Foundations of the Anglican Church LX

Selby Abbey in Yorkshire: when

the Benedictine Community was

suppressed, the Abbey Church

became the parish church

As mentioned in the previous posting, Henry did not find much opposition to his break with papal authority from the religious orders, save for the Carthusian monks and the Observant Franciscan Friars.  The Observants are the group known today as the OFM’s or “Brown Franciscans.”  These were the two strictest religious communities in England at the time, but even among these the majority of monks/friars seem to have gone along with the king in the matter of the supremacy.  All in all eighteen Carthusian monks and lay brothers were martyred, all for denying the Royal Supremacy.  I can’t come up with a reliable number of Observant Franciscans but it was less than that, perhaps a half dozen who stood firm after imprisonment and other scare tactics. 

Although most of the 15,000 religious in England went along with the royal supremacy and took the required oath that they recognized Henry as head of the Church, the King determined to suppress religious life in his realm.  It seems above all to have been a matter of finance rather than theology or even politics—the king saw the religious houses as a new source of revenue to expand his royal programmes without having to request the Commons for new taxes.  He had learned from Wolsey’s suppressions that there were vast amounts of wealth—primarily in land—to be gained by closing down the monasteries.  Henry’s agent in the work was Thomas Cromwell.  You might want to look at the posting for October 14^th to learn more about Cromwell, but Cromwell was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and learned well from Wolsey on how to please the King at any cost and without conscience.  When Wolsey fell, Cromwell rose to power.   It was Cromwell who designed most of the legislation by which Henry separated the English Church from the Roman Communion.  And it was Cromwell who moved to suppress the monasteries.

With the first suppressions in 1536 it appeared that this was simply the sort of reorganization that Wolsey had employed and for which even good Catholics had been calling in order to reform the Church.  Small houses with little income and few members were first to be targeted.  Monks and nuns were transferred to larger houses that could support them.  Royal Commissioners would visit the house, interview the community, inventory the assets and make a report back to Cromwell.  Not all houses were immediately suppressed—some were allowed for the time being to continue.  Those marked for suppression were visited a second time where the visitators would actually close down the house, transfer the religious, and dispose of the property.  In the disposal of the properties—the seizure of the assets in the King’s name or their distribution to the King’s friends—the commissioners were very careful to make sure all debts were first settled, those owned a pension given their rights, and matters settled amiably with tenants.  Properties were not just seize outright for the King.  Those religious—a minority—who wanted to secularize rather than transfer to a new foundation—were also given a cash settlement from the monastery assets.  As fair as the royal commissioners were, the canons of the two houses that resisted their suppression—were treated quite brutally, some with imprisonment and others with death. All of these foundations closed in the first wave of suppressions were either monks (Benedictine, Cistercian, or Carthusian), nuns of the same orders, or Canons Regular.  About eighty houses were suppressed in this first wave—most having less than a half dozen religious.  The Carthusian houses were larger communities but due to the resistance their now martyred colleagues had shown to the royal supremacy, came into particular focus for suppression. 

The second phase—in 1537—was accomplished by encouraging larger communities to voluntarily surrender their property and assets to the crown.  The Cistercians at Furness Abbey voluntarily surrendered their monastery because Henry was about to move against them for their involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace—a popular uprising against Henry’s break with Rome.  Jervaulx, also Cistercian, surrendered for similar reason.  Lewes Priory (Benedictine), Titchfield Abbey (Premonstratensian) Bardsey Abbey (Augustinian), Eye Priory and Easby Abbey all voluntarily surrendered.  A new policy was put into practice with the religious not being allowed to transfer to other houses, but being given a modest pension on which to live on their own.  Monastic pensions averaged around £5 a year—at that time the income of a modest gentleman.  Nuns were less fortunate as their monasteries were usually less well endowed than those of the monks or canons and received about £3 per annum.  Henry required that monks and nuns, though no longer living in their cloisters, maintain religious garb and he forbad them a release from celibacy which prevented their marriage.  For nuns this mean they usually had to return to their families, but the pension due them provided them with the ability to contribute to the family income.  Abbots and priors usually received more handsome—and often more handsome by far—pensions.  They also were more likely to be offered Cathedral deaneries or even bishoprics, in which case their new position paid them a salary in lieu of any pension. 

