The Story
The year was 1974. In my home province of St. Joseph one of our large inner-city houses was the site of our post-novitiate. The community of approximately 40 friars included many friars in initial formation, some professors at the local theologate, staff for the on-site parish and other friars in ministry. 75% of the friars in the community were lay friars. The house was quite full and had a relatively small choir area for prayer. It was the ritual custom in that house for the ordained friars to leave the choir after morning Lauds, retire to the sacristy to vest for Eucharist, and return to the choir where they took their place around the small altar to concelebrate. Positioning themselves thus virtually always blocked the view of some of at least some of the friars who remained in the choir stalls.

A number of the younger friars complained to the local minister about the situation. Despite repeated attempts to help the younger friars understand the mind set of the ordained friars, the tensions mounted. The topic was eventually broached at a community meeting; as a compromise, the ordained friars -- who insisted that they must leave the choir to vest -- agreed to concelebrate from the choir stalls. The compromise was satisfactory neither for the ordained nor the lay friars; the tension never abated.

One evening after night prayer, some of the lay friars, the local minister and a few ordained friars found themselves in the community room when the topic came up again; a lengthy and sometimes heated discussion ensued. Ordained friars were characterized as insensitive and lacking humility; lay friars were accused of denigrating the priesthood. The local minister recognized that the fraternity was beginning to unravel over this issue, and rapidly progressing toward a point of irreparable damage. It was time he intervened. As he was scheduled to be the presider at the next morning’s Eucharist, he chose that moment to act and act decisively.

The next morning after Lauds, as the ordained friars were preparing to leave the choir in order to vest, the local minister asked everyone to remain in their place. He then went to the altar and spoke to the community about Eucharist as a symbol of unity and fraternity; he noted, however, that Eucharist had instead become a source of division and an occasion for increasing ill-will among the brothers. He then announced that he would not preside at Eucharist that morning because he felt that the issue was becoming scandalous. Nor, he continued, would anyone else be allowed to preside that morning; as local minister he could not in good conscience allow Eucharist to be celebrated either communally or privately in the choir until the problem was resolved.

When asked if Eucharist could be celebrated in the private chapel or adjoining church, the minister said “yes, but not as the conventual Mass; only as private Mass.” The local minister then went to his room. In the interim, the provincial offices in Detroit were bombarded with a flurry of telephone calls from the friars in that house, reporting what had transpired and inquiring whether the local minister had the authority to act in such a manner. A few minutes later the minister provincial called the local minister and inquired whether it was his intention to put the choir area and chapel of the friary under interdict. While not his canonical intention, the local minister accepted and affirmed his action, which remained binding on the community.

This was, as you might suspect, the beginning of the end of that location as a house of initial formation. Multiple meetings brought little reconciliation; the only solution was to move the students -- who were the majority of the lay friars -- to another house. Thus, the formation community at that location was dissolved, and various segments of the fraternity went their disparate ways. As a postscript, that local minister was some years later elected minister provincial; in recently communicating the details of this story to me, he indicated that as minister provincial he still had to confront the same issue and similar attitudes in the following decade.

Introduction

While an admittedly dramatic, even disturbing story, this true episode from the recent history of my own province highlights the potential for fraternal, ecclesial and even canonical meltdown when broaching an issue as sensitive as Roman Catholic priesthood in the context of Capuchin-Franciscan life. Even more so, contemplating Roman Catholic priesthood through the prism of the cherished Seraphic charism of minority could be a blueprint for disaster. As one important linchpin of Franciscan identity, “minority” invokes images of humility, powerlessness and all things lesser, while the institution of Roman Catholic priesthood can conjure specters of power, hierarchy, and a privileged sacrality. Sketching these dialogue partners in such bald, oppositional terms -- as is easily done -- suggests an almost inevitability conflict between our Franciscan vocation and its embrace of Roman Catholic Priesthood. Maybe the only solution in view of such impending discord could be the production of some deftly crafted peace-treaty, so designed that neither sister minority nor brother priesthood would have to sacrifice too much in order to achieve the hoped-for cease-fire.

I do not believe, however, that plenary councils of the Order are essentially internecine peacekeeping operations. As a consequence, I do not see it as my task to propose a strategy for maintaining the fraternal bond between minority and the presbyterate; nor, by extension, between lay and ordained friars. Neither do I envision this gathering as an equivalent to the Capuchin-Franciscan division of the international society of historical theology whose aim is to uncover the root causes of this well acknowledged tension. While the examination of historical underpinnings and theological foundations is useful, if such becomes our primary focus in the limited time we have to consider this topic then there is the very real possibility that we will spend more time pondering the past rather than contemplating the future, more time reporting than rethinking, and possibly end up still standing “behind” the questions rather than moving in front of them.

Neither a peacekeeping operation nor a exercise in theological archaeology, I would suggest another route. As the conjunction of Capuchin life and Roman Catholic priesthood has resulted in both grace and malpractice in our past, and this hyphenation of religious life and ordination is an inevitable part of our foreseeable future, our task is to reenvision this conjunction so its potential for grace far outweighs its potential for dis-grace. We need better lenses for understanding that ordination does not trump religious profession, that an ordained friar is not an oxymoron, and that the alliance of the sacerdotal and minority does not necessarily result in conflict or confusion. Rather, a renewed vision might enable us to discover that the Capuchin charism not only to tolerate but to embrace both priesthood and minority is, in truth, a gospel treasure in disguise -- an unfolding parable still partially buried in the field and waiting to be unearthed. This is, I believe, a postmodern facet of Christic light yearning for the bushel basket to be lifted so that the fraternity as well as church and world can further be illuminated.

It is common in contemporary discourse to categorize priesthood in one of two traditions: either diocesan or in the context of religious orders. Maybe we are poised to offer a via tertia: we certainly have done it before. And as our Constitutions remind us that we exist not for our own sake but in order to contribute to the welfare of the church, to serve the people of God and the entire human community, we accept this task of revisioning not only or even especially for our own self-preservation or evolution, but as a wider contribution to a renewed praxis of the church, by the church and for the church in service of the world.

The Methodological Turn

While there are a variety of methods available to us for such revisioning, I propose to employ methods understood as a mode of practical theology. David Tracy has suggested that in the modern period what were once useful distinctions to the medievals have become fatal separations. One of these is the separation of theory and praxis. As I believe that we are concerned here with correlating both the theory and the praxis of priesthood and Capuchin life, Tracy’s methodological guide for relating the two can be useful to us as we strive to craft a praxis theology for Capuchin priesthood.

Tracy believes there are three possible paradigms for the interplay of theory and praxis. The first of these he characterized as a theory-praxis approach, in which the theory is worked out in one arena (for example, systematic theology) and applied in another (for example, in pastoral practice). Tracy considers this an inadequate theological model for a variety of reasons. The most compelling of these is the critique that in this model the theory is never affected by any praxis. It could be a dangerous model for us to employ because it could result in ceding priority either to a particular theology of priesthood or of religious life (with a resulting diminution of the other), and a subsequent attempt to align our lived praxs with what could be an at least inadequate if not ill conceived theologies.

Tracy's second model for the interplay of theory and praxis which he also believes to be wanting is one that allows no place for critical reflection. He characterizes this as a praxis-praxis model. Tracy notes that this model "does not sublate theory but simply negates it." In this model, he writes, "concrete actions and commitments to a particular cause supply all the criteria necessary for truth in theology. This second model ... does correctly affirm the primacy of praxis for theory... [but it] fails to see that all praxis, like all experience, is in fact theory-laden." As Capuchins who are called to theological reflection on our shared experience -- the very essence of a plenary council of the Order, not to mention the local chapter -- we need to reject any such theological model which does not allow for or even demand serious theological reflection on our common life.

As Tracy argues that praxis theologies should reject both a theory-praxis approach, as well as a praxis-praxis model, he concludes by proposing that an authentic form of praxis theology is "the mutually critical correlation of the interpreted theory and praxis of the Christian fact and the interpreted theory and praxis of the contemporary situation." This image of a mutually critical correlation calls for a "collaborative dialogue ... in which each can challenge the other and contribute both descriptive and normative statements, coming to a deeper understanding through their essentially equal dialogue."

This is what I believe we are called to do here: construct a collaborative dialogue at the service of a renewed praxis theology, a critically mutual correlation between Roman Catholic priesthood and Capuchin minority, both considered in the context of what Tracy calls “the contemporary situation.” In the process we need to hold minority and holy orders as equal conversation partners. In particular, this means avoiding the hazard of ceding priority to one or the other, which can derail any hope of authentic dialogue. Consequently, I do not believe we can simply employ minority as a lens for critiquing or rethinking priesthood, for creating a dialogue that is mutual presumes that all conversation partners will contribute. Thus, from the outside we need to allow the possibility not only that Capuchin minority can illuminate Roman Catholic priesthood, but that the reality of ordained minorites can conversely illuminate Capuchin life. We must avoid hermetically sealing religious profession as though its purity is somehow compromised through sacerdotal contact.

Listening outside-in

From the viewpoint of practical theology, the first stage of creating such a collaborative dialogue requires thorough and empathetic attending to each other -- listening across the boundaries of age, formation, ecclesial status, culture and experience: a process that you clearly have already begun. The quality of the listening will, in large measure, determine the type of critical correlation and ultimate reenvisioning that will ensue. Yet while attending to the Capuchin reality in all its diversity is certainly a foundational exercise in this venture, it is also thoroughly insufficient. Gathering in plenary council in this time of such ecclesial and global ferment places further demands upon us. Beyond the Capuchin-Franciscan landscape, as part of attending to what Tracy characterizes as the wider “contemporary situation,” we are compelled to attend to the larger reality of the Church which begets us. We need to contextualize our reflections within the unity in diversity which marks global Catholicism embodied in over a billion believers, who live out their faith in virtually every language and land on the face of the earth. And then, of course, there is the world beyond the Church, the world beyond Christianity, even the world beyond faith. It is this world which is the ultimate object of Abba’s love, the Johannine foundation for incarnation, and the focus of every mission that is authentically catholic. Thus, in these reflections we must reckon with the global context that Gaudium et Spes named as “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age” [n. 1].

It is only after attending not only to the brothers but also to the realities of Church and world -- empathetic listening while suspending judgment -- that we are appropriately prepared to engage in the kind of reflection and dialogue that yields new insights, refreshes the vision, and reinvigorates the Order not just with the founding spirit, but with the Holy spirit.

Admittedly, it may appear odd to some to consider an issue so utterly Franciscan as minority, or to confront the intra nos paradox of priesthood and minority, from non-Capuchin ecclesial and global perspectives. I believe, however, such is essential if we are to avoid the fate that befell the 1974 formation community whose story I briefly narrated at the outset of this talk. While an outsider to that specific provincial pericope, it is my instinct that ultimately the demise of that community was the result of stinted horizons and ecclesial myopia. Translation: the brothers never thought beyond themselves. They were so concerned about their own dignity and equality, their own sense of justice or injustice, their own rights and righteousness that they seemed little to consider what impact their collective action might have on the wider Capuchin fraternity, or even on the local church or neighborhood where the community was such a fixture. The dissolving of the community was treated simply as a private, internal affair of the brothers rather than a public symbol of dissonance and strife.

Since, however, Capuchin-Franciscan’s are, by definition, church men -- not only chronologically baptized into the body of Christ before being professed or ordained, but first declared Christian whose very profession and ordination are theologically predicated upon such baptism -- then any correlation between minority and priesthood must be accomplished from an ecclesial perspective. As the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life has summarized, “Vatican II affirmed that religious life belongs ‘undeniably’ to the life and holiness of the church and placed religious life at the very heart of the church’s mystery of communion and holiness.” Thus our own quest for a revitalized vision of priesthood and minority must contribute to the church’s communion and be conceived within the context of that communion.

But out of what vision of church, out of which “communion ecclesiology” should we craft our correlation, for the term is certainly not univocal. Some who embrace the vision of Church as a mystery of communion do so with a centripetal bias. This is apparent from the fact that some communion ecclesiologies seem to be lacking any "communion missiology." But the church was not called into being for its own sake, and is not sustained by the Spirit of Jesus Christ for self-preservation. Rather, as Vatican II clearly stated and Pope John Paul II has reiterated, the “Church is missionary by its very nature.” Thus, in the words of Paul Lakeland, we must reiterate the symbiosis of communion and mission. While communion can be a cozy notion upon which to meditate, the validity of the particular expression of communion in the church is to be found in the quality of the same community’s commitment to its mission. The praxis of communion is visible in the church’s faithfulness to its mission; the praxis of mission is directly connected to the understanding of communion. If what we mean by “communion” is an inward-looking, self-congratulatory, and fearful huddling together against the forces of modernity .. then “mission” will mean little more than the periodic excoriation of the “outside” world. But if communion means a generous and loving association of free and faithful children of God, then the dynamic excess of love, without which it is not love at all, spills over into a mission to the whole human race, one marked by a generous sharing of the knowledge that God wills to save the world.

This is a communion ecclesiology which clearly resonates with the nature of religious profession. As made abundantly clear in the Instrumentum Laboris, proceedings, and postsynodal exhortation from the 1994 special Synod on Consecrated Life, the call to mission is an essential part of every form of communal consecrated life. Almost 16 years prior to that Synod, the Third Plenary Council of the Order (Mattli, 1978) espoused a similar view, noting that, “The Franciscan life-plan according to the gospel implies, at its root, a natural apostolic dimension without limits,” for, it taught, “Fundamentally every Franciscan vocation is missionary.” Thus, it seems appropriate to create a correlation between minority and priesthood in an ecclesial context with a strong missionary trajectory.

Given our preference for a communion ecclesiology that has a distinctive missiological orientation, I would suggest that it is both proper and productive to begin crafting our critical correlation between priesthood and minority by first attending to the wider world which is the true object of the church’s mission. I propose beginning by attending to the world rather than particular Franciscan concerns so as to dismantle, or at least temporarily disable, the many predispositions, prejudices and presuppositions that instinctively come into play when considering the paradox of ordained friars. In particular, I would like to lay aside what I consider the well worn “justice” and “equality” approaches to the question which, I believe, tend to be binary (equal or unequal), oppositional (just or unjust) and -- at least from my experience -- divisive. By stepping outside our habitual categories and customary questions, by correlating the ordinary with the unexpected, by juxtaposing the inside with the outside, by placing in dialogue the center with the margins, there is not only the very real possibility of acquiring new insight, but also the graced possibility that such insight will redound to the good of the unexpected, the outsider, and the marginalized -- and not simply to Capuchins. And, from the viewpoint of a communion missiology, if our reenvisioning of ordained minority does not redound to the good of the wider church and the world, and especially to those whom the church and world minimize and marginalize, then our exercise is not only for naught but actually an exercise in diminishment.

And what dialogue partners shall we employ in crafting our correlation at the service of a reenvisioned Capuchin priesthood? As our dialogue partners are necessarily limited by the brief time before us, it would seem most advantageous to engage dialogue partners in the world and in the church that provide explicit and yet unexpected analogues to the boundary-crossing that is mirrored in the conjunction of Capuchin priesthood. Specifically, I would propose two dynamics operative in our world and church that both have something to contribute, and something to gain from this dialogue: these are biculturality and the phenomenon of double religious belonging.

We will consider each in turn, first describing them, considering what these dialogue partner might contribute to a renewed vision of Capuchin priesthood and what Capuchin priesthood can in turn contribute to those who live biculturally or simultaneously in two religious communities. At the end, I will try to draw some conclusions from these correlations about a renewed vision of Capuchin priesthood, and offer a few strategies for furthering the vision.

Biculturality

One of the hallmarks of late twentieth century society is the development known as globalization. This is a complex political, economic and social phenomenon resulting from a convergence of diverse forces. In his summary analysis, Robert Schreiter points to three of these forces as particularly influential. The first, predicated upon the collapse of the bipolar political arrangement in 1989, is the relatively rapid emergence of a multipolar world. Previous to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schreiter notes, the planet could be divided into First and Second Worlds, representing roughly democratic and capitalist versus communist and social systems. This Moscow-Washington divide, with countries aligned on either side, was clearly bipolar and oppositional, symbolized by the threat of mutual nuclear destruction. Poor countries of the southern hemisphere constituted a so-called Third World, sometimes playing the First and Second worlds off against each other, and sometimes being the staging ground for surrogate wars between the two. With the rapid collapse of this distribution of power between two poles, the world has become a multipolar place that Schreiter contends no one has been able to map persuasively.

A second force in the emergence of globalization is the growth of global markets and the worldwide expansion of market capitalism. Schreiter writes that this type of capitalism is characterized by its ignoring of national boundaries, its ability to move capital quickly, and its engagement in short-term projects that maximize the profit margin. Like the new political world, this globalized economy is also multipolar -- although Americans are undoubtedly some of the most important “globalizers.”

The third phenomenon that Schreiter points to in the globalization process is the advancement in communications technologies. Revolutions in telecommunications, high speed travel, and particularly the Internet have reshaped how we perceive time and space. 21st century communications technologies “make possible a networking that increasingly eludes hierarchical control; network has replaced hierarchy as a social model for communication.” Schreiter concludes that, “the convergence of these three phenomena -- a multipolar world, global capitalism and communications technologies -- create what is known as globalization .... defined here [as] the extensions of the effects of modernity to the entire world, and the compression of time and space, all occurring at the same time.”

One of the effects of this compression of time and space is a heightened multiculturalism. Multiculturalism was a recognized phenomenon before the late 20th century. For example, Australia -- one of the most multicultural countries in the world -- has experienced large migrations from the UK, Europe, and Asia all throughout its modern history. Globalization, however, has definitely intensified the spread and degree of multiculturalism around the world. This is certainly true of late twentieth century Europe, particularly the Federal Republic of Germany, which experienced continuous waves of immigrant labor, civil war refugees and asylum seekers in the latter half of the twentieth century. As Capuchins, who now live in 95 nations and embrace “hundreds of ethnic communities,” the dynamics of such multiculturalism are so important, that next year the Order will convene a congress in Addis Ababa on “Fraternity and Ethnicity.”

In our growing awareness and understanding of the dynamics of multiculturalism, cultural commentators and especially cross-cultural psychologists have begun to explore the phenomenon known as biculturality. Sometimes biculturality is defined as “the ability of people in a minority culture to understand and work within the dominant culture in order to improve their economic and/or physical well-being when they interact with that culture ... [while retaining] the knowledge and behaviors of their own indigenous culture.” Others contend that biculturalism represents only a transitory phase in moving from one culture to another, and is the middle point in the process of moving from complete segregation to the ideal which is total assimilation. Finally, some believe that the state of biculturality is by definition a marginalized experience, in which people are not at home in either culture, but are challenged to create a space where this disjuncture can constantly be explored, recognized, and changed.

Recently, however, some scholars have argued that biculturality is not necessarily an experience of marginalization or dislocation. Nor is it an uncomfortable and intermediate step to assimilation. Rather, biculturality is viewed by some as the healthy and even ideal stage of adaptation in which one’s original cultural world view remains intact as alternative cultural frames are acquired. Jean Phinney, for example, has argued that being a member of two cultures does not mean existing between the two -- it does not denote a state of entrapment, where one is helplessly caught in the middle. Rather, biculturality can be an integrated life stance in which one belongs to two cultures -- to varying degrees -- at the same time.

This view of biculturality suggests that the ability to live successfully what some have called “a hyphenated existence” does not mean achieving some perfect point of equilibrium between cultures, but developing the capacity to engage in a continuous process of negotiation between cultures. To that end, researchers have found that bicultural individuals do not embrace elements from both cultures that constitute their identities to the same degree at the same time. Instead, as their self-identities modulate depending on the social situation, so is the balance between their cultural resources realigned to address each new social situation. Such individuals seem to have achieved an advanced degree of acculturation and become very adept at drawing upon varies aspects of their cultural identities as needed. I would contend that this more positive and dynamic understanding of biculturality provides a useful analogy for thinking about the conjunction of minority and priesthood. In particular, I believe it makes three distinctive contributions to thinking about minority and priesthood.

First of all, a bicultural frame suggests that to be an ordained minorite is not to be put in a position where one is forced to choose between one or the other aspect of his ecclesial identity as primary or foundational. Unfortunately, I believe this often happens, especially when we employ sequential language describing our ecclesial identities, such as “first a Capuchin, and only then a priest.” Such language steps outside of the parameters of mutual critical correlation, and infers that one vocation is not as important or as privileged a voice in the identity as the other. It is one thing to recognize formation into a Capuchin community as the originating formation, ordinarily coming first, only after which someone is formed in presbyteral ministry. This historical sequence, however, does not negate the possibility of a friar living an integrated life as an ordained minorite in which both religious profession and ordination are equal dialogue partners in his lived vocation. Asserting more than historical sequence here -- in other words, positing a theological rather than a “cultural” priority to the sequence profession-ordination -- actually could introduce a kind of colonialism into our thinking about Capuchin priesthood, suggesting that the only acceptable form of priesthood is one which has been somehow tamed by Capuchin life.

