Pope Honorius III sets a year's wait on joining St. Francis's friars

VITERBO, Papal States, September 22, 1220 AD — A letter from Pope Honorius III, sealed on September 22, puts a year between a man’s asking to join the Friars Minor and the vows that make him one. It forbids any friar who has taken those vows to leave the order. It forbids anyone wearing their habit to travel without permission.

Saint Francis of Assisi began with a handful of companions at the chapel of the Porziuncola, below Assisi. In 1209 AD Pope Innocent III approved a short rule of life for them: some passages of the Gospel, the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and a few rules of conduct. The order has run on St. Francis’s own authority ever since. The men who govern the friars in the provinces want it run like the older orders. St. Francis does not.

Before this letter, a man who wanted to join told St. Francis that he wanted to live the life of the Gospel with him, and proved it by giving everything he owned to the poor. That was the whole of it.

Those men had gone to Cardinal Ugolino, the Bishop of Ostia and the order’s protector. They asked him to use his friendship with St. Francis to bring the friars under a written rule of the kind the older orders live by. They asked, too, for a say in running the order. St. Francis answered that he was called to walk by the way of simplicity and would always follow the folly of the Cross. The Pope’s court waited for neither of them. Ahead of any rule of the friars’ own, it required one thing at once: a year’s novitiate for every man who presents himself.

St. Francis had gone to the East, and had left two friars, Matthew of Narni and Gregory of Naples, in charge of the order. In May they called the friars together and laid new fasts on them, harder than the rule required.

St. Francis landed at Venice in July, learned what had been done, and called every friar to the Porziuncola for Michaelmas, September 29. In the middle of September he went to the Pope, who was at Orvieto. He did not go up to the papal apartments but waited outside the door until Pope Honorius III came out, then bowed and asked him for one man. “My lord, you are great and often absorbed by great affairs; poor friars cannot come and talk with you as often as they need to do; you have given me many popes; give me a single one to whom I may address myself when need occurs, and who will listen in your stead, and discuss my affairs and those of the Order,” St. Francis said. He asked for the Bishop of Ostia, and the Pope gave him Ugolino, the same cardinal.

Ugolino gave way at once. He took back the rule he had given the Poor Ladies, the sisters of Saint Clare of Assisi. It was close to the rule of the Benedictine nuns, the kind St. Francis had refused for his own friars. And he gave St. Francis permission to write a Rule for his own order. The year’s novitiate stood, and the letter imposing it came days later.

The letter opens: “Honorius, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Brother Francis and the other priors or custodes of the Brothers Minor, greeting and the apostolic benediction.” St. Francis’s name stands first: the letter commands him and the men who govern the friars under him, not the friars at large.

Then it gives its reason. “In nearly all religious Orders it has been wisely ordained that those who present themselves with the purpose of observing the regular life shall make trial of it for a certain time, during which they also shall be tested, in order to leave neither place nor pretext for inconsiderate steps.”

Three commands follow. “For these reasons we command you by these presents to admit no one to make profession until after one year of novitiate; we forbid that after profession any brother shall leave the Order, and that any one shall take back again him who has gone out from it. We also forbid that those wearing your habit shall circulate here and there without obedience, lest the purity of your poverty be corrupted.”

For the man who comes to the Porziuncola tomorrow, giving away all he owns is no longer enough: he waits a year before he may make his profession, the promise that binds him to this life for good. The second command binds the friars as much as the man who walks out — no friar may take him back.

The third reaches any man in the habit on any road: he travels under obedience or not at all, and the reason the letter gives is poverty. Its last sentence tells St. Francis and the men who govern the friars what to do with them: “If any friars have had this audacity, you will inflict upon them ecclesiastical censures until repentance.”