Cromwell set up the Court of Augmentations to make sure that the disposal of monastic property was done in such a way as not to leave debtors, tenants, or the religious themselves in undue distress.  This was a very wise policy as the sudden collapse of these houses without providing for the religious or their employees or their creditors would have done serious economic damage that would have made the King and his policies very unpopular. As it was, with people able to get their hands on monastic wealth through royal grant or purchase, the dissolution was well received in most circles.  Indeed, when Mary came to the throne and investigated the possibility that such properties would be returned to the re-founded monasteries there was great alarm.

By 1538 many of the larger monasteries, seeing where the wind was blowing, were applying for permission to hand over their properties to the Crown in return for pensions.   Also by 1538 Cromwell had gotten the dissolution process down to a science and was closing down religious foundations quite quickly and with his usual efficiency.

To this point we have spoken of the monks and canons—both of whom had massive endowments.  The mendicant orders—the Augustinian Hermits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites—did not have extensive endowments but lived from their work and from alms.  Their convents were also closed down but the religious—not having the assets from which to provide pensions—were not pensioned off.  Their buildings were sold or given to clients of the King in return for services done the Crown.  This created some hardship for the friars.  The priests could seek work as secular clergy—and many having degrees in theology were often rewarded with decent posts—but the lay brothers had no choice but to enter the workforce as common laborers.  Like the monks and nuns, the friars—clergy and lay—were not release from the obligations of celibacy. 

Thus by 1539 most—but not all—of the religious foundations of England and Wales had been suppressed.  Only a few great abbeys remained. Vast amounts of land were in new hands and huge amounts of wealth were in the royal treasury.  At the same time, Henry was not releasing the religious from their vows and especially from celibacy.  England was in many ways still very Catholic but the elimination of the religious removed one very important bulwark of religious orthodoxy and in time that would tell.  

The Legacy of Saint Francis



I mentioned in an earlier posting that I had always—with one exception—found the Franciscans of whatever stripe given to charity.  The observant Greyfriars of Greenwich whom I had mentioned in some postings on Henry VIII were most notable in this regard.  When  Henry VIII sent his visitators to close the friary and disperse the friars, the visitators reported that the friars were bonded together so closely as brothers that no one could come between them.  Fraternal charity is characteristic of Franciscans but, as I had pointed out, there is one notable exception of which I am aware and it occurred within the Capuchin branch of the Franciscan family. 

Giotto's portray of Francis' soul being

taken to heaven

In 1987 a small group of Capuchin friars located in the Bronx (New York) led by Father Benedict Groeschel and with the encouragement of Cardinal John O’Connor, then Archbishop of New York, separated themselves from the Capuchin Order and established themselves as the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.  The Capuchins themselves had been a reform movement with the observant Franciscans in the early sixteenth century.  Father Groeschel and his disciples claimed that they were simply trying to return to a more authentically Capuchin way of life but the particulars of how they separated themselves from the Capuchins involve a certain about of duplicity and deceit that left their Capuchin brothers deeply hurt.  Moreover, they represented themselves, or allowed themselves to be represented to benefactors and vocation prospects, as the authentic heirs of the Capuchin heritage so as to imply that the Capuchins had lost their charism.  Though Groeschel and the others should have known better than to allow this to happen, the villain, if there be a villain, in this process was Cardinal O’Connor who despite having no idea of what religious life is about—he himself was a diocesan priest, not a religious—interfered with a number of religious communities, often sowing seeds of dissent. 

