Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio
A bedtime story about Saint Francis of Assisi and the hungry wolf that frightened the town of Gubbio, told the way the old Little Flowers of Saint Francis tells it, with a note for grown-ups on what is history and what is legend. For ages 3 to 8, about ten minutes read aloud. His feast day is the 4th of October.
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A long time ago, in a country called Italy, there was a town called Gubbio. It sat on the side of a green hill, with a stone wall all around it, and woods all around the wall.
Gubbio was a good town. It had bakers, and bell-ringers, and a market on Saturdays, and children who played in the square.
But one year, Gubbio had a problem.
The problem lived in the woods. It was big, and grey, and hungry, and it had very sharp teeth.
The problem was a wolf.
Now, I will tell you how the old story goes. It is a very old story. Grown-up friends of Saint Francis wrote it down many years after he died, and they said it was told in Gubbio. I cannot promise you that every bit of it happened just so. But it is a good story, and it has a good thing in it, so I will tell it to you anyway.
The wolf was so hungry that it crept out of the trees at night and ate the farmers' sheep. Then, the old story says, it grew bolder and frightened the people, too.
So the farmers stopped going out to their fields. The shepherds stopped taking their sheep up the hill. And the people of Gubbio began to carry big sticks whenever they went outside the wall, and they locked their gates when the sun went down.
Click, went the gates. Click, click, click.
And all night long, from the dark woods, they could hear it.
Owooooo.
Then one day, a man came walking up the road to Gubbio. He was small, and thin, and he wore a plain brown robe tied with a rope. His shoes were old. He had no sword and no stick. He was smiling.
His name was Francis, and he came from a town called Assisi, not far away. Francis loved God, and he loved everything God had made: the sun, the moon, the wind, the water, the birds in the sky, and the animals on the ground. He called them his brothers and his sisters.
The people of Gubbio were glad to see him. They gave him bread and a bowl of soup and told him all about the wolf.
Francis listened. He listened for a long time. And then he said, "I will go and talk to Brother Wolf."
"Talk to him?" said the people. "Oh, Father Francis, please don't! He will eat you!"
"I think he is only hungry," said Francis. "God made him, too."
And he got up from the table and went to the gate.
The people followed him as far as they dared. They stood by the wall, very close together, and watched him walk away down the road toward the dark trees, all by himself, with his hands open and nothing in them.
Francis walked into the woods.
It was very quiet there. The leaves rustled. A twig snapped.
And then, out from between two trees, came the wolf.
It was bigger than a dog and bigger than a sheep. Its fur was grey and rough. Its mouth was open, and its eyes were yellow, and it was running straight at Francis.
Francis did not run. He did not shout. He lifted his hand and made the sign of the cross, the way we do when we pray. And he said, kindly and clearly:
"Come here, Brother Wolf. In the name of Christ, I tell you: do not hurt me, and do not hurt anyone."
And the wolf stopped.
It closed its mouth. It walked up to Francis slowly, slowly, with its head low. And it lay down at his feet, like a very large, very tired dog.
"Brother Wolf," said Francis, "you have done wrong. You have frightened the people, and you have eaten what belongs to them. I know why. You were hungry. Being hungry is a hard thing, and I am not cross with you for it."
The wolf looked up at him.
"But the people are afraid, and they are angry, and they would like to hurt you back. This must stop. So I will make you a promise. If you will stop frightening Gubbio, the people will feed you every day for as long as you live, and no dog will chase you, and no one will lift a stick against you. You will never be hungry again. Will you promise to be a friend to the town?"
And now the old story says that the wolf did something wonderful.
It lifted up its great right paw. And it put it in Francis's hand, as if to say, yes.
Francis shook the paw, and he laughed. "Good," he said. "Now come with me."
So Francis walked back up the road to Gubbio, and the wolf walked beside him, as quietly as a lamb.