The image of biculturality, however, suggests another way. An ordained minorite as well as the larger Capuchin community which welcomes the conjunction of profession and ordination, because of that reality, is invited into a particular form of inculturation which models and sustains integration without denigration. It is a turn to what some theologians call “complementary dualism” -- an image related to East Asian Yin-Yang symbolic thinking which is an inclusive, “both/and” form of thought distinctive from the “conflicting dualism” or “either/or” form of thinking which marks so much of Western thought. Biculturality reveals that in the hyphenated reality of the ordained-friar, there is actually grace in the hyphenation: for the individual, the community, the church and the world. Biculturality suggests that this conjunction is a gift to be accepted, not a problem to be solved. It is, as Jung Young Lee asserts, an invitation not only to be “both/and” ... not only “in-between,” but in the embrace of such new marginality as to be “in-beyond,” transcending the present to shape a new identity, a new understanding, a new relationality epitomized as a “harmony of difference.”

A second contribution of biculturality to our understanding of Capuchin priesthood is its revelation about the dynamic nature of this conjunction. As previously noted, various studies have demonstrated that bicultural individuals do not embrace elements from both cultures that constitute their identities to the same degree at the same time, but that the negotiation of one’s self-identity varies depending on the social situation. This insight into the dynamic of a bicultural identity provides both a useful insight as well as an important strategy both for the Capuchin community that embraces profession and ordination, as well as for those many individuals in our fraternity who embody this ecclesial analogue to biculturality.

Just as an African-American who acquires the integrated state of biculturality knows when to emphasize her Africanness, emphasize her American identity, or keep the two in equilibrium, so can both the Capuchin fraternity as well as individual ordained friars within the fraternity acquire sufficient integration to know when it is appropriate to emphasis the Capuchin facet of our ecclesial identity, emphasize the presbyteral side of our ecclesial identity, or keep the two in balance.

A concrete example of how this could play out concerns the issue of concelebration, a topic already broached in our opening story. I would contend that the act of concelebration by an ordained friar by necessity emphasizes the presbyteral facet of his ecclesial identity. Sometimes this is a most appropriate emphasis as, for example, at the Chrism Mass celebrated with the bishop. Other times, however, concelebration is decidedly inappropriate for it emphasizes the presbyteral side of a friar’s ecclesial identity, when the ritual moment is actually emphasizing Capuchin identity. An example of this would be a celebration of first profession. While it may be proper to celebrate first profession in the context of eucharist, allowing concelebration in such a ritual inappropriately shifts the balance to the presbyteral axis of the communities ecclesial identity, when the primary focus of first profession is the Capuchin facet of our ecclesial identity. Concelebration is not an absolute right, and needs to be regulated -- but regulated so that the appropriate facet of our individual and communal hyphenated-identity is emphasized. If our hyphenated existence is actually to progress to the state of being an advanced level of inculturation, then both individuals and communities need a dynamic repertoire of responses, each tailored to the specific circumstances at hand, so that the appropriate balance between the charism of profession and ordination can be maintained. A single, standard response [e.g., concelebration is never allowed, or “I always concelebrate”] is both thoughtless and potentially destructive. Note that the goal of any dynamic strategy in view of our ecclesial biculturality is not to suppress or ignore one or the other facet of the community’s charisms embodied in the presence of ordained minorites, but to enable the appropriate and dynamic balance of these.

A third contribution that comes from employing biculturality as a frame for considering the relationship between minority and ordination is its potent invitation to be in solidarity with the burgeoning number of sisters and brothers around the world for whom biculturality is not an option, but a fact of their everyday life. In terms of international migration, for example, the last three decades have seen over a 230% increase in the number of people who live outside their countries of birth, currently estimated at over 185 million people. This and other factors in our increasingly multicultural world are contributing to the development of an escalating population of what sociologists call people of “mixed race.” To give but one example, the UK is today witnessing record levels of “cohabitation, marriages and romantic liaisons between different ethnic and racial groups. According to the latest census statistics for England and Wales, 660,000 people described themselves as being of mixed ethnicity. The largest mixed group is white and black Caribbean - 237,000, of whom 137,000 (57.5%) are aged 15 and under. Extrapolating from this data, the number of Britons involved in mixed raced situations is much greater than this number, and growing. The mixed race/ethnicity population is now the third largest minority in the UK, 14.6% of the total ethnic minority population, second to the Indian and Pakistani communities and larger than the Caribbean and African populations.”

And, as you may have surmised, this expanding population also has the most youthful age profile in the UK today. According to recent government publications, 55% of those identified as mixed-race were under the age of 16 while the proportion of the white population under 16 years of age was only 19%. As Virgilio Elizondo has aptly noted, “the future is mestizo.” Of course, biculturality and mixed race are not necessary synonymous terms, especially if one thinks of biculturality as an advanced state of acculturation. Unfortunately, for many if not most immigrants and people of mixed racial heritage their situation is one of marginalization, imposed itinerancy and forced minority -- not one of integration. And what does this global situation have to do with Capuchins and priesthood and minority? From my perspective, everything!

In his 20th Circular Letter, Br. John Corriveau spoke about Gospel Brotherhood in a “changing world.” Further on in that letter -- drawing upon the apostolic letter of Pope John Paul II Novo Millennio Ineunte -- he suggests that a fresh image for describing our fraternity is “a home and school of communion.” [n. 2.1] Of course, communion, koinonia, and community are experiences for which the people’s of the earth yearn -- in particular, those millions of the world’s inhabitants who are displaced, who lived a culturally bifurcated life. They long to move in from the margins, and find a society that will allow them to live their own lives, woven together from disparate social and cultural strands, in an integrated and peaceful way.

If we are to be on mission to these displaced and distraught, as called by our Constitutions [n. 174.1] and the pointed mandates of the Third Plenary Council of the Order (Mattli, 1978), then we must acknowledge that, in the words of that Council, our first step in evangelization is “by the example of our lives.” The ecclesially “mixed” nature of the international Capuchin community is, in my estimation, an overlooked resource for our mission to those caught between countries, languages and cultures for we embody an ecclesiastical equivalent of biculturality, we are the religious parallel to what some postmodern scholars call “hybridity.” We are a hybrid community, a conjunction of lay and ordained, disparate strands woven together into a single yet not homogenized identity. We are a living example -- or at least a potential example -- of ecclesiastical inculturation, a community on the way toward the integration of the clerical and lay cultures into a via tertia. And if, as the 1992 Assembly of the Order (Lublin) asserted, fraternity is the place where this and all forms of inculturation begin, then minority emerges not only as a characteristic of Capuchin life, but as a dynamic mode of inculturation: a way of honoring the other without denigration, a willingness to embrace the ambiguity of the hyphenated as an evangelical grace. Thus biculturality not only provides a critique and contribution to Capuchin life, but Capuchin life provides a potential critique and contribution to that thinking of biculturality which sees it only as an intermediate state, permanently marginalized existence, or even a reality only defined by ethnicity.

Double Religious Belonging

Thus far we have considered biculturality and something of the wider global reality in our reimaging of Capuchin priesthood. These various forms of hybridity are very common in our complex world, and increasingly diverse forms of hybridity and hyphenation are constitutive of today’s Roman Catholic Church. One of them is the phenomenon of double religious belonging which, I believe, can also provide a useful lens for reimaging the conjunction of profession and ordination for minorites.

Double religious belonging -- that is, being an adherent of one religion while incorporating the teachings or practices of another religion -- may seem to be another phenomenon whose growing frequency can be contributed to the process of globalization. Certainly in the West, and in a church such as ours traditionally centered in the West, this appears to be the case. In countries like Japan, however, double religious belonging is not only widespread but also a traditional, pre-globalization reality. Recent government statistics, for example, indicate that in a country of 126 million people, about 100 million Japanese identify themselves as Shinto adherents, and 95 million identify themselves as Buddhists. The only conclusion one can draw from such statistics -- which do not include the followers of the many new religions as well as non believers in Japan -- is that a majority of Japanese consider themselves both Shintoists and Buddhists. Not only is double religious belonging the rule in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, it is actually at the root of Christian origins. As Claude Geffré writes,“At first, the Jews who had become disciples of the path of Jesus found it completely normal to continue to visit the synagogue, to circumcise themselves, and not to eat certain forms of impure meats. Thus they believed in the possibility of remaining Jewish while becoming Christian.”

Despite this history, however, double religious belonging has emerged as a theological problem “in religions that demand an absolute and exclusive commitment on the parts of their adherents to their founders and/or faiths.” Peter Phan numbers among such religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He notes that these three religions consider themselves not only mutually incompatible but also irreconcilable with any other religion whatsoever, so that ‘conversion’ to any one of them is often celebrated with an external ritual signaling a total abjuration of all previous religious allegiances.

Despite such official stances, increasingly Christian and Roman Catholic scholars believe that the phenomenon of double belonging -- of being a Hindu Christian or a Christian Buddhist -- is not only contributory but maybe even desirable. While I will leave to that debate to theologians concerned with religious pluralism, I do want to examine two distinctive contributions that the analogue of double religious belonging brings to our rethinking of Capuchin priesthood.

First, the phenomenon of double religious belonging is a catalyst for a particular and promising type of dialogue across a notoriously difficult terrain. When individuals and communities simultaneously identify themselves with two distinctive religious traditions, they bring the potential for a dialogue marked by an unusual level of openness, and devoid of the acrimony that often marks conversations across religions. In describing effective inter religious dialogue, Jacques Dupuis comments that “in order to be true, inter religious dialogue between persons of different faiths requires that both partners make a positive effort to enter into each other’s religious experience and overall vision insofar as is possible.” Such empathy is a particular gift of those individuals and communities who live not between but within two different religious experiences. Their dialogue is actually a dialogue of the self, with the capacity for honest and authentic interchange and critique in a complementary rather than exclusionary manner. Their dialogue is, in effect, a public self-examination requiring a particular humility and honesty.

Such dialogue is not only a technique for survival but a powerful form of witness and evangelization. It reveals Christianity in its most hospitable mode, allowing for “mutual complementarity” that enriches all partners in the dialogue. It is a rejection of colonial forms of missionary activity where the goal is to impose one’s religious beliefs on another community, and an exquisite example of a new kind of missiological dialogue -- a “mission in reverse" -- in which a true mutuality between missionary and community develops. Analogously, 21st century Capuchin life embodies a kind of “double religious belonging” in the conjunction of ordination and religious profession. It is both the state of individual brothers as well as the very nature of our contemporary fraternity. The graced invitation of this phenomenon is the call to a public dialogue of the self, a new response to our Constitutions’ call to “mutual dialogue” in a spirit of fraternal understanding and sincere esteem, an engagement in a continuous self-examination of this juxtaposition of charisms marked by empathy, honesty and hospitality. To the extent that we are able to sustain such humble dialogue -- not as a means for resolving some perceived problematic in our Capuchin identity -- but as a mode of continuous minorite self-reflection, to that extent does Capuchin life freshly reveal itself as evangelical witness to those outside the Roman Catholic community. Simultaneously, such minorite dialogue becomes a particularly poignant form of “new evangelization” - not only in the original sense given to it by Pope John Paul II as “reawakening traditionally Christian countries to the urgency of the gospel,” but new evangelization to a church which is broadly challenged by the juxtaposition of baptism and ordination, struggling with that particular alienation of the faithful as a result of clericalism, and in need of new models for the ordained ministry.

A second contribution of the phenomenon of double religious belonging to our rethinking of Capuchin priesthood is its invitation to reconciliation. Few forms of violence are more heinous than those perpetrated in the name of religion. Holy wars are a disturbing human reality and a particularly unsettling legacy among and between Jews, Christians and Muslims. In his classic work, Violence and the Sacred, René Girard has demonstrated how religion and violence are wed together in ancient religions. As recent events in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Israel, Afghanistan and a multitude of other places around the globe demonstrate, however, the inseparability of religion and violence is not relegated to some ancient past. There are, sadly, many today who yet embrace violence as a "sacred duty."

As Christians we are called to confess the horrors we have perpetrated under the banner of Christ. As John Cobb summarizes, our history is replete with persecution of Jews and heretics. We have sanctioned and sanctified conquest and slavery. We have undergirded patriarchy in extreme and horrific forms. We have ignored the consequences of our actions for the well-being of the natural world, thus threatening the human future on this planet. We have used political and economic power to force our beliefs on others.

Few have modeled our need to confess such sins of commission and omission as much as our Holy Father, who throughout his pontificate has confessed the wrongs that the Church has perpetrated against Jews, the Orthodox, minorities and a host of others. This is an essential move towards reconciliation. Yet, forgiveness is not a power that belongs to the perpetrators but a gift that belongs to victims, and a gift they can give when no longer demonized, colonialized, trivialized, or in another other way dismissed as the "other." Those who experience the grace of double religious belonging can show us the way. They have embraced the other into themselves, and become living icons of interreligious dialogue. As dynamic models of integration, they clarify that reconciliation is not an act once and for all achieved, but an abiding prophetic stance. Individuals but, even more so, communities of double religious belonging are a symbolic antidote to the violence born of religious ignorance or rejection, and show the way to Shalom.

Analogously, a minorite community of lay and ordained has the potential to be similarly iconic. Not just the individual ordained friar but, even more so, a community that embraces the lay and ordained as brothers of distinctive but equal ecclesial status, is in a sense a community that embraces double belonging. It is a community that announces that there are no aliens and strangers in our midst, and that otherness is to be welcomed. What a potent witness to a Church in which there is widespread alienation and even violence between lay and ordained members. International movements have noted a growing concern about a clerical culture that many believe significantly contributed to the scandalous sexual abuse that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church in my own country and others. And just as many laity feel alienated from the clergy, so is there evidence that a growing number of clergy think of themselves as separate from the laity. In a recent study of newly ordained Roman Catholic priests in the United States, for example, respected sociologist Dean Hoge reports 75% of active diocesan priests in the US ordained between 1995 and 1999 believe that ordination confers on priests a new status which makes him essentially different from the laity. 69% of these newly ordained believe that a priest must see himself as a “man set apart” by God. Furthermore, 36% of these new priests believe the laity need to be “better educated to respect the authority of the priest’s word.” In other words, it seems that -- certainly in the United States -- there is widespread evidence that many Roman catholic clergy and laity view each other as different, unreconciled strangers, even aliens.

We not only live in a "mixed community" called “Capuchin,” we live in a larger mixed community called “Church.” In his apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata, Pope John Paul II has defined mixed communities as those institutes "envisioned as a brotherhood in which all members, priests and those who were not priests, were considered equal among themselves." Should we not think of the church as that "sister/brotherhood in which all members, priests and laity, are considered equal among themselves." The only path to that vision is the way of reconciliation. And like those communities who live a life of double religious belonging and are icons and agents of such reconciliation, eschewing religious distinctions, and embracing the otherness in themselves, so must we be for the church: agents of reconciliation who, in the image of the Crucified, are willing to break the circle of violence, and model a new way of being church, a new manner of being priest, not predicated upon separation and sacralization, but solidarity and humble service -- the stance of a true minorite.

Strategies

In considering the juxtaposing of priesthood and the Seraphic charism of minority, I have chosen not to compose any litany of regret, detailing the potential and real problems that could or have arisen from this conjunction. Rather, I thought it a better expenditure of energies to explore a reimaging of this alliance so that it might be regarded increasingly as a partnership of grace rather than dis-grace, of holy praxis rather than mal-praxis. To that end, I have attempted to step outside of the usual frameworks for thinking about the charism of minority, that of priesthood, or the conjoining of the two. Instead, by considering two different forms of hybridity that flourish in this post modern world -- biculturality and double religious belonging -- and, in particular, by focusing on decidedly optimistic interpretations of those forms of hybridity, I have tried to reimage ordained minority in a non-oppositional, complementary and evangelical manner.

Implicit in this exploration has been a reconsideration not simply of minority but of what it means to be Capuchin and, in particular, what this means for a fraternity and not simply an individual. While it is very clear, both historically and theologically, that priesthood is not in any way essential to the Franciscan vocation, I would argue that priesthood is a de facto component of contemporary Capuchin identity and must not only be acknowledged but embraced as such. If, according to the most recent statistics, at the end of 2002 there were 9,093 perpetually professed members of the Order, and 7,080 or approximately 77.9% of those are priests, then it seems to me we are not dealing with some irrelevant, extraneous or incidental aspect of our common life or self-identity. And, given the statistical trends over the past decade, it does not seem as though this clerical facet of Capuchin reality is going to disappear. This is a praxis we must take seriously. Does this mean that to be "a" Capuchin one need be ordained of course not. But again, the consideration is not simply of this or that Capuchin, but the very nature of Capuchin fraternity which is undeniably "mixed."

One of the reasons I did not expend any energy on the historical development of this reality is because I believe the current challenge is not to stand behind this Capuchin fact, with appeals to some pure Franciscan ideal or theory of Capuchinness which sequesters or even dismisses the relevance of priesthood to our vocation, but to stand in front of this Capuchin fact, this undeniable present praxis in order to provide a new, constructive, grace-filled and authentic interpretation of this mixed reality. The capacity and willingness to do so is itself, in my estimation, a true gesture of minority. To be a mixed community that eschews strategies of diminishment or segregation, to be a mixed community that rejects toleration as an acceptable modus vivendi, to be a mixed community that, instead, strives to be an iconic fraternity of dialogue, reconciliation, new evangelization and mission is, in my estimation, a community willing not only to espouse minority, but to espouse a minority that is fundamentally Trinitarian.

The triplex inferno of love we name Trinity is an infinite rehearsal of the other, marked by an unending torrent of pouring out and filling up, as extolled in the great chant from the second chapter of Philippians. God, as three in one, is revealed as a deity in beatific mission to the divine self. Yet, this pouring out and filling up, this divine missioning is marked by an eternal humility in which no Divine Person is diminished in the exchange. Rather, the exchange between Abba and the Christ is so fulsome it begets Holiness in Spirit that is the Holy Spirit. Here is the divine origination of loving “in and beyond.” This is the divine icon of minority, in which there is no self-serving alienation but only the service of complementarity. There is no excluded middle, no either/or existence in the eternal Godhead, but what our Asian sisters and brothers have taught is to be a yin-yang relationality in which, beyond coexistence, each abides in the other. I believe the minorite challenge founded on a Trinitarian revelation is, for us, the same: fraternally and ecclesially to abide in each other.

And how do we move toward such Trinitarian minority? How do we shape a fraternity not only mixed in fact but with a complementary spirituality broad enough to embrace lay and ordained friars and to propel us beyond ourselves in service of a church struggling with its own mixed identity and in service of a world burgeoning with hybridity? I believe we get some direction for answering that question from our Constitutions which, in chapter two admonishes formation personnel to "ensure that the brothers in formation acquire a living and consistent cultural development." While we often think of culture in terms of ethnicity or race, culture, of course, is a much broader dynamic than these. This is a fact acknowledged by the Fourth Plenary Council (Rome 1981) which considered formation in view of the wide ranging diversity that marks those joining the order. That Council went on to underscore the importance of inculturation, that is, “the integration of the lived experience of the Franciscan Capuchin charism into the culture of the people among whom the friars live and work.” This is achieved, according to CPO IV through participation, openness, integration and conversion.

If this process of inculturation is integral to the formation process, in which individual friars and communities are called to “overcome the tendency to create their own closed world and participate in the experience of others,” then it seems to me that a first step toward Trinitarian minority is intentionally inculturating friars to be bicultural minorites who explicitly address the mixed nature of our communal vocation from the beginning of their Capuchin formation. Currently, many of our initial formation programs do not broach the issue of priesthood until at least after postulancy and novitiate if not even later. It seems to me, in doing so, we have overlooked an opportunity to enhance a friar’s capacity to embrace the complementary duality that is a hallmark of 21st century Capuchin life. If the preoccupation in our initial formation programs is only on those things we hold in common as brothers, then any eventual reflection on priesthood can seem like an unwelcome intrusion, introducing distinctions where previously there have only been commonalities. Instead, I would suggest forming brothers from the beginning as friars who understand and embrace the complementary duality of profession and ordination that is a hallmark of 21st century Capuchin life.

A second key to Trinitarian inspired minority is a worship formation for all friars that shapes them as liturgical minorites. The Second Plenary Council of the Order (Taize, 1973) challenged us “to pray as lesser Brothers.” This is a clarion call to pray and live out our prayer in such a way as to avoid any and every impression of superiority by one brother over another. Maintaining this spirit is a particular challenge in the context of the church’s official liturgy, for many scholars now hold that such forms of ritualization at their core are fundamentally an exercise in power. Eucharistic leadership is not a right but a privilege, and only a privilege of service. As the fount and summit of the church’s life, the liturgy -- and especially the eucharist -- must epitomize the minorite stance of all the brothers. Only then will it fulfill the vision of CPO II which imaged prayer -- especially the Eucharist -- as an act of conversion. If that is not a fruit of eucharistic or other worship, then such worship is not only for naught, but such worship actually diminishes the fraternal bond. Thus, the personal preferences and prerogatives of the ordained should not dominate any aspect of a Capuchin liturgical ecology. Rather, the ordained brothers need to understand and accept that in the liturgical context they are special servants and their concern is “the common spiritual good of the people of God [and all the brothers] rather than ... personal inclination or arbitrary choice.” This is a particular contribution ordained friars can make to a church in which, too often, many of the faithful experience liturgy as a source of exclusion and oppression.

