FromConversion toCommunity 77
the Pater as grace before and after meals.^49 During Lent, and from the feast
of Saint Martin ( 11 November) to Christmas, all attended Matins daily at
their local church.^50 The statutes made provision for governance as well.
Leadership was vested in two brothers, who served as ‘‘ministers.’’ These
ministers, the treasurer, and the messenger of the society solicited from the
brothers annual nominations for the officers of the coming year. As their last
act of governance, they appointed new leaders from the list of nominees.
The officials examined candidates for membership, granted dispensations
from various provisions of the rule when necessary, and served as the group’s
link to the local bishop. A new member needed permission from his wife to
join. Each vowed himself to permanent membership unless he left to become
a regular religious. The ministers had power to expel incorrigible members,
whether for violations of the rule or heresy.^51 The ‘‘Propositum’’ made elabo-
rate provision concerning suffrages for the dead. When a member died, the
brothers engaged a priest to sing a Requiem Mass within the week of death;
the literate members recited fifty psalms and the illiterate fifty Paters. Each
year, priest affiliates said three Masses, the literate said the whole Psalter,
and all others said a hundred Paters for the group’s departed.^52
Short and unelaborated, the ‘‘Propositum’’ imitates the structures and
devotions of known eleventh-century rural confraternities. Later urban soci-
eties, whether religious confraternities or communal corporations, perpetu-
ated the same forms. In practice, however, the move from ad hoc association
to developed organization came slowly. The penitent movement arrived in
Vicenza about 1222 , where by midcentury wills and other records identify
individual lay penitents. The oldest extant will, that of Fra Zilio di fu Alberto
Ofredini of Marostica, is dated 17 December 1253. The Vicenza penitents
remained very loosely organized. Only in the 1280 s did they become institu-
tionalized. By then, the brothers had a single ‘‘minister,’’ Fra Giacomo of
Vicenza, who attended the ‘‘general chapter’’ of Italian penitents at Bologna
on 12 November 1289.^53 Even at this late date, the penitents were free of
clerical control. Fra Giacomo was a lay penitent himself, not a friar or cleric.
Ecclesiastical andSecularRecognition
The lay penitents’ way of life, begun in the 1100 s and systematized by the
1210 s, received canonical form on 20 May 1221 , with Pope Gregory IX’s
approbation of theMemorialeof the ‘‘Brothers and Sisters of Penance Living
- ‘‘Propositum,’’ 7 – 12 , Meersseman,Dossier, 88 ; ‘‘Memoriale,’’ 7 , 12 – 14 , ibid., 98 , 99 – 100 ; cf. Gra-
tian,Decretum,C. 33 q. 3 c. 20 ; and see Andrews,Early Humiliati, 104 – 5 , on Humiliati practice. - ‘‘Propositum,’’ 14 , Meersseman,Dossier, 89 ; ‘‘Memoriale,’’ 14 , ibid., 100.
- ‘‘Propositum,’’ 27 – 38 , Meersseman,Dossier, 90 ; ‘‘Memoriale,’’ 28 , 32 – 38 , ibid., 106 , 110 – 12.
- ‘‘Propositum,’’ 23 – 24 , Meersseman,Dossier, 89 ; secular clergy complained about the alienation of
burial fees: Meersseman,Ordo, 2 : 579. - On the Vicenza penitents, see Giovanni Mantese, ‘‘Fratres et sorores de poenitentia di s.
Francesco in Vicenza dalxiiialxvsecolo,’’Miscellanea Gilles Ge ́rard Meersseman,ed. Maccarrone et al.,
2 : 696 , 700 – 701.