Poverty and Prosperity:: Franciscans and the Use of Money

Chapter 2: The Early Franciscans and the Use of Money

The early franCisCans anD The Use of Money MiChael f. CUsaTo, o.f.M. inTroDUCTion In the 1935 film classic, Mutiny on the Bounty, there is a humorous scene early on in the film where, shortly after arriving on the island of Tahiti, the midshipman Roger Byam goes ashore to scout out the territory. He meets Hitihiti, the chieftain of the Tahitians and begins to cultivate a relationship with him. After some time, the two have an interesting exchange relevant for our discussion. In the midst of a wider conversation, midshipman Byam asks Hitihiti what the Tahitian word for money was. Hitihiti responds: “Money, what is money?” Byam says that he will explain. So he holds up for the chieftain a coin in one hand and a nail in the other and asks him: “Now which would you choose: the shilling or the nail?” Hitihiti points to the nail; it appears to him to be the more useful of the two objects. But Byam objects: “Oh no, Hitihiti. With one of these (pointing to the shilling) you can buy any number of these (pointing to the nail).” “Oh, he says, where?” “In England,” replies the Englishman. “You see, in England, you must have money to live with, to buy food.” Hitihiti looks confused: “In island of England,” he asks, “no fruit on tree? No fish in sea?” “Oh yes, plenty,” Byam assures him. Hitihiti then deduces what is for him the obvious 14 Michael F. cusato conclusion: “no money, no food.” “That’s right,” exudes Byam. Hitihiti then tells him: “I stay here.”1 Money has been one of the most divisive issues in Franciscan history, outpaced only by the broader question of the observance of poverty, to which it is often, though not always, related. The appearance in both rules of the precept forbidding the use or possession of money has been a source, on the one hand, of consternation for those attempting to live “in the world” while not being “of the world”; and, on the other hand, a spur to a certain amount of inventiveness on the part of the friars as they sought to come up with ways to hew to the spirit of the Rule while not being slavishly bound to its letter (and, they feared, being reduced to social, if not ecclesial , insignificance). Thanks to the prohibition of money, the friars throughout the thirteenth century attempted to devise a variety of legalistic strategies in order to at least appear to comply with the dictates against its usage.2 Thanks also to money, the friars who came to be known in the fifteenth century as the Franciscan Observants parted company with those favoring the conventual lifestyle (with its limited use of money and ownership), ending in the juridical division of the Order in 1517 into two separate, both ostensibly Franciscan entities.3 And thanks, finally, to an uneasy and uncertain relationship in our tradition between poverty and money, many friars in this century (at least until Vatican II), have been well-nigh infantilized by their formation and by authoritarian friary structures so that the individual friar very often understood little about how the world actually worked (in terms of health care, insurance, the cost of cars, gas and groceries , etc.) and what most people outside religious life have 1 http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/m/mutiny-on-the-bounty -script.html 2 Cf. M.D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty. The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210-1323, 2nd rev. ed. (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1998) [orig. publ. London: SPCK, 1961]. 3 The story is told in the classic work of Duncan Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Franciscan Order (1226-1538) (Rome: The Capuchin Historical Institute, 1987). 15 THE EARLY FRANCISCANS AND THE USE OF MONEY to do to live within their means, dealing with budgets and the ordinary limitations imposed on people by the realities of daily life. Since the time of Vatican II, with its call for religious communities to rediscover the roots of their charism, scholars of the Franciscan phenomenon have attempted to go back to its sources to find not only what might be distinctive in our own charism but, even more importantly, what might have been the original intentions of the founder and his earliest friars. To do this is to do history. Such historical work...