Francis Bernadone gave birth to a charismatic movement that swept the world of his time. In the process he founded three orders: one for the brothers who followed him vowing to live "in obedience, without property and in chastity"; a second for women who made the same profession; and a third order for married persons who wished to follow while remaining in the lay world. The spirit of Francis, however, has never been contained by his orders, nor even by the Roman Catholic Church.
Charismatic movements often grow quickly toward formality and, ultimately, rigidity, as the original leader dies and the organization structures itself to continue with more people and places and new eras. Yet the charisma may underlie the institution and periodically break through to flourish once again.
The charisma of Francis continues to dwell with the institutions that found their origin in him, and new expressions continually emerge within that context. Peter Lippert, a Jesuit, wrote in 1927:
The fundamental newness, which is precisely the thing being sought today by countless attempts at innovation, is to be found only along the line of the original ideal of Francis....If God should someday deign to reveal the order of the future to his Church, the order so longingly sought by many of our best people, it will surely bear the stamp of Francis' soul and spirit.
Perhaps this spirit is best seen today in Charles de Foucald's Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus, and the Missionary Brothers and Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa, as well as in associated movements such as the Catholic Worker and Sojourners.
Francis gave only one mandate to his followers: to live an evangelical life, to love as Jesus did. The only real rule for the friars is the gospel. Throughout history friars have found many diverse and creative ways to bring the gospel to life.
Today Franciscans continue to give birth to new expressions. Of particular focus are Francis' concern for peace, his immersion in poverty, and his absorption in prayer. Although possessing many buildings and establishments, Franciscans are finding ways to turn these to more evident use by the people and to begin again in simple dwellings. Franciscans involving themselves in the lives of the poor can be found from the Altiplano of Peru and the struggling rebirth of Nicaragua to the villages of Africa and the slums of Manila. They are present in most of the major cities of the world and even in China and Eastern Europe.
In our province, evidence of Francis' spirit can be easily seen in San Francisco's St. Anthony's Dining Room, which feeds 1,700 people daily. It is there in a less visible, new project of friars living in the neighborhood, struggling to establish cooperative hotels that will maintain the presence and even ownership of housing by poor people in the path of the sweep of tourist hotels. Our friars have marched with Cesar Chavez in California and with welfare recipients down the strip in Las Vegas. Recently I met with some Franciscans on a reservation in Arizona who are struggling to find a new way to minister to the Native Americans that will promote dignity and empowerment.
Francis is known as the patron of peace. This means peace with God and with one's neighbor. But we cannot talk of this today without thinking of the greatest threat to peace, nuclear arms. Our national conference of Friars Minor just issued a lengthy letter denouncing nuclear buildup and calling on all Franciscans to engage in some way in efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Friars will continue their involvement in this struggle by preaching, teaching, protesting, even getting arrested to show how adamantly we must deny this destruction of life. It is not irrelevant that Francis was recently named by the present pope as patron of the ecology. What could be a greater threat to the ecology than nuclear destruction?
Francis was a man of deep prayer. Perhaps half of his life was spent praying in caves. I do not believe that we will find the balance we need to face the technological and self-destructive world in which we live until we can find that peace within ourselves. Many Franciscans, individually and in groups, are trying to regain that depth. It calls for a return to solitude and to the desert.
Finally the religious orders are evidence that Francis wanted us to witness to the gospel by living as a community. Although big institutions become very impersonal, there is a constant flow of energy into creative efforts to live as brothers and sisters. This takes place in new forms of community gathering, both among the members of the orders, and with others in the Franciscan movement.
This last is the greatest hope and most significant development of our age. Perhaps for the first time in the Franciscan history there is a real sharing between those in the orders founded by Francis and others who are alive with his spirit. We see this in exciting ways during the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the birth of Francis this year. All over the world followers of Francis, members of religious orders, congregations and lay people, are gathering to celebrate his memory, and even more importantly to take up his gospel call: to seek God, to join in solidarity with the poor, to be brothers and sisters to one another, and to be, in an effective way, "instruments of his peace."
Louis Vitale was provincial minister of the Western Province, Order of Friars Minor when this article appeared.
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