History of the Franciscan Order

It would be presumptuous to imagine writing an 800 year plus history of the Franciscan Order in a few paragraphs. The only reason for doing so is to present a very general picture of the long history of the Franciscan Order especially for beginners who are not yet acquainted with this theme or who have never read anything about Franciscan life.

Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1182 in the medieval town of Assisi, in the region of Umbria, central Italy, was the son of a rich merchant and Pica, who Pietro had married and brought over from Picardy. It was Pica who gave him the name Giovanni in baptism, only to be changed by his father to Francesco, on his return from a successful business in France. Francis was born at a time when the feudal system was collapsing in the face of the emerging middle class of merchants. Assisi was divided between the majores or boni homines, members of the nobility, bishops and monks, and the minores or homines populi, the middle class merchants. At the bottom line were the crowds of poor peasants who lived a life of serfdom. Civil strife was rampant as well as petty wars between cities, such as Perugia, which supported the Guelfs, the party of the Pope, and Assisi, which was predominantly Ghibelline, supporting the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1202 the two towns fought a battle in Collestrada in which the young Francis participated and was made prisoner. Ransomed by his father he returned to Assisi a sick young man. After he recovered Francis tried to join the forces of Guatier de Brienne in Apulia in order to become a knight, but only arrived in Spoleto where, after a strange dream, and maybe due to home sickness, he soon returned to his native Assisi. It was during this period that he began to experience a profound change. The company of friends and night-time partying was soon transformed in long moments of solitude and soul-searching in the countryside around Assisi. In 1205 Francis met a leper close to the leper hospice of San Lazzaro d’Arce below Assisi, gave him alms and embraced him. In 1206, in the half-ruined church of San Damiano, Francis heard a voice coming from the Byzantine Crucifix inviting him to repair that church. He immediately set out to work to repair churches. This brought him in conflict with his father, and in front of Bishop Guido of Assisi Francis renounced his possessions and gave them back to his father in order to live as an oblate at San Damiano. He also repaired another church in the plain below Assisi, dedicated to the Virgin Mary of the Angels in the place known as Porziuncola. After some months other young men joined Francis, among whom the nobleman Bernardo da Quintavalle. After the group had grown to twelve brothers Francis decided to go to Rome and ask for the approval of the new fraternity from Pope Innocent III. The Pope granted oral approval of the first form of life of the brotherhood in 1209. That was when the Order of friars Minor was born. Francis sent his brothers to evangelize, two by two, according to the pattern of the Gospel way of life of Christ and the Apostles. He himself tried to go to evangelize the Muslims in Spain and in the Holy Land, but his efforts did not succeed. In the night of Palm Sunday of 1212 a young noble lady from Assisi, Clare of Offreduccio, joined Francis and his fraternity at the Porziuncola and consecrated herself to Christ. Francis sent her to the Benedictine nuns, but then gave her and her sisters the church and convent of San Damiano. Thus the Second Franciscan Order was born, the Order of the Poor Ladies of San Damiano, later on to become the Poor Clares. In 1215 Francis took part in the Fourth Lateran Council which organised a new crusade to the Holy Land. The year 1217 marked a turning point in the new fraternity. The brothers were sent to evangelize in Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, North Africa, Greece and the Holy Land, and the Order was organised in Provinces, or entities of itinerant brothers, under the leadership of Ministers and Custodes. In 1219 Francis himself went to the Holy Land where the Crusaders were beseiging Damietta in Egypt. There he preached peace and was even welcomed by Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil of Egypt, who gave him permission to visit the Holy Places. The brothers were already present in the crusader town of Acre. Back in Italy in 1220 Francis decided to renounce to the leadership of the Order in favour of Pietro Cattani, who died on 10 March 1221, to be succeeded by Elias of Cortona. During the same year the brothers celebrated a general chapter at the Porziuncola in which they approved the Rule of 1221. The Pope did not confirm this Rule, but in 1223 Francis, together with Brother Leo of Assisi, his closest companion, and with the expert advice of Cardinal Ugo di Segni, Protector of the Order, retreated to the hermitage of Fonte Colombo and wrote a new Rule, which was confirmed by Pope Honorius III on 29 November 1223. On Christmas night of the same year Francis celebrated the Nativity Mass by re-enacting the Nativity scene in the castle of Greccio, above the Rieti valley. During the summer of 1224, when the first brothers arrived in England, Francis and some brothers went to the mountain called La Verna in the Casentino region of Tuscany, where on a day close to 14 September, feast of the Cross, Francis received the stigmata of the Passion during the vision of a Crucified Seraph. The last two years of his life saw Francis assailed by various illnesses and suffering from seeing his Order steering away from the ideal of poverty he had initially proposed. In 1226 he was brought to Assisi, where he dictated his last will, or Testament, a document in which he defends the Gospel ideals he had cherished from the time he made penance upon encountering the leper. On 3 October 1226 at nightfall Francis died at the Porziuncola, and on the following day his mortal remains were brought to Assisi and buried in the church of San Giorgio. Cardinal Ugo became Pope Gregory IX in 1227 and proceeded to proclaim Francis a Saint in Assisi on 16 July 1228 and ordered Brother Elias to build a special church to enshrine the new saint. The new basilica was ready to welcome the relics of Saint Francis on 25 May 1230 in the lower crypt, above which Elias built a monastic church and the enormous Sacro Convento which became a papal residence. In 1230 Pope Gregory IX declared the Basilica of Saint Francis as caput et mater (head and mother) of the Order of friars Minor.

