St. Francis lies at a friar's feet and promises to obey him

ASSISI, Umbria, September 29, 1220 AD — Saint Francis of Assisi gave up the leadership of the Friars Minor, the order he founded, today at its Michaelmas chapter at the Porziuncola below Assisi. He handed its government to Brother Peter of Cattaneo, a friar who had travelled with him to the East, and in front of the assembled brothers he promised to obey him. He stepped down a week after Pope Honorius III issued a bull, a formal papal letter, that set new rules for the order.

The order had grown so fast that the strict poverty of its first years was getting harder to keep. Its ministers, the superiors of the order’s provinces, wanted it organised on the model of the older religious orders. They asked Cardinal Ugolino, Bishop of Ostia, to use his friendship with St. Francis to bring it about. St. Francis wanted his friars to own nothing, as the first ones had. Questioned about the ministers’ request, he answered that he was called to walk the way of simplicity.

St. Francis had been away since June 1219 AD, when he sailed from Ancona for the East with eleven companions, Peter of Cattaneo among them. In May this year the two vicars he had left in charge held a chapter that ordered fasts harder than the Rule required. A rumour went round that St. Francis was dead. He landed at Venice in July, learned what had happened, and called this chapter for Michaelmas.

In mid-September, at Orvieto, St. Francis asked Pope Honorius III to name Cardinal Ugolino the order’s protector, with its direction in his hands. In the talks that followed, St. Francis was given permission to write a new Rule. But the Pope’s advisers required one change at once: every man who asked to join had to spend a year on trial first, the novitiate.

The bull was dated September 22 and addressed to St. Francis and the order’s other superiors. Pope Honorius III wrote in it: “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… We also forbid that those wearing your habit shall circulate here and there without obedience, lest the purity of your poverty be corrupted.” The order now needed an administrator, St. Francis’s biographer Paul Sabatier judges, and St. Francis “sadly acknowledged that he himself was not in the slightest degree such a person.”

A chapter is a gathering of the friars. By St. Francis’s own ordinance it meets at the Porziuncola twice a year, at Pentecost and at Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael on September 29. The bull was read to the friars. The ministers met to settle the main points of the new Rule, and only they had a vote. St. Francis was left to write up what they decided.

Then St. Francis resigned. He told the friars, using the Italian form of Peter of Cattaneo’s name: “From henceforth I am dead for you, but here is Brother Pietro di Catana, whom you and I will all obey.” He lay face down in front of Peter of Cattaneo and promised him obedience and reverence.

The friars wept aloud, because losing him as their head was like being orphaned.

St. Francis got up, joined his hands and raised his eyes to heaven. He prayed: “Lord, I return to thee this family which thou hast confided to me. Now, as thou knowest, most sweet Jesus, I have no longer strength nor ability to keep on caring for them; I confide them, therefore, to the ministers. May they be responsible before thee at the day of judgment if any brother, by their negligence or bad example, or by a too severe discipline, should ever wander away.”

In later years St. Francis often explained to the brothers at their chapters why he had resigned. St. Francis said he had given up the office “by reason of mine infirmities and other reasonable causes.” From then on, St. Francis told the brothers, all he owed the order was prayer and a good example.

Peter of Cattaneo governed for less than six months; he died on March 10, 1221 AD. In those months St. Francis stayed at the Porziuncola to write the Rule.

One day the mother of two of the friars came to St. Francis and asked for alms. St. Francis called the mother of any friar his own mother and the mother of all the brothers. He turned to Peter of Cattaneo and asked him: “Can we give any alms to our mother?” Peter of Cattaneo answered that the house had nothing left but one New Testament. The friars had no prayer book, so they read the lessons of their night prayers from it. St. Francis told Peter of Cattaneo: “Give our mother the New Testament, that she may sell it for her need, because by it we are admonished to succour the poor. For my part I believe that the gift of it will be more pleasing than the reading out of it.” The book was given to her.