Italy restores October 4 as national public holiday in honor of St. Francis of Assisi

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Italy restores October 4 as national public holiday in honor of St. Francis of Assisi
‘The national holiday will be an opportunity to celebrate an extraordinary man and remind us, every year, who we are and what unites us profoundly,’

 Italy's prime minister said.



'St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata' by Salvador Maella

Oct 3, 2025
(LifeSiteNews) — Italy will reinstate October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, as a national holiday.

“I welcome with joy and satisfaction the news of the Senate’s final approval of the parliamentary bill reintroducing, after 50 years, Oct. 4, the day on which we celebrate St. Francis, the patron saint of Italy, as a national holiday,” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni commented.

Next year, 2026, will be the first year since 1976 that St. Francis’ feast day is honored as a national holiday in Italy. The holiday was scrapped in 1977 to boost the country’s productivity during a time of economic crisis.

Italy’s lower house overwhelmingly supported the measure by a 247-2 vote, and the Senate Constitutional Affairs Committee approved the bill on October 1.

Stefania Proietti, president of the Umbria Region, told 24 Ore that it is “very rare, perhaps unique, to have the unanimity of all the political forces for a law.”

“Saint Francis embodies those values in which our country says it recognizes itself,” she added.

Meloni said the unanimous support for the bill is “an important sign” that political unity in Italy can be found in “one of the most representative and distinctive figures of (our) national identity.”

“A saint beloved by the entire Italian people and in whom all Italians identify. The national holiday will be an opportunity to celebrate an extraordinary man and remind us, every year, who we are and what unites us profoundly,” Meloni said.

The reinstated holiday was reportedly petitioned by poet and writer Davide Rondoni, president of the national committee for the celebrations of the eighth centenary of the death of St Francis of Assisi.

“St. Francis makes everyone want to live more,” Rondoni told 24 Ore. The national holiday in his honor “is a sign to call everyone to give the best of themselves,” because St. Francis “is a great witness to life.”

“Having patron saints in heaven reminds everyone that there are no patron saints on earth and there must not be,” Rondoni stressed.

Lay and religious figures, such as Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, are invoking St. Francis in support of a “love for creation” and a “fraternal, unarmed world,” which are goods when rightly ordered. However, these ideas are often exploited to further a disordered “theology” or political ideology in which the primacy of God is downplayed or ignored, or individual human rights are subordinated to ecological concerns or a vaguely defined “common good.”

In fact, Zuppi specifically invoked this idea of the common good, writing that St. Francis’ “life and work can inspire political love and love for creation, so that the common good prevails over speculative logic and the logic of the strongest, over partisan interests and polarization.”

St. Francis of Assisi was a model of a true and deep love of neighbor that desired the best possible good for him: Living in the fullness of the truth so that he may have eternal life with God.

Thus, he was not a “Birkenstock-clad hippie, a Peace Corps social worker, or an effeminate tofu-eating Green Party activist,” as he is portrayed by the secular, Dr. Philip Blosser noted. He was not about dialogue for “the sake of mutual understanding” but sought to convert others to Christ, including Muslims.

As Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò put it in a sermon on St. Francis’ feast day in 2023:

He was a young runaway who understood how the goods of this world were a hindrance toward holiness, and who chose to unite himself to Lady Poverty … living the evangelical counsels in the Rule of the Seraphic Order. Francis was thus poor, of that holy poverty which is neither miserable nor abject, but noble and proud, because it is confident of the help of Providence.

He was a tireless preacher of the Gospel. In 1219 he went as far as Cairo, to the court of al-Malik al-Kamil: on that occasion he wished to face the trial by fire to demonstrate the truth of the Catholic Faith and persuade the Sultan to convert and desist from fighting the Christians engaged in the Fifth Crusade.

St. Francis was a promoter of the decorum and dignity of the Liturgy. In his writings we read a thousand recommendations on the respect and adoration due to the Blessed Sacrament, and we know that he spared nothing to purchase pyxes and sacred vessels to donate to poor churches…His veneration for the Ministers of the Most High was such that it led him to refuse to receive the Priesthood considering himself unworthy of it.

In short, Francis was the heroic example of those virtues that in an age of crisis and war would reform the Holy Church.

Viganò continued:

In what, then, was St. Francis “the most Italian of Saints, the holiest of Italians”? We can say that he was the most Italian of Saints, because in him was shown that temperament proper to our people, made up of serene charity towards the poorest and the needy, that charity that so many Orders and Congregations have seen born over the centuries under the breath of the Holy Spirit.

A character made up of charity and love for God, of solid and unblemished Faith, of daily witness by example. In Francis we also find that unshakable certainty in the eternal Truths, of that Rome where Christ is Roman (Par XXXII, 102) that still survives in our people despite the devastating action of the modernist hierarchy.

He was also the holiest of Italians, for his life was an example and model of true humility, of holy poverty, of total abandonment to God and in God, to the point of receiving the Sacred Stigmata that assimilated him even in the flesh to the Passion of the Lord. He bore on himself the signs of the infinite Charity of Christ, before which every earthly good, every wealth, every pleasure disappears and is annihilated, and has a meaning only if oriented to the Good and to eternal salvation.