St. Francis and the Climate Apocalypse July 23, 2021 Philip Jenkins It would be hard to find a more universally popular figure than Francis of Assisi. Christians and non-Christians alike commonly recall him as a wonderful figure of holiness, fully in tune with the animal kingdom, and the environment. It’s odd then to recall a time when Francis was the centerpiece of what we can best call a dreaded messianic cult, which the Church suppressed with a great deal of bloodshed. This was one of the gravest political and spiritual crises that the Latin Church suffered before Luther’s Reformation itself, two centuries afterwards. And the crisis of these years often foreshadows that later revolution.