Francis Of Assisi Research Paper

DEGREES OF HERESY: THE FRANCISCANS

ESSAY TOPIC: How viable was Francis’s conception of poverty for his religious order?

Discuss the Franciscans’ complex and evolving views on poverty from Francis to Peter Olivi.

In this essay I will discuss the Franciscans’ complex and evolving views on poverty from Francis to Peter Olivi. My discussion will look at his ideas on poverty as a way to live, as a concept and Francis’s own adherence. Later it will examine why the pragmatic latter leaders were required to change the idea of absolute poverty, and control the heresy within the order. Where Francis of Assisi, and the Order he founded of the Friars Minor (little brothers) did not attack the wealth and power of the Church they were not a problem,

He liked troubadours (the Rock bands of his era) and like others kitted himself out as a knight and went to fight for his city state Assisi (1201), was captured at Collestrada and was held for a year before being allowed to home. At around 23 he became gravely ill and had a spiritual conversion, which over the following years manifested in his belief that the way to salvation was through

The first solution was in 1230 Gregory IX issued the bull Quo Elongati employing what might be considered a legal fiction in which established that the order “could hold buildings, furnishings and books by means of a third party such as the papacy or the cardinal-protector”. This was the beginnings of the split within the order with those that accepted the need for some way to handle processions , that would become the Conventuals, and those that wanted the purity and Francis’s spirit of poverty, the Spirituals. The need of this enlarged Francian order to be able to hold and control processions and money became a primary concern that eventually had Pope John XXII condemnation of poverty requirements in 1323 bull Cum Inter Nonnullus , even to contradicting Francis’s base belief that Jesus and the apostles had no processions. The Order became notionally poor, in that their monks did not own processions, but the Order itself controlled wealth and became a powerful group within the