Faith & Spirit Quote by Francis of Assisi

Sin is doing double duty here: it’s confession and credential. Francis doesn’t polish his origin story into saintly inevitability; he drags the mess to the front of the sentence. “All things unholy” is deliberately sweeping, less a factual inventory than a rhetorical scorched earth. It collapses the distance between the revered and the ordinary by refusing the reader a comfortable category like “minor youthful mistakes.” The shock is the point. He wants you to feel how far the arc of transformation can bend.

The second line pivots from self-indictment to theology as argument. “If God can work through me” frames Francis not as the hero but as the medium, an instrument whose value is precisely his unworthiness. That’s the subtext: grace isn’t a merit badge, it’s a kind of divine opportunism. God chooses compromised people not in spite of their flaws, but because their change is legible. The “anyone” is both invitation and rebuke - a dismantling of spiritual elitism, including the church’s temptation to treat holiness as an aristocracy of the pure.

Context matters. Francis was born into wealth, chased status, and only later embraced radical poverty and public humility. In a medieval world obsessed with hierarchy and reputational purity, this is a blunt democratization of sanctity. The line functions like a spiritual pressure test: if you still think you’re too broken, you’re clinging to pride. If you think you’re above needing help, same problem.