The people were standing by the wall with their sticks. When they saw the wolf, they gasped. Somebody dropped a stick. Clatter.
Francis led the wolf right into the middle of the town, into the square where the children played on Saturdays, and all the people crowded round.
"Listen, my friends," said Francis. "Brother Wolf has come to make peace with you. He is sorry he frightened you. He promises not to hurt anyone again. And you must promise, too: that you will feed him, every day, so he is not hungry."
The people looked at one another. Then an old baker stepped forward. "We promise," he said. "We will."
And the wolf bowed its head, and put its paw in Francis's hand once more, while everyone watched.
The old story says that the wolf lived in Gubbio for two more years. It went from door to door, and the people gave it scraps and bones and crusts of bread, and it never hurt anybody. The children were not afraid of it. The dogs did not bark at it. And when the wolf grew old and died, the old story says, the people of Gubbio were sad, because they had come to love it.
And the gates of Gubbio, which used to say click, click, click every night, stayed open a little longer.
That is the story.
Do you know what I think it is about? I think it is about being hungry, and about being afraid. The wolf was hungry, and so it did a frightening thing. The people were afraid, and so they wanted to do a hurting thing. And Francis did not pretend that nobody had done anything wrong. He told the wolf plainly that it had. But he did not hate anybody. He asked the wolf what it needed, and he asked the town to share. And then there was enough, and nobody had to be afraid.
Francis lived for some years more. He had been a rich man's son, but he chose to be poor, and he never wanted to be rich again. He made friends with the poor, and he looked after people who were ill, and he sang. He wrote a song, in the ordinary words of his own language, praising God for Brother Sun and Sister Moon, for Brother Wind and Sister Water, and even for Sister Death, who comes for all of us in the end. And when he died, he was only about forty-four.
Today we call him Saint Francis of Assisi. His special day is the fourth of October, when many churches bless people's pets. And now you know why.
Goodnight, little lamb.
A prayer to say together
Saint Francis of Assisi,
you loved the sun and the moon,
the birds and the wind and the water,
and every creature God made.
Help me to be gentle with animals
and kind to people who frighten me.
Help me to share what I have.
And watch over me tonight,
and everyone I love.
Amen.
For grown-ups: what is true in this story
Saint Francis of Assisi is one of the best-documented saints of the Middle Ages. He was born in Assisi in about 1181 or 1182, the son of a cloth merchant, and gave up his family's wealth to live in poverty and preach the Gospel. He founded the Franciscan Order, which Pope Honorius III approved in 1223. He is the author of the Canticle of the Creatures (also called the Canticle of Brother Sun), written in Umbrian Italian. He died on 3 October 1226, aged about 44, and was canonised by Pope Gregory IX in 1228, less than two years later. Pope Saint John Paul II named him patron of ecology in 1979. His feast day is 4 October, and many parishes bless pets on or near it.
The wolf of Gubbio is a legend. It comes from the Fioretti (The Little Flowers of Saint Francis), a collection of stories about Francis and his first companions, written in Italian in the late fourteenth century, roughly a hundred and fifty years after his death. It does not appear in the earliest biographies of Francis. Historians do not know whether it grew from a real event, such as a dangerous wolf and a peace brokered with the townspeople, or whether it was always a parable. We have therefore told it in this story as an old tale ("the old story says"), not as history, and we have kept to the Fioretti's outline: the frightened town, the unarmed saint, the handshake, the promise to feed the wolf, and the wolf's two years in Gubbio. The Fioretti gives no date, so neither do we.
Details like the sign of the cross, the baker and the dropped stick, and the closing thoughts about hunger and fear are our own colour and our own reflection, not from the source. In keeping with Catholic teaching, the wolf does not "pray" or "convert": the old story is about peace between people and creatures, and the saint, not the wolf, is the one who prays.
This story was written by Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, for the Little Lamps collection. It is not an official Church text. Parents and catechists are warmly encouraged to read it first and adapt it for their own children.