Pope Francis’ trip to Assisi last Saturday to sign his new encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, was his first outside Rome since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The visit was a welcome change of scene for Francis, who has hardly left the Vatican since the lockdown was imposed in March. It also offered him a chance to escape the financial scandals that erupted again in Rome this week, and to reconnect with the heart of his pontificate.

Assisi is this papacy’s spiritual home, with Jorge Mario Bergoglio the first pope to call himself after St Francis, who was born in the Umbrian hill town. In 2013, soon after his election, the Pope travelled to Assisi on the saint’s feast day, 4 October, following in the footsteps of 18 of his predecessors. None of them, however, had visited the room in the bishop’s residence in Assisi where St Francis had stripped off all his clothes and declared before the bishop and his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, “From now on, I will no longer say ‘Father Pietro Bernardone’, but ‘Our Father who art in heaven’.”

When he visited that room almost eight years ago, the Pope was deeply touched by the famous story of St Francis’ renunciation, and later wrote to the Archbishop of Assisi, Domenico Sorrentino, saying: “I relived what Francis had lived with that prophetic gesture.” Speaking to America, the Jesuit publication, Archbishop Sorrentino says the Pope “considers this icon very important for our day, for the Church of our time”.