The 13th century saw the Order of friars Minor grow and spread far and wide. They were a great new religious family in the Church, together with the Order of friars Preachers, founded by Saint Dominic Guzman. The two “mendicant” Orders were in the forefront of the evangelizing mission of the Church in Muslim lands, and as far as China and Mongolia. Maybe few people know that the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine travelled along the silk road before Marco Polo. The Franciscans and Dominicans both established houses of studies in the university towns of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna. Some of their members became famous doctors of theology: the Franciscans Anthony of Padua, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and John Duns Scotus, and the Dominicans Jordan of Saxony, Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great. Many of these became great saints and doctors of the Church.

The second half of the 13th century saw the Franciscan Order in a time of crisis. The prophetic writings of abbot Joachim of Fiore became popular among a group of friars who were called “Spirituals” and who considered themselves as descedants of the first Franciscan fraternity. They regarded the developments in the Order, seen in great conventual churches, houses of studies, evangelizing missions, as a betrayal of the original ideals of Francis and the first brothers. They preferred the hermitages, even though some of these friars were also scholars. Tension increased especially during the period when Pope Celestine V took the Spirituals under his protection, and after his abdication from the papacy in 1294, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) began to persecute them. With Pope John XXII (1316-1334) the entire Order was implicated in the poverty controversy between the Pope and Michele da Cesena, Minister General. John XXII excommunicated the Spirituals in 1317, but they still continued to thrive in isolated fraternities of “Fraticelli” in central and southern Italy. Although considered to be heretical, many Spirituals were, in fact, holy men. The most famous among them were Angelo Clareno, Ubertino da Casale and Pierre Jean Olieu, who were respectively active in the Marches of Ancona, Tuscany and southern France. At the end of the controversy the Order was already showing signs of internal division between the unreformed branch, called the fratres Minores Conventuales, and the reformed friars. Already in 1334 groups of “Fraticelli” were living in hermitages such as Le Carceri above Assisi. Gentile da Spoleto requested official recognition of the reformed group. But it was in 1368 that a lay brother by the name of Paoluccio Trinci da Foligno formed a fraternity in Brogliano, and founded what was to become the Italian family of reformed friars Minor known as fratres Minores de Regularis Observantia. Thus, by the mid-14th century, the Order, although still under one Minister General, was divided between the Conventual unreformed family and the Observant reformed one.

