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Franciscan History

In the winter of 1206-1207, Francis Bernardone, an Assisi youth, publicly renounced his own father so as to belong only to God. He abandoned the parties of his companions in order to help lepers, derelicts and society’s rejects. Francis spent the next two years as a mendicant, hermit and restorer of three dilapidated churches in the area of Assisi: San Damiano, San Pierre and Saint Mary of the Portiuncula.

St. Francis of Assisi His lifestyle initially attracted two of his fellow citizens: the rich Bernard of Quintavale and the canonist-jurist Peter Catani. To these were added another nine. They became 12 “penitents” and pilgrims, without a home or fixed dwelling place. In the beginning Francis gave some rules of life that were orally approved by Innocent III; eventually he wrote the Rule of the Orders of Friars Minor, which was confirmed by a Papal Bull of Honorius III in 1223.


Their example was contagious even to the 18-year-old noble woman, Clare, who on Palm Sunday, 1212, fled her father’s house. Francis cut her hair as a sign of her consecration to God in the little chapel of the Portiuncula. Many other sisters followed Clare. In 1218-19, Clare and the Sisters received pontifical approval to live in cloistered poverty. Thus was born the Second Order of San Francis, which he called the Poor Ladies.

Between 1210 and 1221, we have an immense development of the work of St. Francis, who sent his companions throughout the worked in order to preach the poor, humble and crucified Christ and to bring reconciliation and peace to everyone.

In 1221, a Florentine merchant, Lucchesio, and his wife Buonadonna, were attracted by the example of Francis and asked to be able to live the life of the Minors while remaining in their married state. Thus the Secular Franciscan Order was born.

The identity of Franciscanism is found in the living out of the Gospel in the Church according to the model proposed and observed by Saint Francis of Assisi and preach it to every creature.

The First Franciscan Order has undergone a profound restructuring. From it has arisen three tendencies, which have given birth to three juridically independent branches, but with the same Rule of Life. Three branches have their own governments and structures: Friars Minor, Friars Minor Conventuals and Friars Minor Capuchin.

These three families have developed as branches on a single giant tree, with very many works, missions, martyrs and merits. The configuration of Saints and Beatified belonging to the three branches attest to this.

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St. Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi was born in 1182 and died in 1226. Of his comparatively short life, less than twenty years were spent in active Christian ministry; yet by the time of his death, brothers of the Order that he founded had traveled through much of Europe, the Mediterranean area and North Africa and the Order had already had its first martyrs.

The story of Francis’ conversion is well known – how as a young man in his early twenties he abandoned life of ease and comfort to embrace the Lady Poverty. Giotto’s paintings on the walls of the basilica in Assisi where the saint lies buried, graphically illustrate incidents from his early life. Typical of the fashionable youth of his time, Francis was imbued with the romantic spirit of chivalry. He took part enthusiastically in the fighting between warring city states of central Italy and was eventually captured and held prisoner for a year in the neighboring city of Perugia. During this time he became severely ill. Ransomed by his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, he returned home to Assisi but he never regained his former health and high spirits. In 1204, on the eve of setting out once more to do battle, he experienced a vision that caused him to abandon his ambitions for military glory and to espouse a life of poverty.

St. Francis of Assisi It was while Francis was praying before the crucifix in the near derelict church of San Damiano, outside the walls of Assisi, that he heard a voice telling him to ‘rebuild my church’. With enthusiasm he took this literally, sold some bales of cloth from his father’s warehouse and donated the proceeds to the parish priest. This impulsive action led to his being publicly disowned by his father, whereupon, in a dramatic gesture, he stripped himself naked before the assembled populace of Assisi, symbolizing his break with the past. ‘Hencefore,’ he declared, ‘I shall say “My Father who are in heaven”, not “My father Pietro Bernadone”.’

From then on, Francis lived as a mendicant, owning nothing but a rough tunic, begging or working at menial tasks for his food. His particular concern was for the outcasts of society. When he encountered a beggar who was suffering from leprosy, the disease that above all inspired horror in the respectable people of the day, he forced himself to overcome his natural repugnance, embraced the man and gave him his tunic. Subsequently he went to live for some months with a colony of leprosy sufferers near Gubbio.

In 1208, while attending Mass on St. Matthias’ day, Francis heard read the Gospel for the day: And as you go, preach the message, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out devils. Freely you have received, freely give. Do not keep gold, silver or money in your girdles, no wallet for your journey, nor two tunics, no sandals, nor staff; for the laborer deserves his living (Matthew 10:7-10).

Instantly, Francis recognized God’s call in these words of Scripture. It was the way of life for which he had been searching. It was the way he was to follow, quite literally in every particular, till the day of his death.

