Franciscans

• 1. Introduction

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  In the year 1209, a young man from Assisi walked barefoot into the hills of Umbria, wearing a rough peasant's tunic, singing. Francis of Assisi was the son of a rich cloth merchant, and he had recently given away everything he owned. He had severed ties with his family, renounced the comfortable world of the wealthy classes his father called the majori, and chosen instead to live among the poor, the minori. His followers called themselves the Friars Minor, literally the Order of Lesser Brothers, a name that was itself a declaration of intent. Within a year of his first sermon on the text of Matthew 10:9, Francis had eleven companions living with him in a deserted leper colony at Rivo Torto near Assisi. Within the century following his death, the movement he started would reach into every corner of Europe, the Middle East, and eventually the Americas. The questions are worth sitting with: how did an order built on radical poverty survive, and even thrive, when its own founder could not resolve the tension between his original vision and the ambitions of a growing institution? And what does it mean that this movement, born in the rejection of wealth and hierarchy, would end up at the center of some of the most bitter theological and political battles of the medieval church?

• 2. The Founder's Vision

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  Bernard of Quintavalle was a prominent townsman in Assisi, and he was among the first to join Francis, contributing all that he had. The brothers were not enclosed in a monastery; they traveled through the mountainous districts of Umbria, preaching in the streets, always cheerful, their life described as extremely ascetic. The Rule Francis wrote for them in 1209 was drawn largely from passages of Scripture, emphasizing the duty of poverty. They were to beg for food while preaching, own no property, and sleep in church buildings where they were offered shelter. The austerity was a deliberate imitation of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. When Francis traveled to Rome in 1209 to seek Pope Innocent III's approval, what seems to have impressed first the Bishop of Assisi, then Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo, and finally the pope himself was not any elaborate theology but the group's utter loyalty to the Catholic Church and its clergy. The account in Matthew Paris describes the pope initially sending the shabby saint away to keep swine before recognizing his worth by his ready obedience. Whether or not the story is accurate, it captures the tension: the older Benedictine monasticism viewed these plebeian mendicant wanderers with instinctive suspicion. Pope Innocent likely also saw in them a potential preaching force against heresy, which may explain his practical willingness to approve them. Francis was ordained as a deacon at this time, which allowed him to proclaim Gospel passages and preach in churches during Mass. Clare of Assisi, under Francis's guidance, then founded the Poor Clares on Palm Sunday in 1212, establishing what would become the Second Order.

• 3. Poverty as a Battlefield

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  By 1219, the order had grown large enough to fracture. While Francis traveled to Egypt with the Fifth Crusade to meet Sultan Malik al-Kamil, two vicars-general he had left in charge introduced stricter regulations on fasting and alms that departed from the original rule's spirit. On his return, Francis suppressed that insubordinate tendency quickly. A different problem proved harder to contain. Elias of Cortona began pushing for greater worldly standing for the order and closer alignment with the plans of the church hierarchy. This conflicted directly with what Francis had built. Francis eventually resigned the day-to-day running of the order in 1219, asking Pope Honorius III for help and receiving Cardinal Ugolino as protector. He retained the power to shape legislation, writing a rule in 1221 and revising it to a final form approved in 1223. That final revision relaxed the most extreme poverty requirements. The conflict it represented would outlast Francis himself. After his death, Elias, who was elected as leader of the friars in 1232, planned and built the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, where Francis is buried. Brother Leo, described as Francis's closest companion in his last years and the author of a sharp polemical text called the Speculum perfectionis, protested openly against collecting money for the basilica's construction and broke apart the marble offertory box Elias had placed outside it. Elias had Leo flogged. That act of violence against Francis's dearest disciple consolidated the opposition to Elias, and at a chapter held in May 1227 he was rejected in favor of Giovanni Parenti, the Minister Provincial of Spain.

• 4. Theological War Over Possessions

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  Pope Nicholas III's bull Exiit qui seminat of the 14th of August 1279 tried to settle the question of Franciscan poverty by declaring that all property given to the Franciscans was vested technically in the Holy See, with the friars granted only the use of it. The bull even declared the renunciation of ownership to be meritorious and holy, and explicitly banned disputation of its own contents. The ban failed. By the time Pope John XXII came to power in 1316, the battle had become a genuine theological crisis. The Spirituals, who took their name from the age of the Spirit that the mystic Joachim of Fiore had said would begin in 1260, contended that Christ and his apostles had possessed nothing whatsoever, either individually or in common. The Franciscan chapter held in Perugia in May 1322 declared this view not heretical but true and catholic. John XXII replied on the 8th of December 1322 with the bull Ad conditorem canonum, declaring it absurd to pretend that every scrap of food eaten by a friar technically belonged to the pope, and refusing to accept future ownership of Franciscan goods on the Holy See's behalf. He then issued the bull Quum inter nonnullos on the 12th of November 1323, declaring the doctrine that Christ and his apostles owned nothing to be erroneous and heretical. Sixty-four Spirituals were summoned to Avignon; four of them were burned in 1318 for refusing submission. Prominent Franciscans including the minister general Michael of Cesena and the English philosopher William of Ockham fled to the protection of Louis of Bavaria, who in January 1328 entered Rome and had himself crowned emperor before declaring John XXII deposed and installing the Spiritual Franciscan Pietro Rainalducci as antipope. By 1330, however, the antipope had submitted, and Michael of Cesena followed before his death. Only a small part of the order had joined the rebellion.

