Gospel Living: St. Francis of Assisi Yesterday and Today

Chapter 1. Shadows and Lights

The Franciscan Spirit Through the Ages / 153 CHAPTER 1 SHADOWS AND LIGHTS The Beginnings Francis was certainly the very opposite of a businessman; no organizational chart hung on the mud partitions of Rivo Torto, but only the names scrawled in chalk on the beams: Fra Francesco, Fra Leone, Fra Ruffino. What drew people to him, men and women, clerics and lay, old and young, was his Gospel conviction and his calm possession of Christ in the deepest recesses of his heart. No revolutionary slogan, no plan for reform, ecclesiastical or social: the Gospel, nothing but the Gospel, was the Rule of the Friars Minor, of the Poor Ladies, and of the Penitents living in the world. Although this charism was able to inspire men and women mired in mediocrity to join the small communities at the Portiuncula or San Damiano, the personal attraction of Francis—even enshrined in the Rules of 1221 and 1223 and in the Testament—no longer sufficed where hundreds and thousands of converts were concerned, living days and weeks away from Assisi and Umbria. Very early, therefore, even during the lifetime of Francis, a host of more or less practical problems arose which first created diversity, then divisions and then oppositions among the brothers. The Founder's spirituality, his manner of living the faith, remained intact, but the manner of appropriating it had to change. Francis, for example, liked to retire in solitude to mountain retreats, to the Carceri and Greccio. Why should it be surprising if, thirty or forty years after his passing, those who were to be called "Spirituals," zealots of the primitive ideal, sought to cultivate in the rocky mountain passes of the Marches of Ancona a lifestyle that continued the Order's original contemplative and penitential traditions ? Similarly, Francis had esteemed poverty above everything else. How can it be considered strange if his oldest companions and those who had been formed by them preferred to risk ecclesiastical censure rather than be separated from their dear Lady Poverty? 154 / Willibrord C. VanDijk, O.F.M. Cap. The Spirituals The tragic history of the Franciscan Spiritual movement, with all its crises and vicissitudes, may be viewed through legal eyes, in which case one will (like many superiors and prelates of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) see in it only revolt and rebellion. It seems, though, that this sad, drawn-out affair was something very different. Its main issue was one of charism. Both sides were of good faith: the community, consisting of the main body of the Order with the superiors at its head, as well as the scattered groups of Spirituals seeking the freedom to follow Francis in his poverty and solitude. What is involved primarily and essentially is the ideal of St. Francis and the heart of his spirituality: the faithful following of the poor Christ. Anyone who would read the history of the Spirituals—Angelo of Clareno (d. 1337), Ubertino of Casale (d. 1329) and their followers—without paying special attention to their quest for fidelity to the ideal, would be doomed to misunderstand the profound significance of this sad posthumous passion of Francis himself. This initial conflict in the Franciscan Order, moreover, was itself, through the decades immediately following the Order's founding, only the prologue to what was to be repeated so often in the history of Franciscanism. All the internal disputes, all the reforms, all the divisions and all the reunions are essentially quests for fidelity to the primitive ideal of Francis and Clare. They can also be seen as attempts, often successful, to adjust to an everchanging world, as efforts to refine the ideal itself in the pursuit of holiness. Distortions of the ideal were, however, not lacking. In 1354, a lawyer named Bartolo of Sassoferrato, a lay friend of the friars, sought to demonstrate, in his Liber Minoritarum Decisionum, that the Friars Minor had both individually and corporately the legal capacity to inherit. He did this by drawing a subtle distinction, in light of Roman civil law, between the letter and the spirit of the Seraphic Rule. Clearly the mentality that produced such a masterpiece could hardly win the support of true followers of Francis. The problem is that those who clung to the pristine rigors of the Order did not always evince all the Franciscan virtues one could wish for. Ubertino of Casale, one of the leaders of the The Franciscan Spirit Through...