Benedict Groeschel is, in addition to being a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal and a priest, a psychologist.  Some of his fellow priests are skeptical of him as a confessor or a spiritual director claiming that he is, or was in the days of his active ministry, “controlling” of penitents and spiritual directees, forbidding them from seeing other priests or counselors for advice and otherwise establishing his monopoly over their consciences. He certainly has taken very unnuanced stances in regard to a variety of issues and especially those involving human sexuality and his approach could be considered to verge on the sort of control one finds in some cults. 

Certainly the separation of various “reform” movements within religious orders is always a difficult process and often involves pain on both sides.  The difference in the Vatican II era is that most groups have tried to stress not “reform” which carries certain judgment values but “renewal” which is a less onerous term and doesn’t reek of the sort of spiritual pride to which many “reformers” are given.  Of course Groeschel’s group are known as Friars of the Renewal, but as in another community which Cardinal O’Connor set up, the Sisters of Life, there is also a certain smarminess in their attitude to those religious communities who see their role in the Church, and indeed who see the Church itself, in a different light. 

When Francis of Assisi established his Friars Minor in 1210 (the year of their approval by Pope Innocent III—the original brotherhood had gathered around Francis in the year or two immediately prior—he maintained a critical distance from the hierarchical Church.  Francis was by no means disloyal but neither was he complicit.  He saw that the hierarchical Church had drifted far from the evangelical ideals of the Gospel.  Humility and service had been abandoned for pomp and power.  Francis established his brotherhood to be a witness to the Gospel in a Church that had so compromised itself with the world of its day that the Gospel was all but forgotten.  Francis had a deep personal friendship with Pope Innocent III as well as with many of the prelates of his day—those who wanted to see reform in the Church, but he and his friars refused to compromise their vision of a Gospel Life to accommodate the power and the pomp of prelates.  Habits and cords, or even austere poverty, don’t of themselves make one a disciple of Francis, or of Jesus Christ.  The spirit of Francis today is found more among the “nuns on the bus” than some of those who claim to be his sons or daughters but have lost that critical distance from the institutional Church. Even further from Francis and his ideals is the failure of fraternal charity and the triumph of spiritual pride. 

Franciscans of the Immaculate--Saint Francis 3

The Crucifixo of San Damiano

which spoke to Francis

In looking at Saint Francis and the lay hermit movement out of which his Franciscans developed I think we can identify seven characteristics.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1.     <!--[endif]-->Centrality of Christ.  The lay hermit movement of the 13^th century was Christocentric in its spirituality which is to say that they were focused exclusively on Christ as the organizing program of their spirituality.  The Gospels provided them with a direct encounter with Christ who was the only path to the Father.  There certainly was a tender love for the Blessed Virgin  Mary and an admiration for the saints, especially the apostles,  but it was Chris and Christ alone who was their model. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2.     <!--[endif]-->In their love for Christ, they consciously copied the life of Jesus and his apostles and used the example of the early Christian Community as described in Acts 4 as their model for their own communal life. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->3.     <!--[endif]-->Their identification with Christ was rooted in a deep appreciation of his humanity and in particular with his poverty and his suffering.  Especially for Francs, but certainly for all the lay hermits of the time, the key to imitating Christ was to emulate his poverty.  Poverty was not only the rejection of such luxuries as fine habits and the best of food and drink, but was a rejection of the privileges that came with being identified with the institutional Church.  Francis and others rejected living in monasteries choosing instead only the shabbiest of dwellings.  Clerical titles and honors were rejected in favor of all, even the priests, being called “Brother.”  No distinction was made between the ordained and the non-ordained in their communities or in their ministries to the laity other than in the administration of the sacraments.  In other words, they rejected the hierarchical aspects of the institutional Church and even when they were required to accept the office of bishop or cardinal they maintained the strictest marks of poverty and humility. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->4.     <!--[endif]-->Their rejection of living in monasteries was also due to their commitment to be like the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head—homeless wandering was an essential characteristic of the lay hermit life.  Francis insisted that the hermitages and simple “convents” (as opposed to monasteries) where his “lesser brothers” (Friars Minor) lived be owned by others and only given to their use so that, if others judged them unfaithful to their vocation, they could be expelled.  They were to own nothing, either individually or collectively. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->5.     <!--[endif]-->Lay hermits imitated Christ in their solitary prayer.  While some lay hermit groups, and Francis’ brotherhood was one of them, prayed the Divine Office together, the heart of their prayer was solitary discourse with God in their cells or other abandoned places during the night.  Jacques de Vitry, a Belgian Bishop met Francis and his hermits at the papal court in Perugia in 1216 and mentioned how they “retreated to their hermitages at night to spend the night in prayer.” 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->6.     <!--[endif]-->Lay hermits were not cloistered as were monastic hermits such as the Carthusians. They rejected most monastic practices because their vocation was quite essentially different than the monastic vocation. Rather they were expected to have a ministry among the sick and especially lepers, as well as widows, orphans, the disabled, and the poor.  They also reached out to sinners and those alienated from the Church. 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->7.     <!--[endif]-->Finally, in imitation of Christ and the Apostles, Francis and other lay hermits preached the Kingdom of God—a life of discipleship, a new way of living out the Gospel in one’s daily life.  The Kingdom of God is not about what happens after we die—and that was never the emphasis of Francis’ preaching—it is about living in this world under the authority of the Gospel.  The Kingdom of God is putting into practice the teachings of Jesus in our daily lives.  Francis understood this. 

