Joining St. Francis's friars now takes a whole year

VITERBO, Papal States, September 22, 1220 AD — Until this week, this was how a man joined Saint Francis of Assisi’s friars. He told St. Francis that he wanted to live the life of the Gospel with him. Then he gave away all he owned to the poor. That was the whole of it.

A letter from Pope Honorius III, sealed on September 22, has changed that. No man may make his vows now until he has first spent a year on trial.

The letter gives two more commands. A friar who has already made his vows may not leave the order. If he goes, nobody is allowed to take him back. And no one wearing the friars’ clothing may travel about without permission.

St. Francis began with a handful of companions at a chapel called the Porziuncola, below Assisi. In 1209 AD Pope Innocent III approved a short rule of life for them. It was a few passages of the Gospel, the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and a few rules of conduct. Ever since then, the order has run on St. Francis’s own say-so.

The men who govern the friars out in the provinces want a written rule, like the older orders have. St. Francis will not give them one.

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. They asked for a say in running the order too. St. Francis answered that he was called to walk a simple way.

The Pope’s court waited for neither side. Ahead of any rule of the friars’ own, it demanded one thing at once: a year on trial for every man who asks to join.

The man waiting outside the Pope’s door

St. Francis had been away in the East, and he landed back at Venice in July. In the middle of September he went to the Pope, who was at Orvieto. He did not go up to the papal rooms. He waited outside the door until Pope Honorius III came out. Then he 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. The man he asked for was the Bishop of Ostia. The Pope gave him that man, Cardinal Ugolino.

Ugolino 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. That was the kind of rule St. Francis had refused for his own friars. And Ugolino gave St. Francis permission to write a Rule for his own order.

But the year on trial stood. It was the one thing the Pope’s court would not take back, and the letter ordering it was sealed days later. The reason the letter gives is that nearly all the other religious orders already test a man for a time before they let him in.

So for the man who walks up to the Porziuncola tomorrow, giving away all he owns is not enough any more. He waits a year before he may make his profession.