Finally, a third key to Trinitarian inspired minority is widening the circle of collaboration and decision making so that, to paraphrase CPO III, we are not only deciding “for” others but “with” others. Certainly as lay and ordained friars we are called to collaborate with each other, but sometimes institutional clericalism that has marked our order in the past yet impedes our cooperation in the present. Inviting the true collaboration not only of other Franciscans, but of our lay sisters and brothers I believe can help change that dynamic. I know in my family the brothers behave differently when one of our sisters is in the room. They have a particular way of teaching us how to be brothers, even though they are not one. I am sorry that there are no sisters in this room, and wonder what would they teach us about being brothers and abiding in each other no matter what our ecclesial status. Many times our lay sisters and brothers don’t know or can’t distinguish between an ordained and a lay friar. We’re just Capuchins to them. What if increasingly they were a part of our lives, not as the “object” of our mission and ministry, but as co-agents of such, teaching us just to be Capuchins. How would they help us reimagine our complementarity if they were seriously invited into that complementarity at every level of the Order.

Some would content that the mission of the church is primarily conducted by lay people, acting in the Spirit and on their own initiative as baptized Christians. CPO II underlined the need “for the lay people to be involved in our work of evangelization at every level.” What is their role in a renewed image of new evangelization to a church challenged and sometimes even divided by the juxtaposition of baptism and ordination? How would they help us think about the way we pray, how we form the brothers, how we make decisions, how we abide in the other? What would they teach us about the possibilities of mutuality when lay and ordained forge new ways of being together?
One of my favorite sections from CPO IV is that which articulates the formation principle of “participation.” The goal of this principle is to “overcome the tendency to create their own closed world and participate in the experience of others,” That Council went on to note:

Nobody can mature by himself; everyone needs other people .... this openness to others and this capacity to participate is a source of spiritual and cultural enrichment, as well as serving to overcome the conflict one sometimes finds ... In line with this principle .. an open fraternity should be favored .... This openness will incite us to deepen the Franciscan values we share, and improve our practice of them.

I believe this is a prophetic vision that is yet to be realized, but one I believe whose time has come. In a world and a church, wounded by violence, oppression and abuse, it is only through collaboration, mutuality, and a willingness to abide in each other that we can together stop the circle of violence, and become true collaborators in God’s reign.
May God who has begun this good work in us, give us the grace to bring it to completion in Christ Jesus, whom we profess as Lord and Brother, the divine icon of
mutuality, in and beyond forever and ever. Amen.

Introduction

In the time it takes to read this paper, fourteen hundred children will die from starvation and related causes. Six thousand will die from preventable water-borne diseases, diarrhea, acute respiratory infections, malaria and poor sanitation. Over the next few minutes, eighty children under the age of 15 will become newly infected with the virus that causes AIDS and, as we speak, seventy children will die from the dreaded disease. Eleven million children in Sub-Sahara Africa will struggle to find food and hope as they survive as orphans of AIDS. Two and a half million children will try to live with HIV/AIDS; less than 5% of them will have any access to retroviral treatment.

In the next few minutes, twenty-three children will become fatal targets in the ethnic and religious conflicts breaking out across the globe. In the last decade alone, 6 million children have been made homeless and 12 million have been injured or been maimed --as civilians, not combatants, have become the prime targets and 90% of the casualties of today’s ethnic and religious wars.

As we speak, three hundred thousand children are now forcibly conscripted into armies and militias, used for suicide missions, the strategic gang rape of enemies and numerous terrorist activities. They are the ones their adult commanders and child officers send out to the front lines of combat or into dangerous minefields ahead of other troops.

Fifteen thousand people will flee their homelands today, trying to escape from the violence and the devastation in their country of origin; the majority of these refugees will be children. Children will be the most emotionally traumatized and physically abused among the 5.5 million people uprooted and displaced this year alone by the rising tide of religious intolerance and ethnic antagonisms across the globe. In the 1990’s, one out of every 120 people on the planet, 50 million people, were forced to flee their homes because of war and civil strife. Children will be the great percentage of the 3,000 people today (1.2 million children this year) who will be sold into slavery and forced prostitution, sequestered in rape camps, victims of a new and deadly campaign to use sexual violence as a commodity and method of modern warfare.

As we ponder the meaning of minority, power and itinerancy in our world today, we know that over 600 million children worldwide live in absolute poverty, 50% of all children in developing countries are malnourished, 153 million children under the age of five will go to bed hungry tonight.

Taken together these disparate facts trace a frightening pattern of powerlessness and a deafening challenge to our solidarity with the next generation. Before we lock onto any formative theory that might help us navigate our religious journey through the twenty-first century, we must test our understanding of this “world in extremis” and ponder the psychological and organizational assumptions we bring to our theological challenge.

The World in Extremis: A Time of Global Poverty and Intra-National Violence

Even in its early moments, the 21st century reveals dramatically different priorities and challenges than those that characterized the larger part of the 20th century. Gone is the confident world of modernity. Its religious constructs of certitude, universality and uniformity have been replaced by the discourses of concern for traditions lost, claims ignored, rights denied, positions assumed, voices suppressed and histories resisted.

The twenty-first century is poised to take the sobering and competing claims to suffering seriously, even in the various and diverse frames of secular and fundamentalist paradigms. At the center of its attention is the world in extremis and it is there that God will be lovingly revealed and/or loudly denied, in the origins and trajectories of global suffering.

The sobering experiences of children cited above have a common base and a saddening trajectory. Each of them is rooted in an escalating and widening global poverty that is now exacerbated by the eruption of intra-national, religious and ethnic conflicts. While the nature and frequency of international crises have changed dramatically and been reduced, there has been a proliferation of local and regional conflicts based on ethnicity, nationality and religion that use highly de-centralized, often terrorist-like applications of violence.

Societies and cultures, already debilitated by years of foreign domination, must now confront a new and deadly combination of social challenges: unstable political institutions, inadequate health and educational systems, crushing debt payments to the architects and prime beneficiaries of globalization, and the virulent strains of tactical violence now becoming popular in the ethno-religious confrontations of fundamentalisms.

The world in extremis, the context and subject of our kingdom work of redemption and liberation, is a world precariously poised between the dynamics of global poverty and the dynamics of violent but locally embedded social struggles.

It is here that religious formation must claim a new interest and expertise, at the intersection where crushing economic disparity and competing cultural claims crash. It is a significant transition and a daunting challenge.

For the better part of the twentieth century, religious communities have supported and sustained the development of the church’s “parochial culture,” the highly stable web of local ecclesial interests, regional compassion, and provincial pride. The challenge of Franciscan communities in the 21st century is the development of a new “international mission culture” that will be characterized by a renewed focus on God’s salvific love and gracious compassion for the world, an enlivening of the quality of prayer and communion, a renewed attentiveness to mission across borders and cultures, and a life-long formation that understands its role in the “ecology of disparity” in which we find ourselves.

It has become evident to many religious communities that we now live in a complex and globally interdependent world. A formative cosmology that once highlighted cultural uniformity and ethnic privacy in religious life is giving way to one that celebrates a world of profound differences. Religious life today is more responsive to the fact that Catholics form a community of many rich and varied cultures, speaking one faith with many voices. This awareness has translated into an increase in language studies and the development of cross-cultural training programs in religious formation. Liturgies in parishes and religious communities seek new forms by which to celebrate the global church whenever the local church gathers.

But, religious formation remains uniquely challenged to develop a pedagogy that will help candidates cross economic barriers as well as cultural ones. Whereas the crossing of cultural lines implies entering sympathetically into the language and customs of “the other,” the crossing of class lines means a spiritual realignment of one’s horizon of power and responsibility in society, community and church. Today, formation ministry must not only confront a candidate’s sensitivity to and acceptance of cultural diversity but also his or her readiness to confront the growing economic disparity emerging at every level of society.

Many young religious can go through their entire religious formation without ever changing or confronting their underlying economic horizon. The economic structures on which their charitable activities and cultural sensitivities are developed are presumed just and beyond critique. Our proposed shift from a diversity to a disparity discourse in formation literature is meant to situate our discussion in an interdependent but unequal world and to link more carefully the spiritualities of transcendence and justice.

Unfortunately, it is a world often treated with individual indifference and institutional ambivalence by religious leaders, as if poverty and violence were not human constructs and subject to the same grace that moves the human heart to personal conversion. We need to take another look at our assumptions about poverty in the world.

Poverty, as we know it today, is “the explicit outcome of conscious political and economic decisions made by some humans.” Poverty is a series of deprivations that accumulate in peoples’ lives and then reinforce one another. I am speaking of poverty today as material want, physical deprivation, the lack of basic necessities, failed economic institutions, gender and political inequalities and the loss of personal voice and agency. With Peter Henriot SJ, I too believe that poverty is not an inevitable state of being. It is a consequence of the human (not divine) design of our social, political, economic and relational structures. Poverty is a reality that we structure and which we tolerate. Henriot says it well. When Jesus told his disciples that we would have the poor with us always, he was making “an empirical observation not… a policy mandate.”

I would argue that poverty is a structural disorder of the opportunity, empowerment and security that humans require, a disorder that creates and compounds extreme vulnerability to the normal and sometimes uncontrollable events that people face, like natural disasters, illness, violence and economic crises. The structural disorder of severe poverty requires a formation in the structural conversion of our religious communities. We turn to an analysis of severe poverty and our assumptions about its eradication.

The Structural Disorder of Economic Disparity and its Eradication

When we look at the structural composition of societies today, we notice that the world has immense poverty amid great wealth. Of the world’s six billion people, it is estimated that almost half (2.8 billion) live on less than $2 dollars per day. Almost 20% of the world, 1.2 billion, lives on less than $1 dollar per day. To put this into some context for us, it takes about $18,000 a year (15,000 Euro) to sustain a male religious in the West in his simple and ascetic life, when his food, medical, insurance, housing and other needs are tallied up. That is by my estimation 25 times more than what half of the world gets to live on and 50 times more than what the poorest of the world, 20% of humankind, must get by on.

The effects of global poverty are enormous. In rich countries fewer than 1 child per 100 dies before its fifth birthday. In the poorest countries 20% of all children will succumb before they reach the age of five. As stated above, 600 million children worldwide live in absolute poverty – an estimated one in four.

In a recent study of world income distributions, it was found that inequality is growing deeper and the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider, as the affluent of the world reap the benefits of globalization, while the poor stagger at or below the poverty line. Between 1988 and 1993, for example, global per capita income actually rose by a respectable 5.7%. However, it was the top fifth of the world’s population that realized all the gain. All other incomes declined, with the bottom 5% of the poor seeing their real incomes decrease by another 25%.

A review of the dynamics of global poverty reveals five trends. We can now say that poverty is:

1. deepening in that, despite great progress, unprecedented technological advances and solid economic growth, the poor are still falling deeper into destitution and at a faster rate;

2. widening in that the gap between those who have and those who do not is growing larger as the rich gobble up all the benefits of globalization, while the income of the poorest of the world continues to decline precipitously;

3. increasingly militarized in that armed conflicts, especially the eruption of civil war and ethno-religious confrontations, exacerbate and attenuate the already alarming confluence of risk factors for deprivation;

4. increasingly feminized and juvenilized in that women and children fall into poverty more easily and more frequently than men.

5. increasingly internationalized in that the increasing volume and variety of transactions of goods, services and capital across borders (in essence, globalization) leave so many heavily indebted countries at the mercy of a few very rich countries who write the rules and set the tariffs of trade.

It is not uncommon among those of us involved in international justice and peace work to complain about how difficult it is to get and sustain the community’s attention when the conversation turns to justice. During a meeting not long ago with the Ministers General of the major Franciscan Orders, one of the Ministers asked me a question that is germane to our work today. He wondered why it is that Franciscan men seem to be losing enthusiasm and energy for matters of justice, peace and the integrity of creation.

I could not deny his thesis. It is one of the most confusing aspects of our work: why otherwise good, decent and dedicated religious seem at times so disinterested and sometimes even antagonistic toward efforts that might deepen their awareness, extend their understanding and call for their action about the plight of the poor around the world.

One reason is that we surmise that global poverty is inevitable and that its alleviation is virtually impossible. The crushing poverty of half of humankind persists even in the face of amazing technological advances, stunning scientific breakthroughs, and an enlightened moral agenda that has already rejected such things as slavery, child labor, colonialism and the violation of a whole host of human rights. It endures because we cannot yet conclude that we have the motive to reform the ecology of disparity.

In his new book, World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge comes to the conclusion that what we face is a failure of moral conviction. He writes, “extensive, severe poverty can continue, because we do not find its eradication morally compelling.” He goes on to say that it will not be morally compelling to us until we find the relentless rise in global inequality worrisome enough to warrant serious moral reflection.

In essence, we just do not find the present condition of our sisters and brothers morally disturbing enough to change the course of our actions. This may be so because the poor across our tracks and beyond our borders are among those Bryan Massingale calls the world’s “permissible victims.” They are the ones “whose lives and dignity can be – and are- violated with little social outrage, public notice or civic protest.” These are the ones whose cries, however intense, persistent or determined, are made inaudible or tuned out in the great discussions and moral discourses of our churches and institutions.

But, there is a deeper reason, one that challenges our efforts at minority and itinerancy as Franciscan men. It is an underlying psychological ambivalence and institutional defense against the structural conversion needed to move our communities towards the international compassion required of us.

Minority, Itinerancy and Poverty Eradication

Clearly, stemming the tide of severe poverty will not be accomplished without enormous international cooperation and global sacrifice. As we have noted, the poverty we see in the world today is a “structural disorder.” It needs a structural conversion. And for Franciscans the virtue that will energize the structural conversion of the conditions of global poverty is minority. In this vein, itinerancy is our liberation from the “monopoly of imagination” that restrains our emotions, our intellect, our spirits and our structures from the call we have to be a free communion of persons in the world today, without domination or deprivation.

The Sixth Plenary Council of the Order made the connection between the gospel ideal of poverty and the choice of minority:

To be lowly is a genuine manifestation of interior poverty, which in the Franciscan life-project also expresses itself externally, as humility of heart and lack of power, and as solidarity with the needy and deprived. Without minority, our poverty would have no meaning and would become a source of pride, just as without material poverty, interior poverty would be unreal.

John Corriveau, in his reflections on the results of this Plenary Council, noted that the Franciscan commitment to poverty called our first brothers to hard economic choices (and not simply spiritual dispositions) that challenged the prevailing economy of their day:

Those economic choices were also a conscious break with more obvious injustices of the growing market economy of their day, which was based on the appropriation of power and wealth by the few to the exclusion of the many. Their choice of poverty was a choice for discipleship, that is, to relate to one another and to their neighbors after the manner of Jesus. It was a conscious choice for a more fraternal world, a more human world.

Corriveau states that it was Francis’ intention (and that of his companions) to build a new security based on mutual dependence and brotherly solidarity. Commenting on our Franciscan challenges today, he goes on to state that we are called to do nothing less than to establish a “fraternal economy” that challenges capitalism’s reign on our social and religious imagination. For he notes, “capitalism proposes competition as the best response to protect and administer resources.” (5.2) But, the church proposes solidarity and mutual dependence as a more sure, lasting and just foundation for human security and well-being.

Given this, it seems to me that minority, the engine that drives our Franciscan poverty, can no longer be reduced to a perspective that renders it as an interior and highly privatized virtue of humility and imperceptibility. In the face of global poverty as we have presented it, perhaps the most appropriate description of minority in the 21st century is as a social virtue of international compassion.

As Capuchins, we are international actors with a guiding vision and a sophisticated (if often untapped) network of communications. We can support compassionate and just institutions and, if necessary, reorganize sinful organizations and unjust systems. We can bring ideas, institutions and relationships around the world in order to help people make sense of their lives, ameliorate their suffering, expand their generosity, forge new relationships of cooperation, and build bridges across the treacherous political, economic, cultural and ethnic barriers that divide them.

Itinerancy is the courageous and passionate confidence to move forward and beyond the frontiers of language, class, culture, ideology, gender, orientation and caste that separate the poor from the rich in the illusory world of the majores and minores. Itinerancy is rooted in the intellectual conviction, emotional maturity and organizational flexibility of a free communion of Gospel brother/sisterhood. It is founded on the spiritually sure and ever-creative premise that our God is good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone. Itinerancy is our individual and communal response to the eschatological promise of the Christ who, in a world of excess and barbarous suffering, makes all things new and asks us to live in the adventum of a good and gracious God.

Reflecting on the spiritual and psychological dynamics of itinerancy, Carlos Alfonso Azpiroz Costa, OP, refers to the Biblical text from Exodus that notes, “anyone who wishes to consult the Lord would go to the meeting tent, outside the camp.” (Exodus 33:7). This leads Costa to remark,

‘Outside the camp’ among all those ‘others’ relegated to a place outside the camp, is where we meet God. Itinerancy demands going outside the institution, outside culturally conditioned perceptions and beliefs, because it is ‘outside the camp’ that we meet a God who cannot be controlled. It is ‘outside the camp’ that we meet the Other who is different and discover who we are and what to do.

The Psychological and Organizational Dynamics ‘Inside the Camp’

We have alluded several times to the formative challenges attendant upon our call to international compassion and the Franciscan virtues of minority and itinerancy. It is time to make those challenges explicit.

For the past twenty years, I have been tracking the capacity of religious men and women to promote justice and develop the virtue of solidarity, as this has been explicated in the social teachings of the Church. I have done so through the use of two disciplines: the psychological research on religious men and women and the field of socio-analytic organizational development. It has led me to the conviction that, while the majority of religious men and women, sincerely wish to reach out to their sisters and brothers in need, we are, at the same time, constrained by an underlying psychological ambivalence with regard to the poverty and plight of the poor.

On the one hand, empirical research has indicated that young religious hold to high ideals of deferent service, obedience, self-sacrificing for a better world, poverty, self-discipline and responsibility. They value their eternal life as their ultimate concern and strive less than lay comparison groups for merely coping with life as it comes. They show a higher sense of poverty, piety, mortification and chastity in their repertoire of professed values. They shun competitive power and control over others. These are men whose values coalesce around compassion and concern for others.

And yet, studies have also shown that, while young religious express high values of self-sacrificing for others, they demonstrate significant trends for aggression, domination of others, and the avoidance of harm and criticism. The research emerging today indicates that high vocational ideals for social concern and justice are not enough to presume that individuals within religious life or entering religious life have an effective capacity for solidarity with the poor. We have learned that the social imaginations of those studied are often enough constructed out of a compromise between high vocational ideals and inconsistent and largely unconscious personal needs. Sixty to eighty percent of religious men and women, despite their sincerely held and publicly proclaimed values of compassion, are fundamentally ambivalent with regard to the poverty and plight of the poor.
If itinerancy is, as we have suggested, the “courageous and passionate confidence to move forward and beyond the frontiers of language, class, culture, ideology, gender, orientation and caste that separate the poor from the rich,” then we, as formators, face an immediate problem. And it is this: the perduring inconsistency between values, attitudes and emotional needs that affects the religious stance and the life project of those who commit themselves to a life of minority.

Research and experience combine to show that the sincere proclamation of the ideals for justice, compassion and solidarity is only half the story of religious motivation. On the other side and at a deeper level are the emotional compromises and non-rational concessions we make over time to keep our affective needs satisfied, especially when they come up against the hard and painful choices that the self-transcendence of prophetic zeal implies.

Religious formation programs have come a long way in underlining the values of minority, justice, compassion and solidarity in religious life. The literature on minority and solidarity developed in the last several years is extensive and impressive. This addition of “itinerancy” will complement and fill out the other important topics in the lexicon of the “fraternal economy.” And yet, the formative literature is incomplete, if it fails to address the obstacles and resistances (both personal and organizational) to the development of the fraternal economy, especially those that lie within the murky waters of inconsistent needs and emotional compromise.

Here we must take a sobering look at the formation programs called to address the high ideals of minority and itinerancy as well as the troubling and often hard to read emotional compromises against compassion.

It seems that the formation for itinerancy, the formation of individuals and communities beyond the frontiers of language, class and culture, will be further challenged by the structural ambivalence inherent in contemporary formation itself. There are several reasons for this.

