Two years before his death St. Francis retired to Mount Alverno where he began a forty days’ fast in honor of St. Michael the Archangel. There, while in a state of continual prayer and unceasing watching, he saw in a vision a seraph with burning, dazzling wings whose feet and hands were nailed to a cross; at the same time five wounds, like those of our Lord, appeared on Francis’ feet, hands and side; from the wound in his side blood flowed. These stigmata were so fully verified that the Franciscans, since the fourteenth century, have celebrated a feast in honor of the event; the feast was inserted in the general calendar of the Roman rite by Clement IX in 1669.