One of the main reasons for this upheaval in religious life at large, but especially in the Franciscan Order, was the Black Death (1346-1353), which decimated entire monasteries. Another reason was the division within the Church between the Avignon and Roman Papacy, the Western Schism (1378-1417). At the same time, however, a new flourishing of sanctity and reform was breathing new life in the Franciscan family. The Regular Observance spread in various countries besides Italy, particularly in Spain and France. It produced some of the most important Franciscan Saints, such as Bernardine of Siena, John of Capistrano, James of the Marches. These lived in the 14th and early 15th centuries. They were not only great reformers of the Order but also famous popular preachers. The monogram IHS (Iesus Hominum Salvator) was introduced by Bernardine of Siena in his preaching tours in Italy. John of Capistrano led the famous Christian battle against the Turks in Belgrade (1456) and James of the Marches evangelized northern Europe and Bosnia. It was also the Italian Observant Franciscans who introduced the Monti di Pietà, a banking enterprise to lend money with minimal interest to the poor, against the scourge of usury. Foremost among them were Barnabas of Terni and Alberto da Sarteano. In France the Observant reform was the work of the Poor Clare mystic Colette of Corbie, while in Spain we encounter the reform of the Discalced by Peter of Alcantara. All in all, the Regular Observance was not one unified reform, but a series of parallel reforms in various countries. At the end of the 15th century the Order was thus made up of a diminishing Conventual unreformed family, which however still controlled the Order through the Minister General, and a group of reformed Observant families in various countries, which were represented by two Vicar Generals, although some Observant groups preferred to remain sub ministris (under the obedience of the Conventual Minister General) and not sub vicariis (under the obedience of the autonomous Vicars). For organizational purposes the reformed Vicars represented the Cismontane Observance (friars living in Italy, the Balkans and the Holy Land) and the Ultramontane Observance (friars living in Spain, France, Germany).

It was the Observant Franciscans who accompanied Christopher Columbus in his discovery of the New World. Indeed, the glorious history of the evangelization of the Americas was, for the most part, the result of Franciscan presence, first in Mexico and the Caribbean with the “Twelve Apostles of Mexico” (1524), and then in South America, with missionaries like Francisco Solano (1549-1610), and California with the missionary Junípero Serra (1713-1784), who founded the missions which nowadays have become great cities, such as San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles.

At the beginning of the 16th century the Order was practically divided into many groups and families. The time had come for a unification of the reformed families and a division between the unreformed and reformed groups. This decisive action was taken by Pope Leo X on 29th May 1517 who issued the Bulla “Ite vos”. By this document the Pope declared that all reformed families in the Order should unite under one family with the name Ordo Fratrum Minorum de Regularis Observantia (Order of Friars Minor of the Regular Observance), and that this family should henceforth be the leading group with the Minister General totius Ordinis being chosen from among its ranks. The unreformed family was allowed to exist independently with the name Ordo Fratrum Minorum Conventualium (Order of Friars Minor Conventuals) but relinquishing the right for the Minister General totius Ordinis and of the seal of the Order.

The results of this imposition from the Pope himself were not always successful. Although the Conventuals were now a minority they did not want to relinquish the right to name their own Minister General as successor of Saint Francis. On the part of the Observants, not all were happy with the unification under what they perceived to be an Italian domination of the Order, since the Italian Regular Observance was the most numerous. Tensions were especially high among the Italian and Spanish groups, and they would continue for many centuries to come. Even among the Italian Observants some regarded the unification as another process of “conventualizing” the Order, to the point that two new reformed families were born. The Fratres Minores Riformati (Reformed), approved by Pope Clement VII in 1532 by the Bulla “In suprema militantis Ecclesiae”, remained within the folds of the Observance, but in 1525 a friar by the name of Matteo da Bascio created a new split in the Observance with the foundation of the Fratres Minores de vita eremitica who would henceforth be known as Fratres Minores Cappuccinorum (Friars Minor Capuchins). Clement VII approved this reform in 1582 with the Bulla “Religionis zelus”. The Capuchin family was the greatest Franciscan reform after that of the Regular Observance, and it gave many saints and evangelizers to the Church, such as Lawrence of Brindisi, Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Felix of Cantalice, Pio of Pietrelcina, Leopold Mandić. On the part of the Conventual family as it came to be after 1517 we also find important saints such as Joseph of Copertino, Francis Antonio Fasani and Maximilian Kolbe.