First, our formation systems are focused primarily and almost exclusively on the personal conversion of individual friars. Rarely are they conversant with the literature and the skills of the structural conversion of religious communities. While we have attended appropriately to the spiritual, affective, intellectual and interpersonal development of individual friars, the same cannot be said of the communities that form the matrix of this development. Rare are the communities conversant with the assumptions of their organizational dynamics, aware of their shared social defenses, and able to confess their social sin as a group. While we understand more clearly today the values surrounding the development of the fraternal economy, we have not yet explicated the psychological and organizational dynamics of its development or regression.

If we are to enter more forthrightly as a brotherhood into the arena of power and minority, itinerancy and international compassion (as I believe we must), then we must articulate a more convincing and a more robust anthropology of the fraternal economy, one that has the room and the means to help us understand our potential and call to the institutional analysis and transformation of the organizations, systems and structures in our lives. We can no longer take the systems around us for granted, as if they were not suffused with social sin and social defenses.

Second, the formation for itinerancy and international compassion is hampered by the fact that we have no comprehensive, coherent or shared theory of religious formation.

Recently I have completed a study of formation programs in the United States and have concluded that we have seven “cultures of formation,” distinct and sometimes competing systems of beliefs, emotions, rituals and tools. Each of them is expressing values derived from magisterial teaching; all of them are attempting to be faithful to critical aspects of the church’s thought after Vatican II.

But, they are enclosed cultures of religious life, each with a distinct language and set of rituals that form and contain a horizon of expectations that serves to delineate one from the other. They are fast becoming the cultures of ecclesial life.

For example, the essentialist culture with its strict adherence to the language and praxis of “objective truth,” magisterial pronouncements and the apologetic defense of the faith is markedly different from the existentialist culture, with its emphasis on personal growth, self-reflection and authenticity. The socialization culture with its emphasis on “brotherhood,” “faith sharing” and the dynamics of communal discernment stands in marked contrast to the interiority of the existentialist culture that preceded it. Each of the other cultures of formation (the behavioral, the neo-essentialist, the liberation and the professional) expresses key values of action, leadership, justice and creativity but does so in language and in styles that are largely incomprehensible outside the parameters of one’s preferred culture of formation. These cultures of formation have become social defenses used unconsciously to thwart the enlivening of religious communities for the 21st century.

If we intend to build communities of gospel brotherhood, with the organizational flexibility and courageous passion to move beyond the frontiers of their own class and culture for the sake of international compassion, then we must listen carefully and attend cogently to the competing cultures of formation within our congregation. If we learn how to pass over and into these cultures, without judgment and with spiritual respect, then we might also learn - from within - the techniques and dynamics necessary for the passage across the frontiers of gender, class and caste.

The Anthropology of the Fraternal Economy

“Minority,” “itinerancy,” “solidarity,” “participation,” and “transparency” are engaging elements in the lexicon of John Corriveau’s social teaching in the Capuchin Order. But, they cohere around a central image, a controlling paradigm, and a fundamental metaphor of his soteriological insight for the Order and that is the vision of “the fraternal economy.”

It is the “fraternal economy” that expresses how friars are to live the plan of redemption and the work of liberation in a world that abides by alternative principles of division and alienation. More than an economic plank for the redistribution of funds across the globe, Corriveau understands that he is challenging the central metaphor of our times, the “monopoly of imagination” that dictates that competition, is “the sole voice in determining how things are experienced… the lens through which life is properly viewed or experienced.”

He understands that he is proposing an alternative vision and calling for the reconstruction of relationships at every level of our ecclesial and social experience. Rooted solidly in the Trinitarian insight that our God is a “free communion of persons without domination or deprivation,” Corriveau understands that no sister or brother in the world is free, unless they are allowed to express themselves (and all of themselves) in the free communion that is their heritage as the children of God. Any system, any structure, any social or ecclesial institution that would interrupt or interfere with an individual’s or a group’s access to the full and transcendent range of freedom to be in communion must be rejected as an affront to the Trinitarian foundation of this universe. Any institution or organization that would try to circumscribe or otherwise limit a brother or sister’s reach for free communion by methods of domination or tools of deprivation must be renounced and its efforts reformed, because domination and deprivation are not the work of a loving God.

In this way, John Corriveau has been able to integrate the spirituality of transcendence and the spirituality of justice and rightly make the work of promoting human rights in the world a central task of the mature Franciscan.

I would like to close this presentation by highlighting the central elements of the anthropology of the fraternal economy, those critical constants that must form the basis of our attempts to construct a solid formation for itinerancy and international compassion in the 21st century. I will outline them briefly.

Edward Schillebeeckx has outlined several “anthropological constants” that express what it means to be human and how we relate to the divine. They are the foundation of our faith response in the world, in our ethics, liturgy, pastoral action and prayer. They shape how we see and interpret our world. They shape our response to suffering and our orientation to our embodied presence in society. Schillebeeckx names six::

1. corporeality (which includes one’s sexuality and the ecological environment);
2. relationship to other persons as the formative context of our own individuality;
3. relationship to social, political and economic structures;
4. conditioning by time and space;
5. the dynamic of theory and praxis experienced as culture (as opposed to instinct);
6. orientation to the future (as part of what it means to be human).

Without suggesting that Corriveau has derived his own anthropological constants from the theological premises of Schillebeeckx, I would like to trace for heuristic purposes three anthropological insights that could form the basis of our formation for itinerancy and international compassion.

1. creation and the cosmic fraternity. Before launching into a series of reflections on poverty, solidarity, and the principles of the fraternal economy, Corriveau roots all of them in a profound anthropological principle of creation. We are creatures, intimately connected and viscerally bound to the material world. Corriveau underlines the reality of salvation and liberation as an embodied drama. He writes,

Because fraternity embraced all creation, Francis was caught up in what might be called the ‘cosmic fraternity.’ Celano described how Francis, gazing in wonder upon the humblest realities – light, water, fire, wind, earth, trees, animals, flowers – was able to discern the hidden realities of nature… All creatures form a single family before the face of God.

Clearly, any formation for itinerancy and international compassion must draw friars into the embrace of their own bodies and of all creation, eschewing any form of dualism, and helping them to see that ecology is not an object of study but the very matrix of their development. This world and all worlds, embodied and flush with feeling and intelligence, unite in marvelous diversity as a single family before the face of God and are the privileged place for wonder, contemplation, construction and commitment.

2. communion and mutual interdependence. As we have seen, Corriveau strongly rejects the atomism, individualism and isolation that are the key principles of our inherited secular anthropology. Time and again, Corriveau strongly rejects the paradigm of competition that controls our prevailing social imagination. Instead, he challenges us to solidarity and mutual interdependence in all relationships as the only adequate response to a God who is described as a “free communion of persons without domination or deprivation.” Corriveau speaks often about the need for “renewed and restored relationships” that draw their energy, motive and pattern from the “excessive love” of the Crucified One. Corriveau rejects any anthropological project that would project domination or protect deprivation. He notes, “a patriarchal, domineering authority inspires only hatred and fear, vitiating at its very source the communion of life that exists in the Blessed Trinity.” Three principles flow from this vision of communion and mutual interdependence: participation, transparency and accountability.

While these three principles have found their way into our economic discussions, they have yet to find their proper currency in the transformation of our other relationships.

In formation, a focus on “participation” would change the nature and quality of the relationship and work with formation directors. Collaboration and cooperation across our provincial frontiers would become a new expression of our itinerancy. It would also decrease the asymmetry that often exists between personal development and community transformation.

“Transparency” would highlight the openness expected of each friar and each community in the deepest reflections on the quality of our prayer and communion, our mission and our solidarity. It would include attentiveness to the personal defenses of individuals and the social defenses of communities, since these are the most enduring obstacles to the development of the fraternal economy. Formation’s “turn toward the social” in the 21st century would complement the 20th century’s “turn toward the subject,” if it included mechanisms by which communities could assess their own levels of commitment to the common good, solidarity, justice and communion.

A new emphasis on “accountability” would erode the communal atomism that sometimes erupts in the spiritual lives of friars after solemn profession. Communities would understand themselves as mutually responsible and mutually engaged in the enlivening of their prayer and communion (within the fraternity and without) and enter into a shared discernment on the progress of their ministries, instead of the sometimes protectionist attitudes that surround assignments and ministerial placements. A more collective and global accountability that flows from a respect for the international dimensions of Christ’s compassion would complement the personal and interpersonal forms of obedience developed in the 20th century.

A renewed emphasis on itinerancy as the moving forward and beyond the established frontiers of class, gender and sexuality, along with a deeper commitment to the development of the cosmic fraternity and mutual interdependence must provoke a serious and sustained engagement with the feminine. Capuchin formation must become more authentically involved with the histories and experiences of women in the North and the South. We must question the practice that excludes women from the discussions with us on how “restored relationships inaugurate justice.” They must speak for themselves about the shape and direction of the 21st century’s “fraternal economy.” And itinerancy will demand of us the courage to step beyond the secure frontiers of our sexuality and gender to allow women (and other minorities) to be in free communion with us, freed from the domination and deprivation they have experienced for far too long.

3. social structures. It is in his second circular letter that Corriveau announces that structural change will be part of the agenda of his administration. But, his insight is more than a prescription for a fairer distribution of resources across the Capuchin world. It is the recognition that these structural adaptations, built on solidarity and mutual interdependence, offer a stronger basis for hope and a more secure foundation for the world’s well-being.

Corriveau is not afraid to take on the structures that are built upon the triumph of competition. Clearly, Corriveau has focused his efforts on the financial structures of the Order. He has done so because, as we have seen, he knows that the competitive spirit that monopolizes the imagination of the modern world is an affront to the fraternal communion that should determine our interaction with the world.

But, he has not stopped at our economic relationships. He has also called for the “solidarity of personnel” and the creation of “new structures of collaboration between continents and circumscriptions.”

He opens a new frontier for religious formation: the work of structural conversion. Structural conversion presumes that every friar in formation will become more conversant with the tools and skills necessary to understand and, if necessary, help in the reform of the systems, institutions and organizations in which we live and work, according to the vision and the values of fraternal communion.

Too often the work of religious formation is presented at only two levels: the personal and the interpersonal. Often forgotten is the critical dimension of the collective or the structural. Reducing religious well-being to personal and relational dynamics alone ignores the broader institutional forces that can either promote human progress or drive social exploitation.

Discrimination, inequality, inadequate health care, poor educational structures, and unjust hiring practices, for example, are more often than not “social sins.” And the dynamics of social sin are different and more subtle than the dynamics of personal sin, in that the competitive codes of social sin hide within the rules, customs and conventions of organizations and erode overtime the legitimate personal and interpersonal needs of an individual or group.

In the face of the collective violence and the conflicts fueled by ethnic, nationalist or religious antagonisms erupting in our world, it is incumbent on those dedicated to a fraternal economy to understand and be experienced in the practice of conflict transformation, peacebuilding and social forgiveness.

Our brothers at the recent regional meeting of the Order on justice and peace in Addis Ababa understood how social reconciliation is a particular sign of God’s grace in a world of multiple ethnicities and cultures. They also demonstrated how the building up of a culture of human rights in our own communities and in the world at large is a uniquely Franciscan expression of our fundamental equality and unity as “brothers to all peoples without distinction.” (Const. 11:2).

Conclusion

We began this presentation with a sober reminder of human suffering in the world. In the time it would take to speak, thousands of children would die of hunger, be infected with the AIDS virus, and be exploited in the ethnic and religious conflicts breaking out across the globe.

Our fears have come to pass – thousands of children have died or been enslaved. They have become the targets of war, been uprooted from their homes and separated from their families.

In the face of this global violence and poverty, we have proposed minority as a social virtue of international compassion and itinerancy as a passionate and confident moving forward and beyond the frontiers of language, class, culture, ideology, gender, orientation and caste, so that we can live our call to be a free communion of persons without domination or deprivation.

We stand at a challenging crossroad of our Capuchin life. Will we hear the cry of the poor beyond our borders as our African brothers requested at the General Chapter of 2000? Or will we turn away?

The children wait.

We all agree that minority is not merely poverty, nor can it be reduced to occupying the lowest positions. Rather, it is a relationship of service in a humble condition, it means washing one another’s feet. Service presupposes some measure of effectiveness on the real level. How can minority be relevant to the clamor and expectations of contemporary societies, in an increasingly globalized world with ever more complex relationships? Can the societies in which we are present believe that anything good, any good news, can come out of a group of Catholic friars who profess minority? The answers to these questions – which were put to me in the course of preparing for this Plenary Council – depend first of all, it seems to me, on how well one understands and interprets the contemporary world, and on the quality of minority in relation to that world. This talk is composed of five points: 1. Possibilities for service so that a different world becomes possible 2. Minority as a relationship of service rather than an identity. 3. Minority as a necessary relationship arising out of an encounter with others who live in minority. 4. Relationships of service that can help to sustain a new and possible vision of the world. In this section I will try to indicate some consequences of the first three points. 5. Finally, minority in the complexity of social dialectic, moving from proximity to organized solidarity, without losing the foundational experience of minority.

1. A different world is possible

To dream of a different world is not our privilege. The mission of a lesser brother in this world could be, in a certain formal sense, the mission of Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance immortalized by Cervantes in his masterpiece of Spanish literature. In this world, where great ideals appear as romantic anachronisms, to continue to dream an impossible dream, to continue to fight an unwinable fight, to transform harsh reality into nobility and ardor, such a mission must in some way mark the rather “quixotic” figure of the lesser brother. A “Knight of the Mirrors”, standing before Quixote with his brutal demonstration of reality, his socio-economic, political or psychological analyses, can banish the dream with a diagnosis of madness or melancholy. In the present state of societies, in a world where the global power of the strong triumphs and hope is stifled by new peripheries and new frontiers, the temptation to give in to melancholy and a sense of failure and powerlessness can be very strong. But triumph and victory, power and dominion, are not synonymous with truth. “Facts can be the enemies of truth”, was Don Quixote’s retort to the Knight of the Mirrors. Truth and justice, as the cross of Jesus proves, (our Don Quixote of the Kingdom of God) are revealed more clearly among the tears of those who stand beside the crosses on the peripheries, than in the new centers that fascinate and bewilder with their new cathedrals.

“Another world is possible” became the great slogan of the Word Social Forum, first held in 2001 in Porto Alegre, the city I come from, which I attended together with other friars and theologians and many church members. In January of this year it took place in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), in India. It is now called the “Movement of Movements”, since it brings together an increasing number of non-governmental organizations, bodies and movements working to promote the dignity and rights of humanity and of creation, a more just ordering of international relations, an improvement in the quality of human life on earth, etc.

The World Social Forum came about as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, which has been held in January each year in Davos, Switzerland ever since the seventies. The World Social Forum aims to affirm a type of globalization that gives first place to societies rather than to the economy, and sees the latter at the service of the former and not vice versa. Meanwhile, its phenomenal rate of annual growth, its methodology and scope have already surpassed the initial aims. As well as the World Forum, forums are held on a regional and continental basis to prepare for it, to ensure grass roots participation and to spread the ideals. From being a network of ideas, it has become a large showcase where initiatives and organizations gain visibility and find creative forms of expression, particularly those that have sprung up in the last twenty years and which remained relatively isolated and invisible amid the noisy triumph of neoliberalism and the ideology of the “single issue”.

Defying this one-dimensional, anthropologically perverse ideology – like other ideologies of the recent past – the World Social Forum presents a utopian horizon: the possibility of another world. The world as we know it – the present world – built on the foundations of western history, especially of the last five centuries, is becoming more and more unsustainable and non-viable for large parts of humanity, despite the fact that a media war is under way over the interpretation of reality. To state that there is no longer one reality, but only interpretations, eventually brings people up against the boundaries of hunger, solitude, despair and death. Vast portions of humanity are rapidly coming to experience these boundaries, which the media, in alliance with the dominant interests, consistently contrives to keep “out of sight and out of mind”. Another world is both necessary and urgent. The World Social Forum, meanwhile, claims to be much more than a dream focused on some utopian horizon. It also presents the manifold potentialities of reality in a vast range of initiatives that are a sign of this other possible world.

When the second World Social Forum opened, immediately after the birth of the slogan “Another world is possible” – came a second statement: “Not another world beyond or separate from this world”. And then came the third statement, with the same solemnity of an overture: “But different from the present state of this world: the world can be different”. And lastly: “ We can make this world a new world”. For those of us who work in soteriology and eschatology – the “last things” as they used to be called – these statements, in the secularization produced by modernity, resonate with the very heart of Christian hope, with its horizon of messianic expectations, namely the salvation of humnanity with the world and of the world together with a saved humanity, without separation or confusion of the two. We look for the final coming of the new heaven and the new earth, where there will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain. (Cf. Ac 20-21). We could even take pride in the fact that among the coordinators of the World Social Forum there are also people with a sound Christian background. But in the life-stories of each of the thousands of participants there is a plurality of religious traditions, with their ethic of responsibility. Although the “subject” or “agent” of the Forum is civil society in its organizations, without party political connotations and without exclusive religious connotations, members of many religions are explicitly present in their commitment to the charter of ethical principles, to respect for plurality and non-violent methods.

Obviously, the WSF is still fragile in many aspects. There are, to be sure, doses of romanticism and confusion, of the kind of chaos that usually emerges when popular celebrations take place on a large scale; there are exaggerated statements of identity, residual demonstrations by radical groups with outdated ideologies acting in parallel with the Forum, etc. And there is always the question of how effective it all is. All the same, there is great practical value in showing what is happening in various regions of the planet, encouraging communication and networks, creating empathies and affinities, strengthening hope. But the definitive effectiveness of the Forum lies in the very horizon it reveals as a possibility: “another world is possible”.

The following reflection is directed towards the effectiveness of minority, against the background of the thousands of entities and persons that make up the World Social Forum, with its own social and utopian horizons. It may be appropriate to reaffirm clearly something which is prior to any efficacy: namely, that minority, at its heart, in its most secret and mysterious depths, lives and moves in the sphere of gratuity, of grace, of gift given without measure and without calculation. In this sense, too, the humanist generosity and gratitude of the thousands who are part of the World Social Forum are impressive. Could we not recognize here the work of the Holy Spirit? However, in order to understand the relationship between minority and this gigantic demonstration by civil society on a world scale, we need to have at least a minimum of understanding about minority itself, since it is part of our identity, and identities today are problematic.

2. Minority: an identity in relationship

When Thomas of Celano recounts the moment when Francis named his group of brothers, perhaps we ought to think of it in somewhat biblical terms: “I want this fraternity to be called the Order of Lesser Brothers” (1Cel 38). Consequently – and others can explain this better than I can – the essence of the Order lies not just in being brothers, but in being brothers in the form or modality of “minors”. Both words define the identity, the very being, of anyone who really belongs to the Order. In biblical terms, the name denotes a vocation, a call to become that identity. Now, because of “minority”, this identity is paradoxical, there is something contradictory about it, it is an “inside-out” identity, even a scandalous one. Until the shock has interrupted the journey towards identity and turned it penitentially inside out, the adventure of being a lesser brother cannot begin. In order for us to understand more profoundly the need for such a shock and how it happens, let us briefly look at the drama of identity. I believe that the drama – so starkly exposed by our brother and teacher Lázaro Iriarte when he said that the squabbles about poverty were due to its dissociation from minority – has much to do with the profound problem of identity in the history of the West.

The priority of the affirmation of one’s identity, the search for one’s essential being, foundation and meaning, while relegating relationships with others and with their differences to second place in the quest for identity, is the cause of war, ignorance and injustice. It can be said that this instinct for the affirmation of identity is not just the drama of a particular history or culture but is something anthropological or even zoological. But if we are not to remain on the level of generalities, we would do well to recognize, as many contemporary thinkers do, that the history of the West has been characterized by this circle of the odyssey, by nostalgia for oneself, for one’s own meaning and foundation. It is a search for oneself, with a victorious affirmation of self at every contact with what is extraneous to self. The affirmation of identity can occur even in the fascination of mysticism, in merging with the divine, in the beauty of its mystery. It is all the same whether it happens in a theology or liturgy of beauty, or in the beauty of theology or liturgy. But this esthetic side, like the intellectual and the political side, also has its warrior side, its violence elevated to the nobility of heroic battles. The circle of identity colonizes, subjugates, manipulates, and finally annihilates any and every revelation of otherness and refuses any conversion other than a mere conversion to the profoundest depths of itself. Thus, in the political sphere, we have recently witnessed the resurgence of nationalisms and totalitarian ideologies; more recently, in more liberal regions, the struggles of minorities to affirm their own identities. Finally, we are seeing the return of fundamentalism in its various versions. Fundamentalist terrorism is the weakest of these, which only acts in the form of guerrilla warfare. It is fundamentalism imposed by a war of terror waged by the strong, who naively feel justified in using force each time their identity is threatened. All are united in the quest for the affirmation of identity, even if this means a dangerous clash of civilizations in a world in which growing globalization has compelled people into a proximity that is not necessarily a fulfillment of the biblical commandment regarding one’s neighbour.

