess the true faith, and reject — with the same radicalism with which Francis stripped himself naked in the square — the entire edifice of the modernist apostasy.
“He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth Me, is not worthy of Me” (Matt. 10:37–38).
This is the joy of St. Francis. And it is available only in the true Church — not in the structures occupying the Vatican, not in the “Year of St. Francis” of Leo XIV, not in the commentaries of the National Catholic Register, but in the unchanging, integral, Roman Catholic faith, which endures in the faithful who profess it and in the priests who minister it, outside and against the conciliar abomination.
Source:
What St. Francis Said True Joy Really Is (ncregister.com)
Date: 20.05.2026