contemplative prayer, and pastoral care of individuals through preaching and hearing
confessions. Conflict with local clergy is regrettable, stated Bonaventure, but the friars
make up for the defects of poorly prepared clerics. Increased emphasis upon university
studies at the expense of manual labor, and thus full participation as masters and students
in university life, was justified by Bonaventure as the necessary preparation for
preaching. Unlike Dominicans, who from the beginning had been a clerical order
dedicated to doctrinal preaching against heresy, the Franciscans began with a model of
lay exhortation to moral conversion, not doctrinal preaching in a clerical mode.
Recruiting from the university student body and the conversion of university masters like
Alexander of Hales to the Franciscan way ensured the increasing place of studies, and of
a clerical elite, in the order.
Some Franciscans, known as “Spirituals,” found in the eschatological ideas of the
Italian monastic Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1132–1202) a prediction that Francis was the
harbinger of a new world order of radical spirituality. Peter John Olivi (1248–1298), a
friar from Provence who was trained at Paris and taught at Montpellier and Narbonne,
was one of the most forceful of these Spirituals. In his writings, which included a
commentary on the Book of Revelation, Olivi joined an intense apocalyptic spirituality,
foreseeing a cosmic struggle in which a corrupt church would be replaced by a spiritual
church, with an acceptance of the doctrine of the “use” of goods, provided that “use” was
in all simplicity and only of necessities.
Dissension and debate over the issue of ownership and property continued within and
without the order. The Inquisition sought out and punished Spirituals in southern France.
In the early 14th century, Pope Clement V sought to balance acceptance of the Spirituals’
criticism of laxity in the order with a need for reconciliation and unity. Soon, however,
Pope John XXII turned the doctrinal and coercive power of the papacy against the
Spirituals and attacked their central beliefs and practices in a series of condemnations that
led to the isolation and decline of the Spiritual Franciscans, a struggle that cost each side
dearly. In addition, John declared heretical the fundamental doctrine agreed to by all
Franciscans, that Christ and his disciples had no possessions. Moreover, he forced the
Conventuals to accept full ownership of all they possessed, thus reversing previous papal
distinctions between “use” and “ownership.” At the Council of Constance (1415), the
Observants, a group drawing on Spiritualist traditions of austerity, were granted a certain
level of independence within the order, with a separate vicar in each province and a vicar
general for all provinces, all serving under the minister general of the order. Pope Martin
V reinstated in 1428 the distinction between “use” and “ownership” made by Gregory IX.
In 1517, the Franciscans were divided into two independent branches, Observants and
Conventuals, each with its own minister general, a division that continues to this day.
Several years after Francis attracted his first converts, Clare (ca. 1194–1253), a young
woman from a wealthy Assisi family, sought to join Francis’s group. In 1212, she was
accepted by Francis as a convert and placed for the moment in a Benedictine nunnery.
Clare and another young woman were soon living in the church of San Damiano at Assisi
as enclosed female religious, dedicated to asceticism and prayer of the strictest kind.
Clare was denied the apostolate to the world that Francis found and that she desired; hers
was to be an intense dedication to denial and prayer in a strictly enclosed life. This
female branch of the Franciscans became known as the “Poor Ladies of San Damiano,”
later the “Poor Clares” or “Clarisses.” At San Damiano, they lived by manual labor or
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