SFO International Council - Weekly edition
Volume: 7 - N. 04 - 2001 - January - IV
From: CIOFS Bulletin, 2000, N. 2
Marianne Powell
(Part II)
Franciscans of any of our orders must have shared with me the awkwardness when a person comes up to us and says: "For Francis poverty was an absolute. But you don’t live like him." We do well not to kid ourselves when we struggle to find an answer to this remark. I am pretty sure that nobody lives the way Francis and the first brothers lived. The life in absolute material poverty as lived by Francis himself and by the first brothers did not really last long as a requirement for the members of the order. Francis’ ideal in this aspect was in fact compromised at a very early date. The Rule of 1223 already talks of houses where the friars lived. Many other aspects went the same way. While to Francis the brothers were first and foremost brothers, and some of them happened to be priests, by the time of St. Bonaventure the order had largely been clericalized [1 and was rapidly embarking on a monastic life style, the friars living in large convents in the centre of the big cities. There were historical reasons for this, but it is a plain and painful fact that Pope Innocent III had seen further than Francis himself.
One of the most beautiful, because gently teasing, retellings of the meeting between Pope Innocent and Francis, when Francis wanted the Pontiff to approve the rule of his little brotherhood, comes from N.G. Van Doornik’s book which in the English translation bears the title Francis of Assisi. A Prophet for our Time (1979). Francis and his eleven humble, unassuming companions stand before this mighty religious monarch, ruler over Church and princes, spiritual imperator, vicar of the Lord of Lords. Pope Innocent has taken time to see them. On hearing their errand and reading the short text of the rule, Innocent says no. "Your life seems to us too hard and rough. We must be sure that the road you have chosen is not too difficult for those who will later follow you." And Van Doornik’s wry comment rings true: "Strangely enough, modern man is inclined to admire Francis while taking Innocent’s side" (ch.7).
As we know, Innocent was persuaded to change his mind, but his premonitions proved right. The rule was too strict, and the friars also developed different ideas about what their role was to be in the Church. With clericalization laybrothers were largely excluded. Manual work was excluded, as not being considered proper to preachers. The election of non-clerical Ministers General was excluded by canon law, and as far as ownership was concerned, Cardinal Ugolino introduced the well-known concept of usus which allowed the brothers to use property not belonging to them without this being considered as breaking their vow of poverty. It is not necessary to expand the list to make it clear that Francis’ project was compromised already in his own life time and very rapidly afterwards. Does this make the life of Franciscans through the centuries a lie? In my opinion it doesn’t, but we need to understand what living the charism of a founder means.
I am sure, however, that Francis himself would and did feel that
his brothers had slipped up. His Testament reveals as much. Francis
had received from his Master a life project as absolute in its
claims as the Sermon on the Mount, and he had striven heroically to
follow it. As everyone knows, in the process of being
institutionalised, Francis’ life project in its concrete
expression lost part of its absolute nature. This is the price paid
for the survival of the spirit, it is claimed. But there are also
those who think that this is a truth which needs
modification.
In his penetrating analysis of the life and message of St. Francis
the Italian author Ernesto Balducci (in Francesco
D’Assisi, 1989) puts the case differently. Admittedly he
starts with the same assumption that the prophetic message of
Francis fares the same way as the prophetic message of Christ in
the Church, which, he says, to a large extent yielded to the human
culture which produced the institution.
By way of an example Balducci quotes from a statement from the
Lateran Council in 1116, which, as he says, clearly shows how the
Church had started to read the message of the Sermon of the Mount
through the spectacles of the dominant culture:
"At the time of the martyrs the primitive Church prospered with
God, but not amongst people. But when kings, Roman emperors and
princes converted to the faith they as good sons wanted to honour
their Mother, the Church, and they conferred on her land and
property, secular dignity, rights and royal insignia, as did
Constantine and other faithful, and thus the Church began to
prosper as much amongst people as with God. So now the Church, our
Mother and Lady, possesses the things given her by kings and
princes, and she distributes them and gives them to her sons
according to her insight and will."
The Gospel has become a story about the Church’s humble beginnings and has thus been emptied of its value as a prophetic norm.
There is an striking parallel to this passage in the writings of Bonaventure. Bonaventure clearly admired the humility and simplicity of the first friars, but he found himself in the role of arguing for the survival of the order by casting it in a different mould. So this is how the humble beginnings are viewed by Bonaventure in his Epistola de tribus quaestionibus, 13:
"Do not be upset that in the beginning the Friars were simple and unlettered. This ought rather to strengthen your faith in the Order. For I acknowledge before God that what made me love the life of blessed Francis so much was the fact that it resembled the beginning and growth of the Church. As the Church began with simple fishermen and afterwards developed to include renowned and skilled doctors, so you will see it to be the case in the Order of Blessed Francis. In this way God shows that it was not founded by the prudence of men but by Christ." [2
Returning to Balducci’s argument: In spite of this negative inculturisation of the Christian message there has always been, says Balducci, Christian individuals who have been able to look further into the wholeness of the Christian message and keep the prophecy alive. It is claimed, he says, that when there is a tension between a personal and a communal ideal, the personal ideal will die if it is not changed, if it doesn’t deny itself and take on a more lasting institutional form and thus becomes part of a communal consciousness; the historical process is steered by the universal principles of reason, and not by personal ideals. However, Francis’ life project could never become part of a communal consciousness. The new in Francis belongs in the prophetic order. His life project is one in which you anticipate, within the world of time, that which is man’s ultimate state.
In this respect Francis is parallel to Jesus. The prophecy of
Christ goes far beyond the message such as it has been presented
and inculturated through the centuries. And yet, it continues to
live. The prophetically new in the message of Christ survives the
human consciousness, because mankind loves it. It trickles through
the crevices of the thick walls which the Church in its
inculturation process has built round it. It jumps out and creates
life forms, individual or collective, in which the original
prophetic message comes to the fore; but these forms of life do not
survive for very long.
"Can the prophetically new, which lives so briefly and then dies
again, in itself contain the final message?" Balducci asks. It can,
he says, because the way in which the prophetic exists in history
is in failure. The most characteristic example of this is the cross
of Jesus Christ. While in the rational code of history failure is
defeat, in the prophetic code it is victory: the Easter cross. The
wounds of Christ are the obscure and yet transparent sign of this
contradiction. But even if this sign is obscure, it tells us that
anyone (like Francis) who dares, in word and action, to suggest a
form of life which is completely free of the reductions of the
Christian message which the dominant human culture has legitimized,
will have a fate marked by blood. But this sign is also transparent
because the memory of the blood shed by the "new man" is entrusted
to those who do not live in history, but in anti-history, where the
future of man is prepared.
And Francis, did he accept the hard truth of the necessity of institutionalization, as clearly accepted by Cardinal Ugolino and Elias? The answer, says Balducci, is that he neither accepted nor rejected it, but he faced it. He withdrew, not out of history as a mystic, and not into the silence of asceticism, but to the point where history and prophecy meet, that is to the cross, where failure disappears, and he can sing his victory not only before God but also before man. That is the mystery of the stigmata.
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