• 5. Spreading Across the World

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  Caesar of Speyer, the first German provincial, set out from Augsburg in 1221 with twenty-five companions to win the regions of the Rhine and the Danube. In 1224, Agnellus of Pisa led a small group of friars to England. Beginning at Canterbury, the ecclesiastical capital, they moved to London and then to Oxford, and from those three bases expanded swiftly to the principal towns of England. The branch became known as the greyfriars, a name that eventually entered English popular culture so thoroughly that the fictional schools in the works of William Makepeace Thackeray and the Billy Bunter stories took it as their name. In the Holy Land, the Franciscan presence began in 1217 with the establishment of the province of Syria. By 1229, a small friary stood near the fifth station of the Via Dolorosa. In 1342, Pope Clement VI formally declared the Franciscans the official custodians of the Holy Places in the name of the Catholic Church, a custodianship that remains in force today. The mission to New Spain began in 1523, when three Flemish friars reached the central highlands of Mexico. In May 1524, the group known as the Twelve Apostles of Mexico arrived, led by Martin de Valencia, and built the Convento Grande de San Francisco, which served as Franciscan headquarters in New Spain for the next three centuries. Friars including Bernardino de Sahagun and Alonso de Molina created texts in Nahuatl to aid the evangelization of Mexico, preserving indigenous language material that would become invaluable to later historians.

• 6. Art, Learning, and Stigmata

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  Alexander of Hales was teaching at the University of Paris when the Franciscans arrived there, and his presence helped establish what would become a deep connection between the order and scholastic philosophy. In 1257, through the intervention of papal envoys who threatened the university authorities with excommunication, the degree of doctor of theology was finally granted to both the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure. Bonaventure then governed the order from 1257 to 1274 and collected its legislation into the Constitutions of Narbonne, ratified by the chapter at Narbonne, France, in 1260. Three years later, the chapter at Pisa approved Bonaventure's Legenda maior as the sole authorized biography of Francis and ordered all previous biographies destroyed. The Franciscan movement shaped Italian art during the same period. Though Cimabue and Giotto were not themselves friars, they were described as spiritual sons of Francis in the wider sense. The Italian Gothic style's earliest important monument is the great convent church at Assisi, built between 1228 and 1253. Roger Bacon, called the Doctor of Wonders, was a Franciscan. So was John Duns Scotus. Francis himself had written the Canticle of the Creatures, an expression of his view that the natural world was good and joyous, a perspective that would shape Franciscan theology's distinctively positive view of creation. Among reported physical phenomena within the order, Francis himself was one of the earliest documented cases of stigmata. Padre Pio, a Capuchin, reported wounds that persisted for over fifty years and were examined by multiple physicians in the twentieth century, beginning with Luigi Romanelli, chief physician of the City Hospital of Barletta, in 1919.

• 7. A Movement That Keeps Dividing

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  The Capuchin branch of the Franciscans was founded in 1525 by Matteo Serafini, an Observant friar who felt called to an even stricter observance than the one his own order practiced. The Capuchins grew rapidly in Italy and after 1574 spread across Europe and the world, eventually becoming a separate order in 1619. Their name refers to the particular shape of the long hood, or capuce, that they wore. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Observantist branch alone numbered 1,400 houses, nearly half the entire order. Pope Leo XIII attempted to consolidate several smaller branches in 1897 into one Order of Friars Minor, and the combined body grew from that date to reach a peak of 26,000 members in the 1960s before declining after the 1970s. The 2013 Annuario Pontificio counted nearly 12,500 members of the Order of Friars Minor, nearly 4,000 Conventuals, and over 10,000 Capuchins. Outside the Catholic Church, Anglican Franciscan communities emerged from the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century; the Society of Saint Francis for men was founded in 1934. Lutheran Franciscan orders exist as well, including one established in 2006 in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. The Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, an academic society based in Jerusalem and Hong Kong, produced through the forty-year labor of Gabriele Allegra the first complete translation of the Catholic Bible into Chinese, completed in 1968. That effort traced its inspiration to a young Allegra attending, at age twenty-one, a celebration marking the six-hundredth anniversary of Giovanni di Monte Corvino, a Franciscan who had attempted a first Chinese biblical translation in Beijing in the fourteenth century.