He embarked at once on a preaching ministry and was soon joined by the first few of his companions. Together they traveled to Rome, to obtain the Pope’s approval for a simple Rule for the embryo Order. The small church of the Portiuncula at St. Mary of the Angels near Assisi, which the brothers rebuilt with their own hands, became their base, from which they constantly traveled on preaching missions to the surrounding countryside.

The Order of Friars Minor grew rapidly and was soon sending missions beyond Italy to other countries in the Mediterranean area. Francis himself traveled to Spain, Dalmatia and most dramatically, to the Holy Land and to Damietta in Egypt, where there took place his famed encounter with the Sultan in 1219, during the time of the Fifth Crusade. The first mission to England took place in 1224.

During these years Francis was suffering from increasing ill health, particularly from deteriorating eyesight and from ulcers on his legs and feet (it has been suggested that he may have been diabetic). In 1220, he gave up to another the leadership of the Order, though he continued to make preaching tours throughout central Italy, seated on a donkey or carried on a litter. His influence within the Order remained strong and when the Rule was revised and rewritten in 1221 (in this book referred to as the ‘Earlier Rule’), and again in 1223, it contained passages of exhortation and admonition that clearly originated with Francis himself.

It was in September 1224 that Francis received the stigmata, while keeping a forty-day fast at a mountain hermitage at La Verna. Thereafter he became progressively more ill, almost blind and unable to walk without pain. It was recorded of him that ‘he could not bear the light of the sun during the day or the light of the fire at night. He constantly remained in darkness inside the house in his cell. His eyes caused him so much pain that he could neither lie down nor sleep’ (The Legend of Perugia). Yet, according to tradition, it was at this time that he wrote the Canticle of the Sun, with its praise of Brother Sun and Brother Fire.

It is Francis’ love of nature, epitomized in the Canticle, which has most endeared him to modern Christians, to the neglect of other aspects of his spirituality. Yet his love of all created things was simply an extension of his deep love of the Creator. His biographer, Thomas of Celano, wrote of him not many years after his death: His failing health did not prevent Francis from continuing to visit towns and villages of Tuscany and Umbria, until the late summer of 1226 when, his condition grown worse, he was taken to the palace of the Bishop of Assisi. In late September, when it became clear that his death was imminent, he insisted on being carried down the hill to the Portiuncula. In the Little Flowers of Saint Francis there is an account of this last journey:

Francis died on October 3, 1226. As he lay awaiting death, he asked the brothers to sing psalms of praise, in which he himself joined as far as he was able. He requested that there be read to him the story of Christ’s passion from St. John’s Gospel. Then, at last, in the words of Thomas of Celano, ‘when many brothers had gathered about … his most holy soul was freed from his body and received into the abyss of light and his body fell asleep in the Lord.’

(From Praying With St. Francis, translated by Regis Armstrong and Ignatius Brady)

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The Peaceful Crusader

(This article, written by Thomas Cahill, was an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the 12/25/2006 issue of the New York Times.)

Amid all the useless bloodshed of the Crusades, there is one story that suggests an extended clash of civilizations between Islam and the West was not preordained. It concerns the early 13th century friar Francis of Assisi, who joined the Fifth Crusade not as a warrior but as a peacemaker.

Francis was no good at organization or strategy and he knew it. He accepted the men and women who presented themselves as followers, befriended them and shared the Gospel with them. But he gave them little else. He expected them to live like him: rejecting distinctions of class, forgoing honors of church or king or commune, taking the words of Jesus literally, owning nothing, suffering for God's sake, befriending every outcast - leper, heretic, highwayman - thrust in their path.

Francis was not impressed by the Crusaders, whose sacrilegious brutality horrified him. They were entirely too fond of taunting and abusing their prisoners of war, who were often returned to their families minus nose, lips, ears or eyes.

In Francis' view, judgment was the exclusive province of the all-merciful God; it was none of a Christian's concern. True Christians were to befriend all yet condemn no one. Give to others and it shall be given to you, forgive and you shall be forgiven, was Francis' constant preaching. "May the Lord give you peace" was the best greeting one could give to all one met. It compromised no one's dignity and embraced every good; it was a blessing to be bestowed indiscriminately. Francis bestowed it on people named George and Jacques and on people named Osama and Saddam. Such an approach, in an age when the most visible signs of the Christian religion were the wars and atrocities of the red-crossed crusaders, was shockingly otherworldly and slyly effective.

St. Francis and the Sultan Symbolic gesture, Francis' natural language, was a profound source he canned on throughout his life. In one of its most poignant expressions, Francis sailed across the Mediterranean to the Egyptian court of Malik al-Kamil, nephew of the great Saladin, who had defeated the forces of the hapless Third Crusade. Francis was admitted to the august presence of the sultan himself and spoke to him of Christ, who was, after all, Francis' only subject.