The Franciscans of the Immaculate carry on the Franciscan Charism in several respects.  They live simply and without luxury.  They reach out and encounter ordinary people and particularly those on the fringes of our economic structures.  In their fervor as a new community they certainly reject many of the material comforts to which some religious have accommodated themselves.  On the other hand there are significant ways in which they differ from Francis and the Franciscan tradition.  Their approach to Christ is through his Immaculate Mother and their spirituality is more “Marian” than Chistocentric.  In this regard they follow the example of Saint Maximilian Kolbe more than Francis.  They also, while maintaining a fairly austere life, have kept many of the monastic trimmings that had crept into Franciscanism (and other mendicant orders) through the centuries after Trent and especially in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Their prayer is primarily liturgical/ceremonial rather than solitary and contemplative and their liturgies are, despite their general poverty, given to some degree of splendor in ritual and the accouterments.  Their emphasis is more on teaching the Church than preaching the Kingdom and they are considerably more enamored of the institutional model of Church than the kerygmatic model of Francis.   All of this is perfectly acceptable of course but it indicates that they are more disciples of Saint Maximilian Kolbe than Francis of Assisi and their model of religious life is more based in 19^th century romanticism than the 13^th century evangelicalism of Saint Francis. 

What will happen, as it most usually does in religious life, is that as some of the Franciscans of the Immaculate study the Franciscan charism the group itself will make certain corrections of course to being them more into what we might call “Franciscan Orthodoxy.”  Hopefully in that process they won’t lose the fervor and commitment to simplicity that marks them.  If they can move beyond their attempts at a literal emulation Saint Maximilian to become disciples of Francis, they could be a real leaven for renewal in the Franciscan family.  

Franciscans of the Immaculate--St Francis 2

Pope Innocent III 

Well, let’s get back to Saint Francis.  As I had mentioned two posts ago, Francis had given up on his party animal life and took on the position of a lay hermit.  Lay hermits were, as I had written, canonically recognized laity who lived in poverty and prayer, not a cloistered life but a life of wandering in the towns and villages talking about the Gospels and the challenges of following Jesus in the very materialistic society of  13^th century Europe.  These men—and they were invariably men—dropped out of a society they had come to consider shallow and pointless.  (A similar but not quite equivalent option for women were the beguines.  Beguines were not given to the extremes of poverty that characterized the lay hermits.)  Most of the men drawn to the lay hermit life were from the prosperous bourgeois families, were somewhat educated, able to read and write and usually with a little Latin.  What characterized the spirituality of the movement was an absorbing fascination with the humanity of Christ, especially manifest in his suffering and in his poverty which they sought to imitate. 