The modern history of the Franciscan Order is marked by periods of glory in which it grew and spread, and other moments of tension and suffering, including the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the secularist and communist regimes in Mexico and in the Spanish civil war, the Risorgimento movement for the unification of Italy. All along the 16th to 19th centuries the Franciscan family was composed of three autonomous Orders, namely the Order of Friars Minor of the Regular Observance, the Order of Friars Minor Conventuals and the Order of Friars Minor Capuchins. In the first case, however, the Friars Minor of the Regular Observance, although under one Minister General, also embraced other families within their fold, namely the Friars Minor Reformed, present in Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Balkans; the Friars Minor Discalced (Alcantarines), present in Spain and the Kingdom of Naples; and the Friars Minor Recollects, present in France, Germany, England, The Netherlands. These divisions became unachronistic at the end of the 19th century. Pope Leo XIII decided to unify the entire Franciscan Observance in such a way as to make it drop its various names and allegiances. By the Bulla “Felicitate quadam” of 4th October 1897, he declared that, henceforth, all these groups were to be known simply by the name Ordo Fratrum Minorum (Order of Friars Minor = OFM) without any further additions.

Nowadays the Franciscan First Order, or the family of male Franciscan friars, is made up of the three families of the Friars Minor, Friars Minor Conventuals and Friars Minor Capuchins. They are all authentic Franciscans and all profess the same Rule of the Friars Minor written by Saint Francis in 1223, known as the Regula bullata, although they each have their proper General Constitutions. The current number of Franciscan friars in the world is roughly 24,970, made up of 11,468 OFM, 9,685 OFMCap, and 3,817 OFMConv.

The Franciscan family also includes the Order of Saint Clare, or Poor Clares, who have their own long and glorious history and are the Second Franciscan Order. The Order was originally called Ordo Pauperum Dominarum (Order of the Poor Ladies), comprising various autonomous monasteries in Tuscany, the Umbrian valley, and as far as Trent and Prage in Bohemia. Cardinal Ugo di Segni and Pope Innocent IV gave them Rules which reflected the Benedictine way of life, and which Clare of Assisi wanted to change in order to conform the life of the nuns to the evangelical calling of the friars Minor and to the Privilege of Poverty given to her by Cardinal Ugo in 1218. Already in 1212 Saint Francis had given Clare a Forma vitae, which she then inserted into the Rule she wrote in 1252 and which was approved by Pope Innocent IV on 9 August 1253, just two days before Clare died on 11 August 1253. After her canonization in Anagni by Pope Alexander IV in 1255 the community of San Damiano transferred to the Protomonastero of Assisi in 1260. On 18 October 1263 Pope Urban IV gave a new Rule to the nuns, calling them for the first time Ordo Sanctae Clarae (Order of Saint Clare). During the period of Observant reform in the First Order many monasteries opted to return to the Rule of Saint Clare of 1253. Among the reforms of the Second Order are the Colettines, founded by Saint Colette of Corbie (1381-1447) in France; the Capuchin Clares founded by Maria Lorenza Longo in Naples in 1538 and having as their most important saint and mystic Saint Veronica Giuliani (1660-1727); and the Conceptionists, founded by Saint Beatrix of Silva in Toledo in 1484. Besides these saints and mystics the Order has many others, including Agnes of Assisi, the sister of Saint Clare, and Agnes of Bohemia, who founded the monastery in Prague.

The Third Franciscan Order includes the Regular Third Order Franciscans (TOR) with both male and many female congregations, as well as the Secular Franciscan Order (SFO), which is the lay branch of this Order. The Ordo Poenitentium (Order of Penitents) was a lay medieval movement, which soon embraced the Franciscan or Dominican ways of life giving rise to various fraternities. Cardinal Ugo di Segni gave them a Rule of life in the Memoriale propositi of 1221. The first Rule was given by the Franciscan Pope Nicholas IV in 1289 with the Bulla “Supra montem”. This Rule was changed by Leo XIII in 1883 with the Bulla “Misericors Dei Filius” and again by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1978 with the Letter Seraphicus Patriarcha. This is the Rule professed by the Secular Franciscan Order (SFO). The male religious family is called Third Order Regular (TOR) and was approved by Pope Nicholas V in 1447 through the Bulla “Pastoralis officii” which united various congregations of Tertiaries into a religious Order. The female branch of the Order is made up of countless Congregations of Franciscan Sisters. They all follow the Rule of the Third Order Regular approved by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1982 in the Apostolic Constitution Franciscanum vitae propositum.

At the end of this very incomplete and brief presentation of the history of the Franciscan Order you are encouraged to further your knowledge of the Franciscan way of life by reading a good biography of Saint Francis or a volume of Franciscan history. The link to the website www.franciscanstudies.com provides further insights into biographical indications that can help you in getting familiar with Saint Francis and his great family.