Trying to proselytize a Muslim was cause for on-the-spot decapitation, but Kamil was a wise and moderate man, who was deeply impressed by Francis' courage and sincerity and invited him to stay for a week of serious conversation. Francis, in turn, was deeply impressed by the religious devotion of the Muslims, especially by their five daily calls to prayer; it is quite possible that the thrice-daily recitation of the Angelus that became current in Europe after this visit was precipitated by the impression made on Francis by the call of the muezzin (just as the quintessential Catholic devotion of the rosary derives from Muslim prayer beads.)

It is a tragedy of history that Kamil and Francis were unable to talk longer, to coordinate their strengths and form an alliance. Had they been able to do so, the phrase "clash of civilizations" might be unknown to the world.

Francis went back to the Crusader camp on the Egyptian shore and desperately tried to convince Cardinal Pelagius Galvani, whom Pope Honorius III had put in charge of the Crusade, that he should make peace with the sultan, who, despite far greater force on his side, was all too ready to do. But the cardinal had dreams of military glory and would not listen. His eventual failure, amid terrible loss of life, brought the age of the crusades to its inglorious end.

Donald Spoto, one of Francis of Assisi's most recent biographers, rightly calls Francis "the first person from the West to travel to another continent with the revolutionary idea of peacemaking." As a result of his inability to convince Cardinal Pelagius, however, Francis saw himself as a failure. Like his model, Jesus of Nazareth, Francis was an extremist. But his failure is still capable of bearing new fruit.

Islamic society and Christian society have been generally bad neighbors now for nearly 14 centuries, eager to misunderstand each other, often borrowing culturally and intellectually from each other without ever bestowing proper credit. But as Sir Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the British Commonweatlh, has written, almost as if he was thinking of Kamil and Francis, "Those who are confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faiths of others…There are, surely, many ways of arriving at this generosity of spirit and each faith may need to find its own." We stand in desperate need of contemporary figures like Kamil and Francis of Assisi to create an innovative dialogue. To build a future better than our past, we need, as Rabbi Sacks has put it, "the confidence to recognize the irreducible, glorious dignity of difference."

May the Lord give you peace.

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St. Clare of Assisi

Clare of Assisi is a sign of contradiction. She divests herself of feminine assets (beauty, wealth, family connections, eligibility) as eagerly as other women hoard them. She fights for the “privilege of poverty” as persistently as many struggle for success in corporate empires. Like her ally, the charismatic Francis, she upends accepted values, creating question marks in the minds of complacent Christians.

Her accepted image is the wan and distant Sister Moon reflecting fiery Francis, Brother Sun. These two medieval saints of Assisi are as inextricably bound as Mary and Joseph, Benedict and Scholastica, Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal. Their relationship embraces the love of a celibate married couple, of brother and sister, of friends who complement each other’s spirituality.

Clare is more, however, than a pale reflection of Francis. She embodies the gospel life he espoused. Hers was the hidden life of poverty and prayer he would have envied had he not clearly heard the call to an active ministry. Clare incarnates the 30 years of Jesus’ life at Nazareth, a life of daily hardship, simple joys and restricted horizons.

Her father, Faverone di Offreduccio, was a knight; her mother, Ortolana, a charitable matron who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to Rome. Their home was a castle where little Chiara and her sisters learned needlework and music, reading and writing.

St. Clare of Assisi When she was 16, Clare began the secret, chaperoned meetings with Francis that would sow dissatisfaction with her comfortable life. He was 28 and had already founded the Friars Minor and astounded Assisi by his preaching, begging and inspired foolhardiness. Their ardor for each other was consumed in their mutual love of Jesus Christ.

In a romantic scene idealized by Franco Zeffrelli in Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Clare received the rough Franciscan habit from Francis on the night of Palm Sunday, 1212. That was the beginning of the Second Order, the Poor Ladies, later known as the Poor Clares.

After that ecstatic ceremony of self-offering, the young noblewoman apparently never looked back. “I want only Jesus Christ, and to live by the gospel, owning nothing and in chastity,” she vowed. For the next 42 years, enclosed in her convent at San Damiano, she lived out that vow in literal poverty and constant prayer.

The Second Order soon attracted many more women who sought to commit themselves to Christ in the contemplative religious life. Clare’s compassion and wisdom made her an acclaimed saint in her own time. She and Francis met only rarely; he would not allow himself the pleasure of her company or even of calling her by name. Knight that he was, he felt that the lovely Chiara belonged totally to the Lord.