In the last decades of the 12^th century, the Church had lost many members to new movements arising out of an evangelical zeal for discipleship that had seized the Middle Class.  A wealthy merchant of Lyon (in what is today France but at the time was more culturally tied to Lombardy in northern Italy) by the name of Peter Waldo had been seized with fervor by the gospels and had taken literally the words of Christ to go sell all you possess, give to the poor, and to then come and follow him.  Waldo, who had been immensely wealthy, did precisely that and became a street beggar preaching in the towns and villages around Lyon.  The Archbishop of that city, embarrassed by his wealth in contrast to Waldo’s poverty had ordered him to stop preaching.  Waldo went to the Pope, Alexander III, who commended his dedication to live in the poverty of Christ but, as Waldo was not in Holy Orders, supported the Archbishop’s ban on Waldo’s preaching.  In the end, Waldo and his followers separated from the Church over this ban on lay preaching.  

The Church was facing a steady drain of some of its most zealous members precisely because their evangelical fervor was a threat to the comfort and luxury of the bishops and some priests.  Men like Waldo were considered fanatics and extremists by clergy and hierarchs who wanted to enjoy the privileges their status brought them.  In addition to Waldo and his followers, sometimes called the Poor Men of Lyon, or the Poor Men of Lombardy (to which they had spread from Lyon) there were other groups such as the Umiliati.  Still others were seduced into a form of Gnosticism called Catharism which, unlike Waldo’s followers or the Umiliati, crossed the boundaries into heresy. 

In 1199 one of the greatest—if not the greatest—of men to occupy the Chair of Peter was elected to the papacy.  Lotario, Count of Segni, was elected Pope and took the name Innocent III.  The new pope had studied Theology in Paris, the premier theological faculty of the time known for its liberal thought, and then had studied law in Bologna, the leading faculty for civil and canon law.  Moreover, not only was he highly educated, he was personally holy.  Despite his high office, Innocent led an austere personal life (sound familiar?) wearing the simplest of robes, made of wool rather than silk and expensive fabrics. He ate spartanly and his private apartments were plain.   He upheld the dignity of the papal office by integrity rather than by pomp.  At the same time he was a strong leader who brooked no opposition.  One of his first acts was to distinguish between canonical preaching (doctrine) and giving what we might call today “witness talks.”  Laity could, with the permission of the bishop, inspire others by being given the opportunity even in church to speak of what the Gospels meant to them and how they might better live out the teachings of Jesus.  This role of lay preaching was especially entrusted to these lay hermits.

The Lay hermit movement was especially taken by the sentence attributed to Saint Jerome in his vocation—“naked to follow the naked Christ.”   Lay hermit groups sprung up all over Europe as these men renounced material possessions to voluntarily live in the most abject poverty, to minister to the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters—especially the lepers—and to speak to others of making the Gospels real in one’s life.  This is what Francis sought to do.  He returned to his ruined church of San Damiano where he lived, spending the nights in prayer. By day he ministered to the lepers and other social outcasts, all the time slowly rebuilding the ruined chapel.  His former friends came to see him.  Some brought him help in his projects.  A few joined him, taking the habit of hermits themselves.  They were not, at this point, religious but they did have canonical standing, blessed by the Bishop of Assisi.

