What is it about Francis of Assisi which attracts the loonies and the heretics?

Pope Francis has made his namesake the saintly patron of the Amazonian Synod. Why? Could it be because he is rapidly being transformed into a heavenly proponent of ecology? (A medieval Greta Thunberg; but then so in a sense is Greta Thunberg). An exemplar of ecumenism? A pioneer of dialogue with Islam and so with other religions?

None of this is defensible from a sober account of the life of the man from Assisi. Francis was, above all a man of his age, understandably innocent of the modish concerns of the twentieth century. It insults him to link his name with the syncretistical junketings which recently invaded the Vatican gardens.