The question about identity – to move closer to home - is whether in Christian, Catholic and ecclesiastical terms, and even in spiritual, mystical terms, we might not be following the same paths. In wanting to deepen minority more deeply in terms of our identity, might we not become too concerned with ourselves? In ecclesiological terms, we have only to leaf through the texts about the “marks” of the Church, and the disputes about which is the true Church, who embodies and makes visible the identity of Christ’s Church, to realize that there is an intermediate circle around the problem, even before we get into the narrow circle of the Franciscan disputes. If we add to the classic “marks” of the Church - Ecclesia Una, Sancta, Catholica et Apostolica – the further marks that it is Western, Latin, historic and cultural, and Roman – while being fully aware of how much Francis loved the Roman Church and wanted his brothers to be obedient to it – then the drama of identity is even more exposed in the Church of today.
At the same time, the priority given to the quest for the affirmation of identity is not the only principle that has made history in the West. In addition to the odyssey of conquests and discoveries, of colonizers and builders of great empires, the West is evangelically traumatized by the ceaseless pilgrimage of Abraham, Moses and Elijah, of the poor ones of Yahweh, and finally, by the paschal journey of Jesus. On the journey from Abraham to Jesus, from Jesus to the Kingdom of God, the irruption of the mystery led to the paradox of majesty and weakness present at one and the same time, the ocean with the drop of water, the God who is always “high and holy” yet always to be found among the lowly and repentant (Cf Is 57,15). Biblical anthropology implanted in the West a quality of restlessness, of pilgrimage, an ethical concern for the other above and before an ethic of identity, order and institution. This is why the West is in a continuous short-circuit between the affirmation of identity and the renunciation of self in favor of transcendence and relief of neighbour, a mixture of colonization and mission, oscillating between sincere humanistic fervor and the imposition of one’s own humanism on others.
Vatican II gave the Church an identity beyond itself. Its vocation, its raison d’etre, was to be on the way; its mission was to evangelize and to seek the kingdom of God. This is a very simple and at the same time very disquieting truth: the Reign of God is greater than the Church; it is prior to and above the Church; it is the horizon by which the Church reaches beyond itself. At the same time, it is more fragile and smaller than the Church, and is always in need of help. This is one of the lessons of the continuous short-circuit between identity and self-transcendence, between self-affirmation and renunciation of self in favor of something greater which is, at the same time, more humble.

Within this history we find, with renewed shame and astonishment, that the experience of Francis occupies a pivotal place. In showing us that the journey towards the Order’s identity would be one of minority, Francis’ words are essentially related to ourselves, and he speaks from a place that has nothing comfortable about it. We all know what it meant, in the society of Francis’ day, to belong to the stratum of the “minores”, and we need not stress the point now. I would just like to underline something even more obvious: that the word “minor” points to a relationship rather than to an identity. The identity is defined on the basis of a foundational relationship. And that it is comparative relationship: it presupposes that there is someone “major”. If we wanted to jump directly from the social relation between the strata of maiores and minores in the time of Francis to our mystical relationship as “little ones” before the greater mystery of the divine majesty, we would run the risk of eliminating the importance of “littleness” in the societies we live in. For now, it is enough to say that minority makes us “change places” – from the priority of affirming our identity to the priority of self-transcendence, a relationship that is greater and humbler than ourselves, which progressively defines our identity without our being able to control it. It is given to us from the starting point of others, whom we loyally consider as our “greater” loves. And, perhaps, speaking somewhat fearfully but in all frankness, we can say that at the present time the Church, in its complex internal relationships, is more inclined to the defense and deepening of identity than to self-transcendence in relationship with what, in the world, is smallest and most humble.

3. Minority: a necessary relationship that grows from other people

It is useful to recall what Francis wrote at the beginning of his Testament: “The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them, and I showed mercy to them. (Test. 1).

For specialists of religion trying to understand the structure of religious experience, this moment in Francis’ life turns out to be most valuable . The edifying biographies of Francis were quite right to incorporate many narratives into this foundational experience in his life, given its decisive importance. What is important to highlight, for the purposes of our topic of minority, is that this foundational experience first of all had a de-structuring, one might say even destructive effect, and provoked a moment of uncontrollable emptying of self, a kenosis. Today, at this time of the “emptiness” of western culture, when modernity seems to be in a state of flux and great institutions appear to be dissolving, the experience of emptiness or kenosis is a fairly dramatic fact. The forthcoming meeting of Christian movements who are searching for the “European soul” is one significant sign of this.

The kenosis involved in the foundational experience of Francis is not purely mystical. It arises from the revelation of the other as “leper”, in his humanity. This association of that which is deformed, ugly, painful, repugnant – initially felt as a threat from which one instinctively recoils - with defiant, fragile humanity in all its purity, is the place where the Lord turned Francis into a “minor” among minors. In biblical history and in the history of religions, before any institutional aspect, we find life stories that are traumatized by this moment. There is no religion without compassion, and there is no compassion without the pain and loss that take place in an unexpected encounter.

To be “minor”, therefore, is not a voluntaristic act or a calculated decision made under the control of reason; it is not a project matured with full awareness. No-one becomes lowly or empties himself or serves others without that shock or scandal which alone transforms bitterness into sweetness and vice versa. This transformation is not in our power, and does not begin in us. Minority begins in a necessary relationship – one that imposes itself – beginning with other lowly people, as a grace that is beyond our nature, something truly super-natural where Creator and creatures are lovingly associated. This anthropological and ethical reference to “another lowly person” and to compassion as the deepest form of love and mysticism is what makes the beginning of minority possible.

Once again, Francis reminds us of something precious: “They must rejoice when they live among people considered of little value and looked down upon, among the poor and the powerless, the sick and the lepers and the beggars by the wayside.” (Rnb 9,3). According to Lázaro Iriarte, with the conventualization and clericalization of the mission to preach the gospel, this original relation to a simple, uncomplicated environment soon faded from the horizon, and minority was engulfed by a search for ascetical and mystical poverty, little different from the austerity of the Greek Cynics with their ascetical and political polemics. Poverty itself, as we know, became a tragicomic dispute within the Order and within the Church.

Minority, therefore, is a gift we receive from God through the presence and mediation of others, of the little ones of this world. Without this foundational experience the rest is rhetoric. Building on this foundational experience we can hope to make an adequate contribution, as “lesser ones”, to the evangelization of the world through the good news of justice and peace.

4. Minority: “sustainable” relationships to make a different world possible

It is fitting for us now to analyze what understanding we have today of the societies we live in, so as to place within those societies our relationship with minority and its possibilities for sustaining the new world we hope for. In terms of Cervantes’ epic masterpiece, this is the confrontation between the Knight of the Mournful Countenanced and the Knight of the Mirrors.

4.1 Between systems and chaos: the present-day condition of the people in regions of exclusion

One of today’s global concerns is the sustainability of the world. Political power and the structuring of the economy, in their basic forms, continue to be carried out according to a non-viable paradigm, philosophically Cartesian and scientifically Newtonian in type, which divides reality and makes it mechanistic. It is a warlike paradigm, whose motto is “divide and rule”. Within this harsh and warlike paradigm, truth is synonymous with dominion and deconstruction. Even scientific specialization and technology, as well as critical and instrumental reason, analytic philosophy and methods of historical criticism, have developed within its confines. Thus, scientific truth becomes powerless to generate meaning and life . Even authority and obedience, as well as education and teaching authority – including the ecclesiastical – become violent relationships: “he who can, commands; he who must, obeys!” This paradigm has turned our relationship with the world and the earth’s ecosystem, and our social relationships unsustainable from every angle: politically, economically, culturally, ecologically and spiritually.

A new understanding of the world is emerging in the meanwhile: more systemic and more holistic. There is an abundant literature on this . One of the more fascinating theories is that of “self-organization” and of the emergence of life in ever more complex conditions. The other is “chaos theory”, with its frightening doses of random occurrences . Finally, uncertainty and indetermination, complementarities and structural dissipation to make possible the re-emergence of more complex structures – all of these helped to design, on the basis of the new physics of the twentieth century, a new paradigm on which even anthropology, social relations, the economy politics and ethics, the ecosystemic and holistic vision, and finally also spirituality, theology and religious traditions, are still attempting a new birth. And doing so with residual resistance and pathetic fundamentalism on the part of many institutions . The fact is that in any case, the new possibilities for understanding and action do not make things simpler, but more complex. They start by requiring a new literacy and a new ethical posture. When the paradigm changes, everyone starts again from the beginning, and the teachers of the old paradigm sit down beside the illiterate. When we think of this happening in the political, moral, doctrinal or canonical fields, the discomfort, emptiness and kenosis caused by such a global change are obvious. It is not false humility to admit that in many important matters concerning our world we simply do not know what to think and what to do.

Meanwhile we also learn to trust. From the new physics we learn that, even at the very lowest level, in the sub-atomic regions of reality, where only a kind of quantum soup or even a quantum emptiness exists, or thermodynamic fields of energy with mere pieces of reality swimming about in the form of fractals, where the chaos of the macro-cosmos is also beneath the micro-cosmos – there, precisely there, is where order emerges, symmetry, organizations, life-systems which, at a certain level, definitely call for our responsibility. Chaos, therefore, is an abyss of unfettered energies, violence and death, but it is also the incubator of reality, of organized life appealing for an ethical response.
It is also quite true that every field of structured energy has further corresponding regions of chaos around it. Chaos theory can be applied to society in a transdisciplinary way: for centuries, the exploration of colonies corresponded to the beauty of the metropolis, just as today, in a large third-world city, portions of the developed world border on large areas of urban chaos. The residential areas with their fine closed-in apartments correspond to the chaotic suburbs where the cleaners sleep, the quarry workers and the domestics who work in those beautiful high-rise apartments. The world of today, from neighborly relationships to international relations full of the trauma of migrations and frontiers, can be understood on a scale going from systems that are more or less successful to the increasingly abysmal doses of chaos in the universe. In other words, between those who are included in systems that give some guarantees of life, and the excluded who live their daily life dangerously, without security, surrounded by violence and easy death. Today’s globalization and the improvements it brings have their corresponding and dramatic forms of periphery and chaos.

At the same time, the struggle of people to survive the daily grind, displaying energy in its almost primitive state, is also a source of creativity, even if it is structured in a fragile, ephemeral form, like mere fragments of organized reality, as in ephemeral “fractals” floating in the midst of chaos (to use an image from the new physics). Two examples may shed some light on this: the informality of work and the informality of religion. There is an enormous ferment of creativity in the world of work, supported by all kinds of relationships and organizations, from good neighbor schemes to NGOs, to the so-called “third sector” and international cooperation. And there is incredible creativity in the area of spirituality, forming “pieces of religion”, “fractals of Churches” that spring up on every street corner, syncretistic forms acquiring their own logic and sustaining the meaning and dignity of lives under threat.

The photographer Sebastião Salgado, well known for his photographs of dramatic social events taken all over the world in the past few decades, observed that the suburbs of third-world cities are all the same in the sense of sharing the esthetics of chaos, of ugliness and horror. Chaos makes everything the same, it is the overarching identity, involving the absolute loss of all differentiating identities. And, at the same time, it is also the possibility of a new beginning, the place where a miraculous humanism is revealed, made up of surprising encounters with lepers and with Christ.

4.2 The inevitable experience of the proximity of another “minor”

It was outside the system, on the edge and sliding into chaos, that the meeting took place between the Samaritan and the man who lay half dead by the side of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. The scribe had asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life (cf. Lk 10, 25). According to the scriptures, he had to fulfil the two great commandments; to love God first, and his neighbor as himself. But law must be able to establish identities and differences, determine what must be done and also define limits and be clear about what must not or need not be done. And so the problem was to define the boundary of the closed apartment: who is my neighbour?! And the first thing Jesus’ parable sets out to do is to remove all limits, all boundaries. Those who were part of the religious system fulfilled the law with a zeal appropriate to the holiness of the law – a priest was forbidden in any circumstance to touch anyone who had apparently dropped dead: this was the first rule of priestly holiness (Cf. Lv 21,1). According to the parable, the priest and the levite came by but they did not come close, for reasons of cultic holiness. The clear boundaries imposed by the law forbade them to come close. It was the Samaritan - considered to be a man possessed by the devil and hated for various good reasons – who, journeying outside of his own world, halfway between the two purest Jewish cities, “saw him and had pity on him. He went up to him and bandaged his wounds” (Lk 10, 33b-34a). There on the outskirts, excluded from their systems, both had the unavoidable experience of “coming close” without defenses. It was the experience of Francis when he was thrown out of his system by disillusionment, sickness, family and personal crisis, and by the collapse of the beautiful world of his youth: he found himself among the fallen and excluded. He needed to be dragged into the same pit, the same kenosis, the same void, so that he would meet a brother who was truly human, fragile and purely human. In that condition, mercy enfolded both parties: in a certain sense the man who had fallen by the roadside made it possible for the Samaritan to feel alive, to care for him effectively and with dignity, to have value and meaning – the man who lay half dead was a samaritan to the Samaritan, just as it was the lepers who cured Francis’ wounds.

4.3 From the minority of the other to one’s own minority as itinerancy and as identity.
On the basis of the foundational experience of closeness in minority, in which one receives from another lowly person one’s own vocation to minority, all can be recovered: the Samaritan places everything – his oil, his mount, his money, the inn, even his plans, at the service of the other person’s minority. And in this way he remains “in proximity”, he perseveres on the way of minority, by serving the minority of the other. He perseveres without any kind of second identity that is its own master. He gives what he has, becomes destitute, and goes on his way defenseless, ready to risk further close contacts.

Francis, after his foundational experience, which was both mystical and ethical at one and the same time - like Jesus himself at his Trinitarian baptism among the humble - finding himself in the same place and in the same body with the lowly and with God, was filled with enthusiasm and went about asking for goods and alms, but he continued to give, remained in a state of poverty and abnegation. We need not turn this talk into a homily to state clearly that itinerancy, like poverty, is not a value in itself – field researchers and tourists are also itinerants – nor is it a merely spiritual mystique – God can be found everywhere. But itinerancy and poverty flow from minority which, in turn, is a relationship that stays close to, in encounter with and in service to the lowly, who move from place to place because they have no guaranteed place of their own. One receives the vocation to minority and itinerancy in order to be with the lowly ones, to share the condition of minority, to give what one has and do what one can to serve. It is a form of wandering service, service on the move. Without service – without mission in minority, in other words, without a mission that means washing feet and healing wounds out of compassion, itinerancy becomes an exercise of power over others. Both priest and Levite were also on the way to serve their sacred system with its harsh laws and limits placed far above mercy.

Finally, a “minorite” identity can be defined: it is to persevere on the risky journey of coming close, with sensitivity, compassion and humanity, whose only value, meaning and foundation comes from other lowly people, from the world of the “little ones” and the poor, from those who have fallen along the way.

In social terms permanence of identity means persevering on the frontiers of marginality and social chaos, risking confusion and spontaneity – traditional definitions of Capuchin, Franciscan joy. But it means doing so with the generosity and responsibility of one who could also be crushed or made a martyr either by the religious system or by the spontaneous violence of fringe situations. But we also know that, just as a drop of water in some way contains the ocean, and the flutter of a butterfly’s wings on one continent can produce a storm far out at sea, so can an unnoticed, merciful encounter redeem and recreate the world. Every single thing is related to every other, in one complex and marvellous whole.

5. Minority and social dialectic: from proximity to organized solidarity

The foundational experience of minority is a “non-place”, it is beyond everyday experience. One cannot be on the edge, on the outside, in chaos and in total deconstruction, every day. The foundational experience can only be an extra-ordinary event, in which the foundation is built above the chaos and becomes the profound secret that sustains the everyday. Its truthfulness and strength, meanwhile, can and should lend significance and creativity to the everyday. We are involved in everyday realities not just when one person falls down in front of us but many; we are involved in the crowds on the street, in the city. In the harshness of daily reality there is a multiplicity of faces, cries, needs, diversity, all calling for urgent choices. And so we are thrown back onto the system, the resources of the economy, of politics, of labor, of projects, words and ideas. God’s greatest glory is to be humble. Proximity and mercy, the grace received and given among little ones, now needs to be transformed into the realities of everyday social life. And this is what we ultimately call networks of solidarity.

We do not need to invent solidarity: it exists everywhere. It has always existed as the very possibility of any society. But in each age it acquires new possibilities, and today it has some surprising aspects. For example, in a metropolitan area such as São Paulo, in Brazil, with its18 million inhabitants and high rates of violence and every kind of degradation, it is estimated that roughly one NGO comes into being every day, with a multitude of initiatives that even at the local neighbourhood level go far beyond mere charitable assistance. They become growth points where fatalism can be overcome and responsible citizenship learned. In a word, they are places of new life. Even the cruelty and violence of the megalopolis, in the very wounds it inflicts, gives rise to every kind of solidarity, spanning the whole range from trauma to compassion, to discovery, creativity and organization. One journalist who evaluated the many forms of solidarity initiatives in São Paulo, placed first the contribution of theology - apostolates inspired by liberation theology and the social enterprises of the Catholic Church in recent decades. Next came the desire for greater humanity, expressed by citizens who enjoyed good cultural and economic resources. In situations like this, all around the planet, the good news for the lesser brother is that one can wade in wholeheartedly, without many resources, but giving oneself, with all the risks involved in such a gift.

But, in time, under the pressure of everyday life, minority becomes weighed down with complexity and even sophistication, apparently abandoning the simplicity of its founding moments. And, despite the nostalgia, it incorporates the necessary mediations in order to remain efficient. Efficiency means rationality, a project, resources, funds, communication, technology, association with people at different levels, policy implementation, entrepreneurship, investments, travel: in a word, everything that can strengthen the network of solidarity based on a few basic options. At this point, Capuchin tradition seems to have accumulated a wealth of experience, in that it is able to engage the whole of society, to be simultaneously on the margins and at the center, not ashamed to ask for alms which, in truth, are a right and an inheritance of the “little ones” with whom the Lord of all treasures identifies, as the Rule teaches. It is important to remember that, right from the beginning, questing was never practiced simply for oneself or for the friars, but that it was part of a context in which all were associated in evangelization: both those who needed gifts and those who needed to learn to give something of themselves. Minority and itinerancy become a bridge that unites many directions. In the meantime, the decisive thing will always be the dose of sensitivity present in the foundational experience – the mercy and grace of an encounter in minority and closeness. This sensitivity becomes a point of view, an argument, a banner, even when one finds oneself in the most sophisticated places and occupations – lecturing, on a plane or among people who wear fine clothes.

One ministry that historically has become characteristic of the friars is the ministry of the word. At a time when the value of mechanical work was valued, highlighting man’s ability to “act on materials”, it used to be said that virtue would consist in “few words and many actions”. Today this is seen as blatantly ideological and even as a claim to power. What the prophets taught and what creation reveals before anything else is that the word is the great mediator between chaos and the organized world. The “fractals of religions” scattered about the peripheries and their eloquent pastors are asking us to remember that people do need to be healed, but they also need words that heal and sustain hope and self-esteem, and poetry to feed their humanity. Among popular organizations and groups there are many that start from the arts, dance and sport, not just the economy and education for work. But an effective, saving word needs to be loaded with foundational minority, a word uttered in the intimacy of dialogue and allied to a listening ear, if it is not to become the religious sophistry of a false prophet. The temptation to be a successful prophet may need to be countered occasionally by the experience narrated in Ezechiel 33, when the people would meet every night to listen to his songs and enjoy the music, while paying no attention to his appeals. When the word fails, we fall back into our proper, lowly place, so that we can once again seek minority in close proximity to the “little ones”.

With the increasing complexity of daily life, temptations are returning – the temptation of the law, of an all-absorbing, self-sufficient system, the tendency to forget the Samaritan’s experience and the closeness of the man by the roadside, to become the priest or Levite convinced of their own zeal. At such times we need to go back to the original experience of minority, just as we need to return to experience prayer, the mountain, contemplation. And therefore perhaps failure, the lack of fruits or the lack of recognition or gratitude, every little helps! The pain of being Don Quixote, or rather, of remaining alongside the crucified for the sake of a kingdom of God that looks like failure, is necessary for minority.

In any event, whether in abundance or in want, there is a new aid available to us today to help us resist identifying service with success. In ecclesial terms, this is inter-congregational cooperation: collaborating with organizations inspired by others, or again, collaboration with bodies or networks that are not specifically Catholic, which might be ecumenical, interreligious or simply civil organizations. All of these help to place us in “our” place as the lesser brothers of everyone, associated with a service given by many for the good of all – the other possible world.

INTRODUCTION

I begin this talk by thanking the organizers of this PCO VII for honoring me, a brother from a young General Vice-province situated at the heart of the tormented African continent, by asking me to outline for the representatives of the whole Order my vision of Franciscan minority together with concrete ways of living as a Capuchin in situations of poverty and destitution. To avoid remaining on the level of generalities I shall limit my reflections to the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Republic of Congo in particular.