In the popular and lovely 1972 Zeffirelli film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Bishop Guido of Assisi is portrayed as an obese and slothful prelate who doesn’t take Francis seriously.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  Guido, a friend of the reforming Innocent, was enthused by Francis’ vision and anxious to help him.  He provided the necessary introductions to have Francis meet the Pope.  Now the Pope, while ardent in programs to reform the Church, did not at first see Francis as a serious aid in this project.  For an educated man used to the corridors of power, how could this repentant playboy from a mediocre Umbrian hill-town with no theological training be of any real help in cleaning out the nest of sycophants and parasites into which both the Roman Curia and local hierarchy had, for the most part, degenerated?  (If this sounds familiar, remember that the past gives us insight into the present.)   The story goes that the Pope had a dream in which he saw Francis holding up the crumbling Lateran Basilica.  (The Lateran was, at the time, the papal residence.  The Popes only moved to the Vatican in the 15^th century and even then it didn’t become the primary papal residence until the 19^th.)  It is a lovely story and there may be some truth to it but it is more likely that in the interview that Innocent gave to Francis, the Pope’s mind was changed and he saw the potential this hermit had to give the Church new spiritual energy.

An important question is why Francis did not choose to enter a traditional religious order of his day.  He certainly had options,  there were monasteries—Benedictine and Cistercian as well as Carthusian—that would have permitted him traditional religious life.  There were also the Canons Regular—religious, mostly clerics, who led a community life while doing pastoral work in parishes and preaching.  We can see by the choices he made why traditional religious life did not attract him.  Religious had security.  Their monasteries provided a roof over their head and food on their table as well as winning them a respected place in society.  As Francis’ brotherhood developed he forbad them to own property, even the houses in which they lived.  They lived in the neighborhoods of the poor, outside the city walls and the protection those walls afforded.  They wore the patched clothing of the poor, not proper religious habits.  They didn’t aim for the respect of the Middle Class—far from it, they went out of their way to identify with the poor who were held in contempt by the merchants and business owners.  In fact, however, their integrity in embracing the poverty of Christ did win them the respect of almost all in society and they drew vocations in great numbers from the very classes whose values and lifestyle they were rejecting. 

Francis started a revolution that reformed the Church.  Thousands of men took up his lifestyle.  Eventually this small band of lay hermits in Umbria grew into an Order of tens of thousands of brothers spread across the known world. Francis’ spiritual sons would go off to Muslim lands and die as martyrs; they would go on expedition to Peking and the court of the great Kahn.  They would accompany Cortes and Pizzaro in the Americas.  A son of Saint Francis would be the first white man to see the great cataracts of Niagara.  Franciscans would sit on the throne of Peter—some as good popes, others as bad.  Most important though was that the work of Francis and his brothers among the poor and working classes probably staved off a Luther or a Calvin for three hundred years.  It was an evangelical renewal of the Church—something we could use today.  

Franciscans of the Immaculate--Saint Francis

In my last post I wrote that I would next write about Saint Francis so that we can look at the Franciscans of the Immaculate and see whether they draw their inspiration more from Saint Maximilian Kolbe or from Saint Francis.  To give the spoiler, while I have great respect for this new Congregation I think we will see that they are not Franciscans at all—at least in spirit—but disciples of the Polish Saint who was a martyr of charity at Auschwitz.  And that is not a bad thing at all, it just doesn’t make them Franciscans.  Let me say too, to be fair, while academically I am somewhat of an expert on Franciscanism—my doctoral studies focused on religious movements in 13^th-14^th century Italy—I am not a Franciscan and have no right to say that this person or movement “belongs” or doesn’t “belong.”  Nevertheless, I do know something—more than most—about Franciscanism.

Francis was born in 1181 in Assisi, the only child (as far as we know) of Pietro di Bernardone.  He was baptized Giovanni (John) but nicknamed “Francesco” (Frenchy or Frenchman) by his father—some sources saying that his mother was French.  Pietro de Bernardone was a successful cloth merchant.   Now cloth—the import/export for resale of silks from the Levant, the manufacture of wool, the weaving of brocades and velvets—was the dot.com of the thirteenth century which is to say it was the expanding and lucrative market in which fortunes were made and lost.  Pietro was very successful and the Bernardones were secure in the upper middle class.  Now “upper middle class” is a tricky term; in those days the term was not only financial or even primarily about wealth.  They were bourgeoisie because while they were rich they were not noble.  Many families of the bourgeoisie were richer than the old nobility.  The old nobility had their wealth tied up in land—the urban merchant class had liquid wealth—money and goods for sale.  It often grated on the wealthy that they were not noble and they affected the external signs of nobility—inventing coats of arms for themselves and giving themselves pretentious titles.  They often gave large donations to churches to build family chapels containing burial vaults as the nobility built funerary chapels in cathedrals and monasteries. 