After Francis’ death, Madonna Chiara mothered the friars through the years of transition and did her best to see that the founder’s ideals were not compromised. Her reputation as a healer and a spiritual counselor grew.

Among those who confided in her and counted on her prayers were two popes, Gregory IX and Innocent IV. While the former had tried to convince Clare to accept a less rigorous mode of poverty, the latter, at her persistent request, confirmed the “privilege of seraphic poverty” shortly before her death. This pontiff said of her, “She has surpassed all women of her time.”

The depth of Clare’s union with Christ is evident in a letter she wrote to Agnes of Prague, who founded a monastery of the Second Order in that city:

Although it is tempting to see Clare as a purely feminine, passive, reflective person, that characterization would be incomplete. Her life at San Damiano was as rigorous as that of any monk or peasant farmer. Raised in a castle, she lived her entire adult life in a small stone convent, slept on a straw mattress, faster three days a week, never ate meat, often did penance and got up in the middle of the night to pray the Divine Office. Year around she wore a coarse brown robe with a black veil and went barefoot on stone floors.

Thomas of Celano, her biographer, observed that Clare was of good stature and had an oval face, fine coloring and fair hair. His masculine judgment was that “she inclined to stoutness, but nowise excess.” In early paintings, however, Clare is always tall and slender, perhaps like the candle her name suggested.

Members of her community who testified during the canonization process emphasized the abbess’ circumspect leadership: “She often hastened to do herself what she had commanded another to do.” They described the humility that led her to wash the extern sisters’ feet on their return from a round of begging as well as her love of silence (“Careless speech always weakens our love for God,” she insisted.) Her devotion to Christ in his Passion was evidenced in all-night vigils and weeping during the hours of the Crucifixion. Chronically ill, she healed others of sickness and depression by signing them with the cross.

Clare called herself the “little plant of the Blessed Francis.” And she relied on him as her spiritual director in the early years of her life as a religious. He was wise enough to lead her through a gradual liberation until Christ himself was her only guide. Her devotion toward Francis ripened into a mature love that did not require his physical presence.

In a symbolic vision that underscores the motherly nature of both saints, Clare saw herself climbing a high stairway and carrying a jog of hot water with a towel for Francis. When she reached him, he opened his habit to bare his chest so that she might drink “something sweet and delightful.”

While Clare and Francis shared the same gospel insights, she received the gift he desired for himself but which he could enjoy only at intervals: She was the contemplative flowering in a cloister garden, the prayerful person whose daily life was focused on God alone.

St. Clare of Assisi For the Christian who loves to pray in the direct sense (as opposed to the prayer of pastoral activity, charitable works, evangelization), Clare had an ideal existence. Everything she did was prayer. When she came to San Damiano, says Celano, “There she fixed the anchor of her soul.” There she lived in the house of God and God made his dwelling in her. The anchor held fast. She took no vacations, made no pilgrimages, and allowed herself no diversions from the single purpose of her life. Like Jesus before his baptism, she lived in obscurity and ordinariness. And she grew in wisdom, age and grace.

The cloister at San Damiano became a source of spiritual energy radiating throughout the Church. Clare and her sisters prayed the Divine Office (Liturgy of the Hours) five times a day, seven days a week, conforming the pattern of their community life to the sequence of the liturgical year. They meditated and kept their silence as habitually as others cling to idle chatter. Washing or scrubbing, weeding or sewing, they were constantly praying God and enjoying his presence.

Speaking of the “liberating gift of enclosure,” the Poor Clare Constitutions by which Clare’s contemporary daughters abide comment, “The enclosed nuns are called to give clear witness that man belongs entirely to God and so to keep green among the human family the desire for a heavenly home.”

That evergreen desire is Clare’s legacy, not only to contemplatives in cloisters, but to all Christians who recognize in themselves the need to respond regularly to Jesus’ invitation: “Whenever you pray, go to your room, close your door and pray to your Father in private” (MT 6:6).

(From Clare of Assisi – The Anchored Soul, by Gloria Hutchinson)

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Who can be a Franciscan?

The Franciscan Friars of Holy Name Province are men who choose to live a simple life-style in community. It is a life of prayer and service to the church and the world, modeled on the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

The first step in seeking admission to the Franciscan Order is to contact the Franciscan Vocation Ministry of the Holy Name Province. Those interested in joining should:
  • Be a practicing Roman Catholic between the ages of 22-38. However, if you are not yet 22 years old, please do not hesitate to contact us.
  • Enjoy good physical and mental health in order to meet the challenges of a religious vocation.
  • Have graduated from high school.
Click here to learn more about the Franciscan way of life and God’s plan for you. If you have any questions, please contact the Franciscan Vocation Ministry at 1-800-677-7788.

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