The principal objective of this 7th Plenary Council is “to study minority and itinerancy in light of the theology of communion” (Circular n° 20,9). And so, this presentation is the open and sincere reflection of a Capuchin brother trying to understand the meaning of Franciscan “minority” in a context of generalized social destitution.

My paper is divided into three parts:
1. The life of “Lesser” Brothers today in sub-Saharan Africa;
2. “Minority” according to St Francis;
3. Some proposals for a better living of “minority” in sub-Saharan Africa today

1. LIVING AS “LESSER” BROTHERS TODAY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

1.1. The socio-economic and political situation in the Congo (Sub-saharan Africa)

1.1.1. In the economic sphere

After five years of wars and rebellions the population – especially in the interior of this vast country and in the suburbs of the major cities - is living in a situation of generalized poverty. Because of looting and plundering the economic and industrial fabric has been completely destroyed and roads are impassable or non-existent, which makes the circulation of goods and people extremely difficult.

Consequently the income of the population, largely drawn from the sale of agricultural products, has fallen sharply, with commercial and industrial activities reduced to a minimum. This in turn means that state revenues have declined, so that the country is unable to pay its civil servants or provide subsidies for the social sector (health and education).

Added to this general malaise is the fact that, despite the signing of peace accords, many precious minerals such as cobalt, gold, diamonds and coltan continue to find their way out of the country by fraud.

1.1.2. In the social sphere

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the State does not subsidize education and health. It does not intervene in the payment of staff and makes no contribution to the supply of medicines. The running costs of schools and hospitals are paid for by parents and patients.

This means that many children do not attend school and many sick people have no means of seeking treatment.

1.1.3. In the political sphere

For over a year now, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been in a transitional period. The government is made up of members of the different rebel factions who find it hard to govern together. Any action by the government is paralyzed by distrust and internal suspicion. There is no real central authority and civilian life is stagnating.

1.2. Causes of this generalized poverty

There are national causes and international ones.

1.2.1. National causes

a. Rivalry at the highest levels of the State: With the « one plus four » formula (i.e. one president and four vice-presidents), there is rivalry among the different political components of the government. This means that there are mutual boycotts at the highest level, instead of sincere collaboration.
b. Bad governance : the notion of the «common good » is unknown. Each one thinks first of his own personal advancement and personal enrichment. This is why international organizations are reluctant to help the State. They prefer to work through credible NGOs in order to reach the population. And I deliberately say credible NGOs, because there are grave abuses even in this area.

1.2.2. International causes

a. Certain neighboring countries and criminal organizations covertly encourage ethnic and political tensions.
b. International economic policy, in particular the subsidies given by rich countries to their farmers, obstructs the traditional peasant agriculture. The agricultural and agro-industrial products of the DRC become too expensive and are no longer competitive. For example: the market price of a locally produced chicken is higher than one imported from the west; locally produced corn is much more expensive than corn imported from the US, etc.
c. Insufficient control over all-powerful international companies, which act as a state within a state.

Conclusion : Without international aid accompanied by a different type of globalization, sub-Saharan Africa is condemned to languish in a state of generalized poverty.

1 1.3. The attitude of the international community in face of this generalized poverty in sub-Saharan Africa

Despite the slow reforms in international economic policy and the egoism of rich countries in the agricultural sector, this situation of generalized poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is considered scandalous. In a world where technology has developed to the point where it would be possible to give each citizen in the world everything he or she needs in order to live a dignified life, hundreds of millions of human beings are malnourished, have no access to medical care and no possibility of ensuring quality education for their children.

The Magisterium of the Church has become aware of this international injustice. Since the end of the 19th century, and particularly during the pontificate of John Paul II, a social “doctrine” of the Church has been developed. This demands that concrete action be taken to eliminate the injustice and to ensure a decent life for every citizen of the world. This social teaching of the Church is nothing other than the implementation of the gospel teachings of Jesus Christ. In his commentary on the Beatitudes, Jacques DUPONT expresses very well the scope of this teaching: « Poverty is an evil that must be fought … In the early Christian community there were no needy members (Acts 4, 34)... Therefore, only those would have the right to preach the beatitudes who had done everything in their power, used all possible means in their own sphere of influence (from sharing their goods to sharing responsibilities, from trade union or political action to professional activity), to ensure that there were no more poor people. If not, the beatitudes must be prayed humbly, must rise up to God as a humble prayer asking him to convert us and to give us the strength to fight in this way against poverty and misery » (J. DUPONT, Le message des Béatitudes, in Cahiers d’Evangile, n° 24, May 1978, p. 15 and 18).

At the international level, the Charter of Human Rights is concrete proof that all men and women of good will have understood that all people – black, yellow and white – are equal and have a right to a life worthy of human beings. What is actually contained in the concept of human dignity is a slow process of discovery in the course of human history, which today constitutes the common moral inheritance of humankind.

Conclusion : We hope that this new social ethic can be concretized and applied in the form of specific international measures, economic, social and political.

1.4. THE LIFE OF THE CAPUCHIN FRIARS MINOR IN DRC

1.4.1. Sociologically, we are not among the poor

When we compare our lifestyle with that of the majority population in this continent of poor people, we come to the same conclusion as Th. Matura : « Sociologically, we are not among the poor ». This matches the findings in the « Summary of replies » (to the PCO 7 questionnaire), p. 22: « In general in those countries (of the South), people love us as they see us, i.e., rich, powerful and generous. Our wealth, of course, is deduced from signs that might not be equally convincing everywhere: good houses, regular meals, the use of cars ».

In reality, judging from our lifestyle, we are neither poor nor rich. It would be truer to say that we lead a decent life, but which in the context of the immense destitution of our poor countries, looks like « a rich man’s life ». Yet, if we compare our life with that which is demanded by the « Declaration of Human Rights », we are poor. The fact is that poverty and wealth are relative concepts.

1.4.2. Dependence on external subsidies

If we Capuchins of the Congo have a decent lifestyle, this is thanks to the subsidies we receive from the General Curia (International Solidarity Office) and from other benefactors in the northern countries. The reality is that in our countries of sub-Saharan Africa it is very difficult to find paid employment. Some 60% of the population of a large town such as Kinshasa (with 6 million inhabitants) do not have a paid job. Those with a job accumulate their arrears in pay and when they are paid the salary amounts to a pittance. To survive, people turn to the informal economy, which we call « being resourceful ». In the interior, money no longer circulates. The price of agricultural produce is very low. The result is that our Christian communities are so poor that they are unable to support their pastors. Quite the opposite in fact – the people turn to us for help. In fact, our European missionary predecessors accustomed them to receive aid. And when they went on vacation the missionaries brought back money and material goods from Europe to finance their apostolates.

Today, with the drop in the number of missionaries bringing money and goods for the apostolate, there is a certain anxiety among us. Where are we to find the financial means to support not only formation and the needs of the brothers but also our ministries among these deprived people?

1.4.3. An invitation to collaborate with international development projects

Disappointed by government mismanagement, international bodies are turning to religious institutions to provide assistance and to run development projects.

But for our part, we hesitate. It is true that our missionary predecessors built schools and hospitals and set up agricultural co-operatives, but has that age come to an end? Can our minority be reconciled with these activities?

You understand the importance of this Plenary Council when it comes to making choices about how we are to live our life as Capuchin lesser brothers. To stimulate reflection I will venture to make a number of suggestions at the end of this talk, but first, in part 2, we must try to understand St Francis’ concept of minority.

2. THE CONCEPT OF MINORITY ACCORDING TO ST FRANCIS

Our starting point is Proposal n° 3 of PCO 6: “ For Francis, the gospel ideal of poverty involved choosing minority. To be “lowly” is a genuine manifestation of interior poverty».

This definition takes up the definition of St Francis’ minority which Th. Matura gave in his talk to PCO 6: «Minority is the manifestation of an inner poverty, of a humble heart». A rereading of Matura’s talk will give us a better understanding of Francis’ idea of minority.

2.1. Interior poverty

To understand the concept of « minority », one must first grasp the meaning of « interior poverty ».

1. According to Th. Matura, and also in the view of our brother William Henn, the main text that left its mark Saint Francis was 2 Cor 8, 9: « You know how generous our Lord Jesus Christ was: rich as he was, he made himself poor for your sake, in order to make you rich by means of his poverty». (Quoted by Saint Francis in 2 Reg 6,3; Letter to All the Faithful n° 5; see also 2Cel 73-74). In this text, Saint Paul teaches us that Christ, having divine status, agrees to take on our status as a «human person » with all its limitations, including suffering and death. For Saint Paul, Christ’s poverty is precisely this self-abasement, which makes him the servant of humanity. .

2. Saint Francis wished to imitate this inner self-abasement, which for him involved three things:
a. Joyfully recognizing and admiring as gifts of God all the good that is in us and all the good done on our behalf: « let us refer all good to the Lord God, Almighty and Most High, acknowledge that every good is His, and thank Him, from whom all good comes, for everything » (1 Reg 17,17) .
b. Acknowledging and accepting that I am a sinner, and asking God to save me: « We may know with certainty that nothing belongs to us except our vices and sins » (1 Reg, 17,7).
c. Accepting and rejoicing in anything we may have to suffer for the Lord’s sake: We must rejoice instead when we fall into various trials and, in this world, suffer every kind of anguish or distress of soul and body for the sake of eternal life» (1 Reg, 17,8).

Saint Francis designates such suffering as « carrying each day the holy cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ » (Ad. 5,8). In this connection I share the theological analysis we find in the « Summary of Replies », p. 10, which states: « The mystery of Christ’s self-abasement is always the reference point for understanding the strictly theological content of minority ».

2.2. How does inner poverty show itself, according to St Francis?

1. By living a life in which every aspect of what we do is permeated by humility. « Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There are many who, while insisting on prayers and obligations, inflict many abstinences and punishments upon their bodies. But they are immediately offended and disturbed by a single word that implies a reflection on their self-esteem, or takes something from them. These people are not poor in spirit. » (Adm 14).

2. The obligation to serve, and to offer one’s time and talents « By choosing minority the disciple follows Jesus in his self-abasement and finds himself becoming a servant and the brother of all. The result is a sure sense of being a gift of God for others, and this is the source of the obligation he feels to serve, and to offer his time and talents » (Summary, p. 10).
- « Blessed is that servant who is not placed in a high position by his own will and always desires to be under the feet of others » (Adm 19).
- « Blessed is the person who supports his neighbour in his weakness as he would want to be supported were he in a similar situation » (Adm 18).

2.3. Material poverty

According to Saint Francis, there can be no true interior poverty without material poverty. We are familiar with the radical choices Francis made: no private property and no touching of money.

On this point, both Th. Matura and W. Henn wonder whether Francis was perhaps more flexible than he seemed at first sight. As proof of this, they quote:
- 1 Reg, 8,3: « Let none of the brothers therefore…. receive…in any way coin or money…unless for an evident need of the sick brothers ».
- Test 24: « Let the brothers be careful not to receive … churches or poor dwellings… unless they dwell there as guests, as pilgrims and strangers ».
- But the main text is found in the Letter to Brother Leo «In whatever way it seems better to you to please the Lord God and to follow His footprints and poverty, you may do it with the blessing of the Lord God and my obedience».

Th. Matura also notices that Saint Francis never uses the gospel to justify imposing specific rules about material poverty. From this Matura concludes that while material poverty is certainly an essential element of interior poverty, particular norms are bound up with aspecific historical moment and must not be given an absolute value. They are therefore subject to change.

3. LIVING MINORITY TODAY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

We now come to the most difficult part of this paper. What concrete proposals can I make to help Capuchins live their minority better in situations of destitution? I do not claim to have the right answers to this difficult question, but in all humility I offer my own convictions on the matter, for your reflection and discussion.

3.1. Accentuate interior poverty

We must, in Th. Matura’s words, "return to the centre".

1. Through our prayer, especially our contemplative prayer. We must discover and bring into our daily lives the certainty that all good things, whether the good that we do or the gifts that we receive, come from God. To thank God and praise him for all creation and for the progress made in making the kingdom of heaven a reality.
2. Acknowledge that I am a sinner and that the evil (disorder) in the community is not always the fault of others; that in many cases, it is my fault. Adm 10: « Many people blame the devil or their neighbour when they fall into sin or are offended. But that is not right, because everyone has his own enemy in his power, and the enemy is his own lower nature which leads him to sin. ». Adm 23, 2: « Blessed the servant who obeys quietly when he is corrected, confesses his fault humbly and makes atonement cheerfully».
3. Turn back to God and ask forgiveness. 1 Reg 20,1 : « Let all my blessed brothers, both clerics and lay, confess their sins to priests of our Order…knowing that…without doubt they are absolved from their sins ».
4. Bear with suffering and sickness as a participation in the sufferings of Christ. (Adm 6,2).

3.2. Manifestations of interior poverty

3.2.1. An attitude inspired by interior humility in all our activities.

It is not unusual for those of us who have received secondary education, often at university level, to look down on those who have not had these privileges. We may even despise them. And yet St Francis warns us: “ All the brothers without exception are forbidden to wield power or authority, particularly over one another. » (1 Reg 5, 9).

3.2.2. Material poverty

In the eyes of our fellow nationals, we are not poor men. On the contrary, belonging to an international congregation, we are perceived as an economic and financial power. They therefore see it as their right to ask for our help to escape their misery.
a. In the spirit of our Constitutions, each brother has the right to a decent life. In addition, « Each brother should be trained, according to his talents, for the various tasks that have to be performed (Const. 37,4). All this presupposes a substantial budget, which African jurisdictions cannot provide.

We must also provide the means to conduct the apostolate among the Christian communities, which live in absolute poverty. At every provincial chapter, and often in our local chapters, we discuss these questions relating to material poverty. For example, what budget should we make for vehicles, for communications media, for the apostolate?

b. In a context of generalized destitution, can we advise some brothers to live among the poor? The difficulties of such an option are not to be underestimated. In our villages, the poor live in huts, without electricity, without water, without a minimum of hygiene, and with extremely haphazard health care, etc.

One must also take account of the moral life of these poor communities. I have the impression that most descriptions of these communities are too utopian. Even PCO 6 did not escape this rose-colored vision (cfr n° 10 and 11). Saint Thomas Aquinas pointed out that the moral life was impossible without a minimum of non-material goods. In the same sense, L. BOFF writes: « Poverty is so perverse that it deconstructs individuals from within. They find themselves in a situation of extreme individualization (it is a question of ensuring their biological survival). They become envious, resentful and bitter. They blaspheme against God. Their human, sexual and economic relationships become corrupted». (Leonardo BOFF, La terre en devenir, Paris, 1994, p. 192).

Therefore, any friars who are going to live this kind of experience need to be exceptional. The Letter of the former General Minister, Paschal Rywalski, to Br. Bellarmin FONTAINE, at the conclusion of his visit to the Central African Republic in 1980, is very enlightened in this respect: «You remember that we spoke about one very beautiful form of poverty, which consists in living as far as possible like the poor… This form of poverty presupposes good physical health, psychological balance and a great love for the poor Christ and for poor people » (p. 5).

What we are talking about, therefore, are those activities and lifestyles that Th. Matura calls « prophetic », uniquely reserved to a few exceptional friars. Such a way of life cannot be universally counseled for all the brothers.

3.2.3. Work

We must find ways to "earn our living by our work". This was something that Francis recommended: « Let the brothers who know how to work do so, and exercise the trade they have learned…). And for their work they can receive whatever is necessary, excepting money. And when it is necessary they may seek alms like other poor people » (1 Reg 7;3,7).

But, as we pointed out earlier, in the DRC it is difficult to find paid work. So the postulants, novices and post-novitiate brothers try to earn their living by doing agricultural work. The theology students also share in the work of gardening and the care of the house.

3.2.4. Commitment to others

a) The apostolate of preaching and the sacraments

Because of the poverty and destitution of our people many parishes in the interior (bush) are deserted. We believe that, as lesser brothers, one of our principal tasks is to take care of these deprived Christians. But there is a financial problem: these poor Christians cannot support their pastor. On the contrary, they come to us for help to survive, to stay alive. What must we do?

b) Participation in charitable works

In the "Summary" we find two examples from the Vice-Province of Zambia. Friars receive aid to distribute to the needy. In other words, the brothers do not live like the needy people, but they assist them. However, we might question the real impact of such action in an ocean of needy people.

c) Participation in development projects

We Congolese brothers nearly all come from poor families. We would like our brothers and sisters to come out of poverty and have access to a decent standard of life, as we do. In all honesty, in the face of our poor brothers and sisters, our conscience is burdened, we feel hypocritical and guilty when we do nothing to promote integral human development for their benefit.

There is one opportunity in the DRC. In fact, having been let down by the state, international organizations are asking for the collaboration of religious congregations. Faced with this situation, I believe we must follow Proposal n° 25 of PCO 6 :
« Our solidarity towards the least ones and the suffering is also well expressed in social and charitable works or structures. These must be administered according to law and, as far as possible, be run with the cooperation, at different levels, of competent lay staff trained in the values of solidarity. Our specific, privileged task remains that of enabling these enterprises at the human and spiritual level (see Const. 71, 9). ».

This text rightly refers back to the Constitutions (71,9): « As far as possible the administration of temporal goods should be entrusted to lay people, particularly when social and charitable works are involved. Here, the brothers should have only the spiritual direction ». The text of PCO 6 therefore broadens out the possibilities available to the brothers:

1°) Their specific task is to be animators;
2°) Next, the text accepts that friars can run charitable/social projects together with lay people;
3°) Finally, it accepts that friars can take over the running of such schemes if there are no suitable lay people.

N° 3 in particular raises problems for some brothers. First, one basic objection: is being “in charge” of such projects compatible with Franciscan "minority"? Then, there is the danger that friars running the project become immersed in bourgeois capitalism, adopting the tone and attitude of a “boss”, thereby becoming what General Minister John Corriveau calls « the patrons of the poor ».

The best response to both of these objections was given by Br John Corriveau in his message to the Assembly at Addis Ababa entitled: « Gospel Brotherhood in a Multi-Ethnic World: Franciscan and Capuchin Perspectives ».

Concerning the first objection, which touches on the exercise of authority, I share the analysis made by brothers from the United States: « The PCO must address the nature and use of power, which is the capacity to implement or to prevent change… We must avoid any tendency to denigrate power as such or to claim that our minority requires us to abandon every exercise of power. Rather, the PCO should reflect on which types of power are appropriate for lesser brothers… In itself, power is morally neutral, but it can be used and abused, for good or ill. The PCO might say how power can be used to achieve the objectives that flow from our gospel mission » (Summary, p. 35).

Regarding the second objection concerning the “bourgeois” lifestyle of the friar who is in charge of the project, we can say that the friar needs to assimilate the Franciscan spirituality of a fraternal economy aimed at building communion. It is also the fraternity’s role to supervise the friar and his management of the project. He must be a man of prayer, intimately united to God and to his brothers.

CONCLUSION

I end this talk by quoting Paschal Rywalski. Writing to the friars in Africa he said: “It happens that the friars, responding to appeals from life itself and from the circumstances in which they find themselves placed by obedience, are driven to undertake large social apostolates in order to provide a standard of living that is worthy of human beings and children of God in a given region. They then end up with all the worries, the toil, the risks, the misunderstanding and the criticism, but also the joy of helping in an effective way, while the poor people receive what is rightfully theirs: a sense of well-being and the dignity of honestly earning their own living.

The commitment of such religious, who live a modest lifestyle and spend their energies and their health in a spirit of faith for the good of the people, is in conformity with the gospel and with the spirit of St Francis”.

Capuchins and Power

Minority, Itinerancy and System

Fr. Fidel Aizpurúa Donazar, OFM Cap.

THEY DO NOT BELONG TO THE SYSTEM,
AS I DO NOT BELONG TO THE SYSTEM”
(Jn 17,16)

Introduction

We open our reflection with the prophetic denunciation by the late Franciscan scholar Lázaro Iriarte, who put his finger on one of the still bleeding wounds of Franciscan history: “For the Order, minority has been the least appreciated part of the inheritance bequeathed to it by its Founder, and the first to be discarded, despite being fairly easy to understand and the least open to juridical complications...The whole complex set of problems about poverty that arose in the fraternity after the death of the saint, all the internal squabbles and external complications which were hardly inspired by the gospel...arose from the impossible attempt by the sons of St Francis to continue to ‘be poor’ without having the courage to continue being ‘lowly’”1

The aim of this paper is to help provoke “the courage to be lowly”. It is not simply, or even mostly, a question of personal courage but rather of communal courage. There is a widespread perception that Franciscan men and women can live minority in individualized forms, while to be members of a lowly or minoritic community is something we find almost impossible. One gets the impression that community structures are a real impediment to building a life-project in minority. These structures, which eventually turn out to belong to a web of interlocking systems, will be the object of these reflections2.