Francis and his friends liked to affect the practices of the old landed families.  When he was about twenty Francis and his friends joined a military expedition against the neighboring town of Perugia.  Francis and his buddies, all spoiled children of parents with too much money to use it wisely, equipped themselves (or their fathers equipped them) as “knights” with horses and armor and set themselves for the glory of war.  What fools.  For all their fancy stuff, these guys were no more knights than they were Martians.  They were the spoiled brats of pretentious families who, unlike the sons of the nobility who were bred to fight, were clueless about the science of warfare.  It was an ignominious defeat and Francis and some of his friends were taken prisoner.  They were lucky they weren’t killed.  They were held for ransom.
About this time Francis became seriously ill.  Some sources imply it was a result of the conditions in which they were held prisoner, others that it was independent of that and was after Francis returned home.  While the illness had physiological dimensions, it seems to have primarily been a nervous breakdown.  Francis’ personality changed drastically during this illness and a slow recovery.  The former party boy became a loner.  He lost his interest in the fast-track lifestyle of his friends.  Instead he began to haunt an old chapel which had fallen into ruins just outside the city walls of Assisi.  He spent long hours wandering through the meadows and orchards that surround Assisi but he always seemed to end up back in this chapel.  It was there that he heard the crucifix speak to him one day: “Francis, rebuild my church that is falling into ruins.”  Obviously, he thought, the church of which Christ is speaking is this chapel of San Damiano and so slowly he began piling up the fallen stones and mortaring them back into place.  Francis, on his rambles through the countryside came into contact with those people who live on the margins of society.  The beggars and the homeless were not permitted to spend the night within the city walls and they slept in barns and sheds or in the open fields.  Probably some sought shelter in the same ruined chapel he was starting to rebuild.  And then there were the lepers.  They were not permitted in the city walls even in the daytime.  They were total outcasts,  picking through garbage for food or old clothes.  Francis began to tend to the sick.  Lepers repulsed him but he knew that they were very image of the crucified—the least of his brothers and sisters to whom Jesus had referred in the Gospel of Matthew. 

We all know the story of how Francis, when confronted by his father for his having given away not only his possessions but some of his father’s wealth, took off his clothes and laid them at his father’s feet and then, naked, turned to the bishop who quickly had him dressed in an old tunic of patched cloth.  This story has long been misinterpreted however.  Francis was not merely renouncing his patrimony to become a beggar but he was embracing a vocation to a particular form of religious life common in those days called “lay hermits.”   Lay hermits were men—the status was limited to men which is why Clare, when she wanted to embrace the same lifestyle had to go to live in a monastery of nuns—who lived in poverty under the protection of the bishop.  They had to be accepted into this status by the bishop but where then given a habit that identified them as hermits—a tunic, usually of mid-calf length, a belt, and a hooded cape called a capuce.  Once accepted by the bishop they had the “right” to beg alms.  They also could preach—not canonical sermons—but what we would call “witness talks” about what the Gospel and teachings of Jesus meant to them.  Lay hermits were not cloistered but usually lived outside the towns or villages where the migrant people and lepers lived.  They often were given the custody of rural chapels or lived in the ruins of monasteries or old barns.  They dedicated themselves to prayer and to this witnessing to the gospel as well as to the care of the sick.  Lay hermits were very common in the 13^th century and not only the Franciscans, but the Carmelites and Augustinians, as well as the Servites, have their origins in the lay hermit movement.  Francis was you quintessential lay hermit.   More on this in the next posting.