Like many of you, I don't think St. Francis either suffered extreme poverty himself, or wanted others to do so. He founded a brotherhood whom he encouraged never to "lose connection with others", to both work and beg in order to share. His own austerity seems to me to have been a gift of penitence and love, so that, free from preoccupation with his own desires, he had more of himself, his time and his resources to share with others. On the spiritual level, Holy Poverty is a way of showing one's total surrender to God in a life of trusting dependence and obedience. St. Francis, the enemy of all injustice and oppression, did not want extreme poverty for anyone.
JPIC