Is a Franciscan life in minority really possible? This question includes the need to try to overcome the bad faith involved in speaking of, claiming and desiring minority when one is in fact clearly living in a different direction. Bad faith creates insoluble tensions between spirituality and commitment, between desire and practice, between theological language and daily behaviour, leading to a final breaking point3. To speak of a component part of our “charismatic luggage” ought to include a personal and communal decision to be really open to walking in the direction in which our reflections lead us. Otherwise, better to leave it alone.

A second preliminary requirement, without which there would be no point continuing, is to accept a palpable dose of risk. The transition from one lifestyle to another produces a strong sense of insecurity, in the face of which two positions are possible: one is to try to strengthen the structures we have always trusted in and which gave cohesion to our lifestyle, or, conversely, to construct a “society of risk” that will encourage us to live creatively with risk and uncertainty4. It will be necessary to move from a community of nostalgia to one of possibility and newness5.

In this reflection we propose, firstly, to describe succinctly and strikingly how a system works and the different ways of belonging to it. Next, we shall try to bring out the difficulties and possibilities involved in desiring to live in a non-systemic way when one clearly belongs to a whole web of intermeshed systems. Thirdly, we will try to propose a set of principles that could lead to a systemic alternative. Finally we will suggest a series of frameworks for reflection, necessary in order to glimpse the possibility of a more alternative Franciscan life-project, less alienated from the dominant systems and therefore more prophetic.

We speak less and less of refounding religious life. It is an idea that is too novel, perhaps premature, and we are abandoning it because we find it so difficult to break camp and pitch our tents elsewhere. We have sensed that refoundation is only possible by relating to the chaos and confusion of our times so as to reach a point of being able to respond in new ways to the needs of our evolving times. This is fine, but although the concept may have been premature, the message cannot be ignored. “Religious men and women are on the threshold of a disconcerting, fascinating world. This may not be the right time to refound. The challenge for us is to welcome the darkness and death, the birth pains and different struggles involved in giving birth to life”6 Our efforts to build a more minoritic lifestyle are the birth pains, until, please God, a new Franciscan life is born.

Our intention is at the same time a lowly one: we do not wish to change the system; what we want is that at least the system will not change us, will not kill the desires that Brother Francis sowed at the outset of this adventure. And these desires, as we know, come from Jesus himself. When he prayed that his future followers would not belong to the world, just as he himself did not belong to the world (Jn 17,16), he was in fact asking that we should not belong to the unjust and inhuman system in which history has frequently taken shape7.

I. Systems and structures: their impact on religious life

Religious life as a phenomenon is totally inserted into the historical context. Although its spiritual purpose is to make visible “the mystery of the kingdom already active in history”8, it has to take issue with “today” and there construct its justification and meaning. Hence it cannot be spared an analysis of the ways in which it is inserted in history.

1. A “world of whirlwinds”

Our world can be understood and defined as “a world of whirlwinds”. One has to be ready, in one way or another, to enter those whirlwinds, with all the risks that this entails.9 Let us look at them briefly:

 One persistent whirlwind in all of human history, still alive and well today, is power. People think that the most effective form of human self-affirmation comes through having power over others. It has always been so. But today the whirlwind of power is activated by information. In this “news era”, whoever has information has power. The world of excluded countries and persons, as well as being an area of economic exclusion, is an area of exclusion from information. This is because to create public opinion is to control everything: what people buy and sell, what they feel, what they produce, what they dream. The whirlwind of power is more alive than ever, because the thirst to be oneself is far from being quenched.
 Another whirlwind, also with a long history, is the need for meaning. The more years are added to human history, the more are universal wounds acquired by peoples and the darker grows the horizon of meaning. Not for nothing has the modern person been defined as “man in search of meaning”.10 Because when a person finds that place in the world which gives meaning to each step he or she takes, life’s journey becomes less onerous and more creative. In the genesis of the major forms of social alienation there is usually an underlying dimming or darkening of meaning, a bewilderment that approves whatever can be lived without discussion. Many contemporary mass movements find their explanation here.
 The clearest analyses of the present time say that the nation-state is in crisis and that the reins of power are more and more in the hands of what is called the “network state”, alluding to the Internet as the commercial and political domain of the future. Add to this the action of that “black hand” organizing the economy for the benefit of the large multinationals, the great mafias that manipulate the economic future of nations as they see fit, and we can see how true it is that the nation-state is, in its own way, yet another slave of power. This generates a loss of identity - and the person perceives it as such. Given that one cannot prevail over that which is unassailable, many individuals and peoples try to find their identity in the old way - by affirming nationalism. It is in this paradoxical whirlwind that the life of society today finds itself immersed.
 The crisis of the patriarchal model is a great whirlwind because it touches profoundly the choices on which the structure of the person has traditionally been based. This model has proved incapable of resisting the sexual revolution, the incorporation of women into salaried employment or the different movements for the emancipation of women and sexual liberation. For this reason, relationships between the sexes and generations are taking on new forms that are markedly different from the hitherto dominant patriarchal model.
 The whirlwind of migration has thrown into question something as sacred for human beings as the notion of a frontier. The network state allows migration because it makes frontiers and boundaries out of elements that are not geographical but mainly economic. Therefore, while frontiers grow weaker and migration becomes a universal phenomenon, there is still somebody controlling the comings and goings of humans.
2. Freedom, systems and structures

This reality of the way things are in today’s world is the framework in which we must situate our reflections on systems and structures that have such an impact on the way religious life is organised and lived11:

a) Freedom: This is the creative force that defines human beings in their deepest identity, driving their desire to be and to fulfil themselves. This force is channelled through communication (communion), verbal and existential, and includes every person and all reality, especially the weakest, through a freely given process.
b) System: This is the set of production-consumption relationships in society that can be programmed in a rational way, encompassing individuals and peoples.
c) Structures: These are stable structures of communication that make people’s freedom possible, although they are part of the system and tend to serve it.

We must take up each of these definitions and reflect on them:

 There is no doubt that, following the great gospel tradition12, the follower of Jesus must work for freedom. One believes to the extent that one liberates. Religious life needs to be constantly challenged by freedom, by brotherhood, by the longing to make history the home of one single family.

 Large sections of humanity agree on one obvious point: that “in our day there has arisen a single system encompassing all humans on an economic and social level and operating from a neo-liberal, capitalist perspective”13, which drives those that do not fit its parameters to the point of exclusion, either because they do not wish to fit or because they wish to but are prevented. This leads us inevitably to qualify the system as negative. For us, the historical system, the one that actually exists, not the ideal one, is negative, it is the “iron cage” of which Weber speaks14. We shall have to take this into account when we attempt to construct a Franciscan alternative.15
! Structures are understood in exactly this way, in so far as they are related to the system (and well related) as negativized structures. “An institution (structure) without freedom ends up by becoming an impersonal (negative) system”.16

3. Systemic dialectic

The fact that the system and the structures that serve it turn negative has always been noted in history. This is why there have been groups that frequently lived their relation to the system in dialectic, prophetic forms. Let us look at four examples:

! The Epicurean “Life “without a master” (“adespotos”): Aristotle was the great theorist of the polis, and with it, of the system: “He who cannot live in society or needs nothing for his own sufficiency, is not a member of the community, he is either a beast or a god”.17 Later the Epicureans developed the theory of “adespoteia” “(In the face of the oppressive system) it was necessary to seek within oneself for an inner freedom that would liberate men: the “adespotos” life, life without a master. This word encompasses one of the key ideas of the new wisdom”18, namely, that because one belongs to a system, it is impossible to renounce the system of values, predispositions and contents which it encourages within the person.

! Ancient monasticism: This is a decisive, foundational example in Church history. By fleeing from the cities and from the society of their fellow men, they intended to uproot themselves from the dominant (economic, political, legal, administrative, social and even family) system of their time, in order to offer an alternative model of being. They claimed to be building what they called “the city of human beings”,19 the alternative, inclusive, fraternal system.

! The Franciscan fraternity: Although Francis did not elaborate an anti-systemic spirituality, there was one thing he saw very clearly: he wanted to live something different, not just from the social behaviours of nascent capitalism, but different from the ecclesial system itself, even from the dominant affective system.
! The present-day social alternative movement: The social current widespread throughout the world in places such as Porto Alegre, Seattle, Genoa, Barcelona, Paris, etc. is an eloquent statement - avoided only by those who are securely settled in the dominant system - of the fact that many people live in dialectic relation to this system in the belief that a different world is possible.

Simply to list these examples shows that a dialectic relation with dominant systems has always existed. To embrace alternative ways at the level of thought and action is not an impossible idea that must be dismissed a priori. On the contrary in fact, history shows that these alternative movements have been the true midwives of new ways of life.

4. Religious life and systems

Generalising for a moment in order to put our reflection in context, we can ask a general question: What has been the attitude of religious life in relation to the dominant system, the systemic structures (Church) and to its own legislative structures? Fundamentally, it has not been a dialectic relation but one of accommodation:

! Religious life has contributed in decisive ways to the strengthening of the dominant system. It has done this in the name of its idea of society (monasticism), of its vision of social stratification or of culture. J.M. Castillo says: “It is not logical, but strictly contradictory, that religious, who condemn neoliberal capitalism, should at the same time have good universities in which they train the most remunerated managers, sought after by leading financial firms and banks. They pay them well, these youngsters educated by religious, because they know that in those universities, the “professors of poverty” are excellent educators of the “managers of wealth”. I’ve never understood this, and I never will, however much they try to explain it”20. Religious life has received many benefits from the dominant system, both economic and in terms of social esteem. But the system is not free, and so the bill it presents, and always presents, is very large.
! Religious life, by and large, has fallen into the embrace of the ecclesial institution in its more organizational aspects. Although its function in the Church was to be a prophetic, evangelical conscience, religious life, for structural and supposedly evangelical reasons, thought that one of its principal tasks had to be to collaborate in the ecclesial structure as it existed at that moment in history. Years ago, J.B. Metz raised questions that still shake us today: “Where can we see today the tension (in the proper sense), the vital antagonism - in my view necessary and fruitful - between the Orders and the Church at large? Where today are the tensions that marked the origins of nearly all the Orders, of the Franciscans and Jesuits to name only two? Have not these Orders, in the time that has elapsed since their foundation, become too settled in the ‘centre ground’, where everything is balanced and moderated? Have they not accommodated themselves in a certain sense to the wider Church, and allowed themselves to be fenced in by it? Have they not allowed themselves, for that very reason, to be carried along overwhelmingly by the generalised climate of crisis in the Church, let themselves be put into a bell jar full of contaminated air, casting their own grey shadow on the greyness of Church life today, when they more than anyone else should be the ones to illuminate the darkness? Where is that capacity to shock, which the religious Orders once had within the Church? Where are they passionately exercising that prophetic critique within the Church in the things that concern them? Not only is this permissible for them by reason of their existence and their following, it is even demanded of them, although real prophets have always found the task difficult to accept and to discharge”.21 It would be wrong of us either to let ourselves be overwhelmed, or to refuse the cold shower of these questions, which can be purifying and invigorating.

! Even the legal structures of religious life have always sought the protection of the greater ecclesiastical legality emanating from canon law. And so we have frequently found - although our words try to deny it - that our canonical institutions take precedence over gospel insights. From this perspective, many a venture aimed at living minority hits a brick wall and comes to nothing. Perhaps the concept of liminarity (from limen, a threshold or boundary) used in certain treatises on modern religious life, can be of some help.22 Liminarity is an unconscious tendency towards totality, fullness, a palpable connection with the Originating Mystery that affects our lives whether we are aware of it or not. It is an inner inclination of the human spirit that defies all logical or rational explanation. It is necessary to recall once more that the task of the liminary group is to mediate universally shared values. It seems that values remain essentially the same, but their mediation and application require new expressions in each cultural and historical moment...At the present time the liminal zone is densely populated, very often by people who feel confused, lost and alone. The answers given by the gurus of yesteryear no longer illuminate or give security. We need a new wisdom for our times. No-one is better equipped to provide it than those who live entirely in the liminary space.”23 Liminarity can be another alternative to minority, or at least a new ideological base from which to generate new thinking about it.24

5. “Hardening our face”

“I shall harden your face like flint”, says God to the prophet Ezekiel, to encourage him to face his prophetic task.25 When things are put like this, how can we feel distressed or disheartened? Instead, we should feel courageously strong, to face up to the questions being asked today of the community of brothers. We ought to have the courage to ask the hard questions: What kind of structures do we really want to build? How should we work on the question of our systemic belonging? What profound, real longings are at work in our corporate religious life? Fraternal communication is an excellent channel to make possible horizons visible: “The word is not just one among many institutions, it is the basis that makes them all possible. No word exists without linguistic mediations (languages) and historic ones (processes of communication), but they can pervert it and become a source of oppression among people. This is the risk and the value of communication”.26 Let us take that risk, and claim that value.


2. In the system, but not of it

We have already implied that Francis of Assisi, in our view, lived within a systemic framework without belonging to the system, without playing its game, proposing a new path in ways that were not deliberately dialectic but were certainly alternative. Having described the mechanisms of the system and its impact on religious life, let us return to our Brother from Assisi.

1. A series of attempts

Francis’ intention to live without being part of the mechanics of the system was not of course unique. It is one of a long series which, in the Christian field, started with Jesus of Nazareth27. We can single out three milestones:

• It is a commonplace among Franciscan scholars that the earliest group of friars wanted to reproduce the way of life of the apostles28. Summaries such as Acts 4, 32-35 refer to the ideal lifestyle, full of ordinary details, which inspired the life of not a few Christian communities and continues to do so. Primitive Christianity, as is shown by the so-called “catholic epistles”29, floating in the sea of paganism and with a strong experience of being a religious minority, had to elaborate mechanisms for community life that would strengthen the choices they had made. How long did they continue in that stance of living in the system without belonging to it? Perhaps until Paul himself saw that by “offering the faith to a family” he could guarantee the latter’s continuity?30 Was this step the beginning of Christians’ belonging to the dominant system? We shall never know. What is certain is that the “apostolic life” as a lifestyle independent of the system later inspired the way for many Christians.

• It has always been said that the first milestone in Christian history marking the point where the intention was to reproduce the life of the apostles was ancient monasticism31. But in reality things were not quite like that: it seems that the large number of monks and hermits that arose between the 3rd and 5th centuries had as their ideal that they should be new citizens of the “city of human beings”. They wanted to build a humanizing social project inspired by Christian spirituality32. In other words, their fuga mundi was the outer face of their inward response to a social and political system they did not accept; it was their reaction to structured lifestyles which, in their view, were not real.33 In this sense, although the later explanation is the one that alludes to the life of the apostles, the certain fact is that ancient monasticism was a response to the system in forms of extreme alienation and disconnection.

• It is probable that this way of thinking influenced Francis of Assisi by way of the popular lay movements of the middle ages. But possibly we will not find either in Francis or in the primitive community any elaborated thinking on this point. The classic early Franciscan theme of “forsaking the world”34, however much the authors themselves interpret it as the paradigm of leaving the world, is more of a decisive option not to share in social mechanisms which, as Francis saw them, clashed with his option for the gospel. It is not so much a flight as a practical questioning. The novelty of Francis (and of many other groups in the course of history) was to try to live this option without leaving the world and, in the case of Francis, to do so not in dialectical ways but in fraternal ones. Given the later institutionalization of the Order, was this attempt doomed to failure?

2. Strategies

Francis’ longing to live in the system in non-systemic ways was based on a series of strategies well known to everyone:

• In the area of the economy: the refusal of any title of ownership of immoveable or even moveable goods, in the belief that not having one’s own place to live was feasible for his community, as it was in the case of the disinherited and tenants35; the absolute refusal of money, even in exaggerated ways, which shows the extraordinary precautions he took to guard against the dangers of its use (accumulation, ostentation, power)36; precautions against a concept of education understood as a platform for superiority and power37; precautions against commercial activity requiring investments on account of property38. In the last analysis the question does not seem to be whether Francis allowed houses, books, money and specialised jobs or whether he did not. His originality lay in the fact that he tried to live the realities underpinning the system in non-systemic ways. Since he did not know how to elaborate a more precise alternative (perhaps it was not possible at the time) he formulated his different vision in the usual ways, by prohibition.

• In the area of social prestige: The prohibition against applying to the Roman Curia for documents to prove his identity, with the consequent social approval this would bring, is understood as a wish to offer a different way of being incorporated into social reality39; the non-acceptance of offices, especially where the friars would be in charge of others, denotes not just a distancing of the friars from the dangers involved in managing money, but also the wish to declare on which social level he wanted to be placed, outside the mechanisms of social advancement or promotion40; leaving aside the discussions that have arisen in history, the non-clerical element, such a feature of the fabric of the first community in the early years, was intended to place the Franciscan option in a terrain not easily understood by an ecclesial structure that considered clericalism as quite natural41; the particular ways of evangelising (both by example and by “not being against clerics”) attempt to portray a way of offering something more by kindness and the complicity of the heart than by the authority of one who is in a position to teach42; the resistance to a juridical formulation of a Rule, as shown by the tortuous process that culminated in the approved Rule, indicates the precautions he took to avoid embracing a legal consecration of a lifestyle whose vocation was to be an alternative.43

3. Did he succeed?

Anyone reading the primitive Franciscan experience as an alternative to the system might well ask this question. Perhaps the exact answer is: neither yes nor no. His attempt is already a value in itself, like the value of a prophecy that is as yet unfulfilled. The truth of utopias lies not so much in their fulfilment as in their capacity to arouse, to suggest, to ask questions. In this sense, the persistence of the questions, that of minority to be specific, is without a doubt an inheritance from Franciscan prophecy that has come down to us today. The price it had to pay, that of harsh exclusion44, makes sense when large numbers of Franciscan brothers and sisters today still courageously take up the challenge of Francis, a challenge simultaneously anti-systemic and fraternal.


3. Itinerancy as a corrective to the system

Everyone knows that systems require stability. Changing conditions, especially in politics, cause instability on the stock markets and consequently in investments. The system, especially money, wants security. This is why itinerancy is a corrective to the system, a canon shot below its waterline.



1, Dynamics of itinerancy

Itinerancy did not sprout from Christian and Franciscan spirituality by spontaneous generation. A series of dynamic forces were at work in it that made it possible:

• The concept of creation as the home of all: Ever since the earliest religious experiences45, by way of the Old Testament46, Christian faith has believed that the world was the common home for all of creation. Francis saw it as such, both because of its origin and its destiny47. To understand one’s belonging to creation as having a home which is one’s destiny generates a new kind of unlimited relationship of openness to others.

• Understanding humanity as a family: The system continues to manage the socio-economic concept of the “cave”, the tribe, a restricted core, a private club48. But it is not so much a section of creation that survives through being imposed on other species and on an adverse social situation49; rather, it survives through the certainty, very often obscure, of possessing the same genetic code. Francis experienced this consanguinity in a mystical way. We all live in the same house and therefore we are all brothers and sisters and we love one another, and violence is never justified among family members.50

• Looking into the heart: Itinerancy is blocked when historical reality is viewed from the perspective of a social struggle between the interests of one group against others. This is exactly the way the system sees things. If, by contrast, reality is interpreted from the heart, then the way is open for movement, enabling human pathways to intersect and expand. The primitive Franciscan biographies say that Francis, like his brothers, had a simple, focussed expression.51 Perhaps the reason for this was that Francis, in the words of L13, had received the “loving gaze” of Christ. The dynamism of a look that goes straight to the heart is what makes mobility possible, and on this all itinerancy is based.

• The concept of a frontier becomes relative: the system is anchored in the concept of the frontier or boundary. In fact, recent advances in the direction of a more flexible concept of frontier are either fuelled mostly by economic interests (EU) or else have been unsupported by countries with the most developed systems, which have no interest in that kind of permeability.52 Itinerancy breaks through the frontier’s thick wall and sees the world as a single sphere in which justice and the rule of law are the first requirements. The pilgrimages of Francis and his first brothers to the Holy Land and perhaps to Santiago de Compostela should not be seen simply as the typical pious practices of the period, but as the conduct of people who understand life in the wide framework of relationships between countries.

2. Itinerancy versus system

The Franciscan lifestyle can be understood as a fraternal confrontation with the system. Itinerancy would be a way of putting a face on such confrontation. Let us uncover some of its shades of meaning

• The itinerant style of the first friars: It seems that the settled conventual structure was not present when the Franciscan family took its first steps, although it soon came on the scene53. The Testament cheerfully recalls this fact54. We must not despise the most basic charismatic insights of Francis who lives the gospel without compulsion, in total freedom, with structures practically non-existent. Leaving aside the nuances of meaning one might find in this initial stance of his, what cannot be denied is that itinerancy was a natural and deliberate option in the face of religious forms of stable living which were well known to Francis. The system soon imposed its law and took the direction of conventual stability, although in less stable ways than in the case of other Orders.55
• The Franciscan mission in itinerancy: This was how it was understood and lived in the beginning. The joy of that freedom is also recalled in the Testament.56 Of course there were abuses, but the system made sure they were repressed57. This repression put an end to a non-systemic model of mission, one which proposed and exhorted and could have given rise to a highly ecumenical way of evangelizing58.

