Led By a Man Singing

Stephen Schmalhofer sends this quote from G. K. Chesterton on St. Francis of Assisi, appropriate for this day, and appropriate too as the basis for a prayer for the new Holy Father:

The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.