• Franciscan obedience as itinerancy: The system demands blind obedience to that “black hand” which rules social and economic destinies and hides the actions of the powerful. Francis understands obedience in a different way: it is not something demanded for organizational reasons, but a way of guaranteeing, if you will pardon the expression, God’s freedom and that of the person. Obedience is the freedom to belong to, to embark on, the gospel way. Therefore, “whoever launches himself in faith into the obedience of freedom so that God can act freely, causes other energies to be liberated which are not in themselves available to human beings”59. These “other energies” are those that can shape a different, fraternal life system.

• A new citizenship: We have already said that the system, once it has turned negative, works on the basis of the old “controller/controlled” dialectic. The gospel, and Franciscanism because it is evangelical, postulates a new citizenship which makes its true home in the wide world and in the human family. The picturesque scene in Fioretti 11 where Francis makes Brother Masseo twirl round in order to find out which way he should go, draws the utopian profile of the Franciscan:he or she is someone who can twirl around a thousand times before the world, in the certain knowledge that, wherever he happens to end up, he will be at home. D.Flood says that the friars “rejected a stability that would have implied enrolling in the social framework, which is what the policy of the commune wanted from them, every time they began, as good religious, to prove their worth” (1R 17, 10-13) Had they invested in a residence, however justified the investment, they would at once have become part of the social framework”60. This refusal to belong to any system makes it possible for a new citizenship to be born.

3. Efforts to recover itinerancy within the fraternity

The miracle of an itinerant Franciscan life will not come about without an equally explicit cultivation of itinerancy in the internal structures of our life. In this sense we have some items of unfinished business, such as how to overcome the “monasticization” of our lifestyle, which has been with us for centuries; also, how to make the Franciscan family ever more international by overcoming the iron limits of provincial and even local demarcations; the rotation of offices as a symbol of effective brotherhood, beyond the rigidity of canonical norms; how we truly incorporate the present-day phenomenon of migration as a concrete way of integrating ourselves into itinerancy.
For Francis, 1Pt 2,11 (“as pilgrims and strangers”) was a favourite text61. According to current exegesis, the homeland 1Pt is alluding to is the community62. It is from the community that itinerancy receives the strength to believe in it and the courage not to fall away. Without community support itinerancy disappears and systemic stability appears. For this reason, our communal vitality could perhaps be measured by the vigour of our itinerant life.

4. Benchmarks for reference

If we have grasped the “system-alternative” dialectic, we must now develop a few basic points of reference for our treatment of the topic of minority:

1. Questioning the unquestionable

The manipulation of “consecrated” concepts, values and ways of life can produce the reaction of refusing to question the unquestionable. However, questioning the unquestionable belongs to the essence of prophecy and the following of Jesus: ”Christian discipleship consists in living in this world in the way that Christ lived in his: touching lepers, pulling a donkey out of a ditch on the Sabbath, questioning the unquestionable and relating to women”.63 Anyone who rightly understands the gospel approach ought to have the courage and vigour to question what the system considers unquestionable. From this perspective, no reality can be exempt from analysis and discernment. The hierarchical component of the fraternity, of its systemic ways of social life, of the way in which it connects and collaborates with the ecclesial system, of its dependence on economic ways of living that presuppose large numbers of staff, etc.: all these are the “unquestionables” that need to be discerned to see if they really are unquestionable. The capacity to question is the test of one’s real desire for change.
2. Facing up to the single issue


Although it originates in economics, the ideology of the single issue applies to all of human reality, social and even ecclesial. “This is the ideology that preached the end of ideology. It is the dominant ideology that presents itself as natural. As such it aspires to be unique and presents itself as unquestionable, as an enclave closed to all but the experts”64 This way of understanding reality ought always to be confronted with the alternative, with plurality, with minority. To claim to understand things in only one way is to reduce and annihilate them. Anyone who understands the novel nature of minority negotiates the politically correct and opens up ways of living that do not cave in at the fist sign of pressure from norms sanctioned by the system. Whoever does this finds, to his surprise, that the possible ways are many and that the single issue, by presenting itself as unique, is an illusion.

3. Revisiting the topic of social prestige

“When the gospels explain to us the central core of Jesus’ message, they lay down two conditions, and two conditions only, for understanding and living the heart of the gospel. One refers to money, the other to honour”.65 Religious institutions have needed social prestige in order to have a prominent place in a society with a religious component. Frequently, the prestige has resulted in an elevated social rank, in the possibility of direct intervention in circles where public decisions are made. If we wish to understand the alternative of minority, we need a new, less exalted approach to the topic of honour, knowing that, just as Jesus was a man “without honour”66, so must his followers be, and they must believe that it is possible to maintain one’s dignity and delight in life without being part of the circle of honour.67

4. A conscience within the system

Theologians attribute to the religious life the function of being a force that shocks, the conscience within the ecclesial and even the social system68. If it loses this prophetic function, religious life loses its original purpose and its natural horizon. In that case minority gives a decisive push to rediscover the power to shock, the thankless task of offering continual alternatives to a series of systems which, by their own dynamic, become arthritic and lapse into routine - in a word, they become dehumanised. The consequences of either attitude for the future of the Church, of religious Orders and of society itself are far-reaching.69 If a Plenary Council were to have no “shock value” even for Capuchins themselves, how could it hope to have any for the Church at large, much less for society?

5. Moving to the margins

However hard it is to take, minority eventually corrects the perspective of the fraternal group. The perspective is more interesting than the goal; it shows you where you are heading, uncovers the deepest desires that drive you, the dream you most cherish. Perspective reveals your direction and your future. That is what makes it so decisive. Anyone who understands minority will see at once that liminarity - a life lived on the margins, linked together with what is, and with those who are, on the fringes, on the edges - is a possible perspective for an Order that calls itself “minor”70. As long as we are strangers to the edges (of society, of the Church, of emotional states, of the economy) our talk about minority will be little more than a spiritual hobby. This is why the real question for minority comes not from spirituality but from the edges of society, from those people and entities who are, whether by force or by choice, on the margins of life.

6. Against the system: communion

The person with a systemic mentality argues that it is impossible to live without systems. Why not have a “system of communion” as our utopia? Doesn’t the gospel say:”It must not be like that among you”(Lk 22,26)? There are possibilities for survival as a group by strengthening the mechanisms of communion. If the opposite of system is dissolution, individualism and breakdown, then obviously disaster is at the door. But what if its opponent were communion, cultivated, reinforced and up-to-date, with a content? Wouldn’t that communion be, in itself, the kernel of a meaningful minoritic life? “The Church, as church, cannot have titles of ownership, nor can it sign contracts or establish the laws of the system. It can only open the way for encounters in communion, gratuitously, where all is forgiven and shared in love”.71 To recreate communion each day is the best way of facing the reality of a dehumanising system. It is precisely here that the fraternity needs to show its most authentic face.

7. In collaboration with non-systemic movements

Perhaps it is necessary, given that our prophetic forces as an institution are not excessive, to try and connect with non-systemic civil institutions, to which we could lend our generous fraternal support. NGOs such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and others, can, at any particular moment, be a suitable outlet for our desire for alternative, minoritic ways of life. Perhaps the time has come to view the reality of our society as an appropriate framework for our own charism, and in no way as an enemy at the gates.

8. An invitation to want to change, to be a sign of change

This could be the conclusion to this section. This kind of reflection is directed to the will, through its connection with the heart. As long as the will remains insensitive, impenetrable, surrounded by a thousand defences, as long as there is no profound openness to new ways of approaching problems, however impossible they may appear today, then all that we have been saying will never be rooted historically. Moreover, we would have to appeal to the language of gestures as the language of truth and openness to the future. Gestures, while not changing the system, do speak of another possibility, of a time when things could be different if only we took a certain direction. This is why the system is afraid of gestures. And therefore the gesture is, at this present time and in many cases, our only possible homeland. E.Galeano says it very well: “They are tiny things. They will not do away with poverty, or remove us from underdevelopment, they do not socialise the means of production and exchange, they do not expropriate Ali Baba’s caves. But maybe they do let loose the joy of doing something, and translate that joy into action. And at the end of the day, to act on reality and to change it, even just a little, is the only way to prove that reality can be transformed”72.


5. On the paths of minority

At the risk of being misinterpreted, and given the practical focus intended for this PCO VII (along the lines of PCO VI), allow me to list a few of the “pathways of minority” which this Plenary Council might wish to look at:

• Overcome prejudices: If the age-old prejudices - ideological, moral, religious - are at work in our decisions, we will never be able to move forward. The topic of minority must be treated from a perspective that is ideologically new, not on the basis of positions we have always held, otherwise the result will be - what it has always been73.

• Request that no more Capuchin bishops be appointed: Following 2C 148, where Francis asks the Cardinal of Ostia “If you want them [Franciscans] to bear fruit for the church of God, hold them and preserve them in the state to which they have been called, and bring them back to a lowly station, even if they are unwilling”, perhaps there is a need to reflect on the sign value and the teaching on minority the Order could give, if a General Chapter were to renounce the episcopate for the friars. This would indicate that we wish our contribution to the Church to be prophetic, on the margins.

• Are the saints making us lose our minority?: Francis warned in Adm 6,3 that “ it is a great shame for us, the servants of God, that the saints have accomplished great things and we want only to receive glory and honour by recounting them”. We can see how today, in our media-dominated, globalized world, canonisations are treated in a way that distances us from minority. Would it not be interesting to exercise our capacity for discernment in this matter?

• The “scandal” of three groups of friars minor: There is no doubt that, on the one hand, the fact of there being three historically differentiated groups of friars minor has enriched the life of the Church and of the Franciscan movement. But many brothers have seen this, and still see it, as a scandal in an Order that has brotherhood as the core value of its charism. If we ourselves are unable to reclaim that single, lost brotherhood, how can we talk to the divided world of today about the one brotherhood of mankind? There are Capuchins who see this as a task of minority, at least as far as our name is concerned74. It might also be true of the content of who we are.

• Houses more than one hundred years old: Some of our houses in old Europe are over a hundred years old, some even several hundred. This type of dwelling determines the ideology and practice of a lifestyle which, because of its historical context, is no longer attuned to a new spirituality of minority. Surely it would be useful to think about this fact?

• Shrines and their dynamics: Some of our more prominent communities are established within the framework of a Marian shrine, or something similar. While recognising the value of the ministerial work that is often done in such places, perhaps we should also realise how many employees are required by this type of presence, particularly since economic matters are involved that touch minority. Surely the Council would have to say something about this?

• Non-clerical work: The sources of income for a large part of the Order derive from religious activities. “To live on religion” is always rather dangerous. Therefore, there may be a word to say about lay (non-clerical) work for others, as a “minoritic” way of life. This would be a particularly interesting topic in the context of the formation of candidates to the Order.

• A “minoritic” theological formation: There is no doubt that it is possible to be well formed, theologically and otherwise, in the framework of minority, as long as this does not lead to the creation of educational centres of great renown requiring large investments. Is there room for a review of the type of theological formation given to many of our young third-world brothers who come to Europe for their formation?

• The de-europeanisation of the Order: This topic is linked to the previous one. Our Order, of European origin, has maintained a level of eurocentrism more through belonging to an ecclesial system that is itself European, rather than by the conscious choice of the group. This may be the moment to reflect on this question from the perspective of minority: the more we are “minors”, the more we will be universal.

• Works of spiritual, rather than religious, evangelisation: Many Capuchins in the world are predominantly involved in religious ministry. However, the modern world today is asking for spirituality more than religion. Perhaps this field of practical spirituality is waiting to be discovered by those who call themselves minors. What are we doing, for example, to accompany young people as they grow to faith-maturity? How are we responding, as an Order, to the challenge of providing a spirituality for those who are alienated from the faith?

• More unfinished business: the question of “insertion”. It has always been said that the Capuchin is a man of the people. But have we ever been so as an Order, taking on the social structures of the people? Or has the Order rather tended to approach people from a “quasi-monastic” context? Would this not be the moment to give fresh and decisive impetus towards a style of Order that is truly part of the people, where they are? This would also bring us face to face with minoritic lifestyles.



Conclusion

I conclude this paper by underlining four basic points, offered as fraternal recommendations which I am sure you will accept in the same spirit:

• Sharpen our awareness of belonging to various systems: As long as we are not convinced that the Franciscan life is immersed in a variety of systems, is a part of them and collaborates with them, then we will not see the need to begin to define the limits of those systems, and the difficulty of envisaging an alternative project of minoritic life will be very great.

• Renew the intention of Francis in a new context: renewing Francis’ intention to live in relation to the system but without being of the system is meaningful today. The social context has changed, immersed as we are in the whirlpools of globalization. The offer of an alternative way of understanding life, from a non-systemic viewpoint, would be very useful for society and for the Church. Perhaps this is the specific contribution that Franciscan life is being asked to make.

• The great possibilities of itinerancy: they are as great as, or greater than, those of minority. Itinerancy connects very well with our changing world and reveals many possibilities with a view to attempting a new project of Franciscan life, both inside and outside the fraternity.

• Test our attitudes: Overcome the negative attitude that says “it’s not possible”. Also, overcome the “bad faith” of one who says maybe it is possible but he has no intention of seeing it through; move beyond the self-deceiving attitude of the one who says it is possible but we only need to change a few surface details; aim for the creative attitude that thinks it is possible if we decide to do it.

In 1984 Davide Covi approached me for an article for a special edition of the Laurentianum, Francanesimo e Profezia, he was preparing for the Fifth Plenary Council in Garibaldi. The result was curiously a lengthy study of the Admonitions in which I attempted to understand those paradoxically mysterious, transparent twenty-eight exhortations from the perspective of our prophetic witness as followers of Francis. The article attracted very little attention and contributed not at all to the Fifth Plenary Council that had more pressing issues with which to contend. Were you to read that article today, you would have the impression that I had written it for this, our Seventh Plenary Council.

Twenty years later, after editing the three volumes of Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, the Franciscan and non-Franciscan sources for the life of Saint Francis between 1207 and 1365, I re-read that article and marvel at had little I knew at that time. The experience of living with those documents day-after-day became a remarkable formative journey during which more questions than answers arose, and surprises emerged when least expected. I and my fellow editors were amazed, for example, to discover that biblical passages and images present in the writings of Francis did not re-emerge until the writings of Bonaventure. When we least expected them, certain words or phrases, for example, with which my Conventual co-editor might have been uncomfortable were perfectly acceptable to my “Leonine” co-editor and myself were not, and vice versa. The post-Bonaventure works published in the third and largest volume surprised us most as we discovered that certain phrases or concepts absent in the first two volumes appeared only in the third. And, much to our surprise, certain concepts present in the writings of Francis were either totally absent or present only minimally in throughout all three volumes, one of which was minority.
During the ten years of this major translating endeavor, we inadvertently became involved in a discussion among academics teaching spirituality that touched on definitions, approaches, and methodology. The American biblical scholar, Sandra M. Schneiders, had initiated that conversation with her 1989 article in Theological Studies, “Spirituality in the Academy.” It received a major boosts from theologians such as the English theologian, Philip Sheldrake, who raised in 1993 scholarly questions of interpretation and method in his Spirituality and History, the Canadian medievalist, Walter Principe, who raised critical questions concerning definitions of spirituality, and the American, Bernard McGinn, who in 1994 had embarked on a five volume study, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. As an academic in the field of spirituality, I brought many of those questions to the Franciscan texts with which I was struggling. I brought them to the daunting topic that I bring to you now, “The Minority of Francis and His Early Brothers,” questions that touch on historical, theological, and anthropological interpretations. I bring them conscious that touching on who we are as minores is, in my opinion, at the heart of our spirituality as brothers. That is: we are brothers by the wonderful gift of the Spirit; what makes that crystal clear is our gift of minority.

For reasons that I hope will be obvious at the conclusion, I chose to entitle my presentation “Minority: The Sacramental Intuition of Francis.” I did so mindful of a growing respect in the fields of spirituality and liturgical study for the primary role of symbols in shaping and influencing our religious imagination. Because they are immediately present, symbols have the ability to speak to the human soul. At the same time, effective symbols are evocative and challenging and, as such, they invite us ever more deeply into their mystery. To speak of ourselves as fratres who are minores is, I contend, to declare the symbolic dimension of our life or, to express it in another way, it is to enter into the mystery of our communion and to discover the wonder of our call.

Minority: The Sacramental Intuition of Francis of Assisi

One of the most challenging discussions during the translation of Francis of Assisi: Early Documents centered on the translation of that very phrase, fratres minores. We were eaher to challenge the average reader to see the reality of who we are in a different light. Fratres was easy, “brothers.” It was minores that was the challenge. How were we to translate minores? When we did decide on the Order of Lesser Brothers, a number of people, friars especially, became upset that we were changing how people spoke and thought about us. Others were upset that we chose a word that was diminutive, lesser. That was precisely what we were attempting to do: to express how Francis wanted us to be seen.

Learning to read the early documents of our Gospel life is an art, one that makes one ever more sensitive to the tradition we have inherited, particularly when attempting to translate the Latin adjective, minor, in such a way that it becomes relevant. The search for a definition of what it means to be fratres minores is daunting since Francis’s biographers seem to be more concerned about other dimensions of their life. Two authors, however, are initially worthy of some attention: Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, but, as we shall see, for different reasons. In his Life of Saint Francis, a work of classic hagiography written to underscore Francis’s holiness and to prove the worthiness of his canonization, Thomas describes how the saint came to give his brotherhood its name. While he uses the word minor four times in that one paragraph, his four other uses of the word are scattered throughout the text to refer to the Order itself or, in one instance, as a diminutive adjective. In the Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, however, Thomas uses the word twenty-eight times. Some of these instances come from the Assisi Compilation which, as we know, forms the foundation of the lengthy second part of Thomas’s second portrait. The majority, nevertheless, are Thomas’s own insertions and give the impression that Thomas himself realized the oversight of his earlier work and attempted to rectify it. Thus Thomas writes of being minor or minores from the perspectives of poverty, especially in the context of begging; of humility, in which personal short-comings or deficiencies in everyday life are highlighted; and of dealings with clergy and other religious, from which perspective being taken advantage of or abused is brought to the fore. He undoubtedly provides the sharpest contours to his consideration of what it means to be minor in an example set in the context of fraternal life that resonates with his story exemplifying true joy:
Here I am, a prelate of the brothers, and I go to the chapter. I preach to the brothers and admonish them, and, in the end, they speak against me: ‘An uneducated and despicable man is not right for us; we do not want you to rule over us. You cannot speak; you are simple and ignorant.’ So, in the end, I’m thrown own in disgrace, looked down upon by everyone. I tell you, unless I hear these words with the same expression on my face, with the same joy in my heart, and with the same resolution for holiness, then I am in sense a Lesser Brother.

Bonaventure, however, is more interesting. A theologian commissioned by his brothers to compile a “definitive” portrait of Francis, Bonaventure wove together incidents from the Thomas Trilogy as well as insights that he garnered from those who knew Francis personally. When his Legenda major is read through the prism of his Breviloquium, which anticipates it by only two or three years, the genius of Bonaventure’s theological understanding of Francis become clear: his portrait of Francis was a literary configuration built on the solid foundations of his theology of grace. This becomes most obvious in his arrangement of the saint’s virtues, a program of development that Bonaventure places before his confreres whom he challenges to emulate their Founder. Curiously, virtues that have become celebrated in our contemporary understanding of the Gospel vision of Francis, such as fraternity and minority, are mentioned only in passing and, once again, without analysis. Bonaventure stands in the shadow of Thomas of Celano, content to allow being minor emerge, for the most part, through the lens of humility, and, in one stance, as an expression of poverty. The Seraphic Doctor, however, is the first to coin the word minoritas and does so in understanding the nature of the call to be fratres minores.

On October 4, 1255, Bonaventure commented on the Gospel of the day, Matthew 11:29, “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.” The Morning Sermon is devoted to what might be considered the pedagogical approach of the Franciscan school and appears to have been delivered, as one might expect, before the larger academic community of the University of Paris. The scope of the Evening Collatio, however, is more narrow, seemingly addressed to the university fraternity living at the Couvent des Cordeliers on Paris’s West Bank. Turning once again to the Gospel of the day, Bonaventure picks up where he left off with his commentary on Learn from me:
Learn, that is, from my example so that you may be meek and humble. A person is meek per affectum fraternitatis, and humble per affectum inferioritatis sive minoritatis. Therefore, to be meek is to be a brother of all; to be humble is to be minorem [less] than everyone.

The Collatio continues with a fourfold consideration of meekness and three fourfold considerations of humility from the perspectives of its fruits, the means of acquiring it, and the means by which it is maintained. What is unique about Bonaventure’s presentation is his audience that was composed his confreres, in his words, those learning as well as those teaching. In this light, his consideration of humility per affectum inferioritatis sive minoritatis provides an insight into what it means to be fraters minores. Initially Bonaventure’s commentary on the Matthean text might be construed as encourages a sense of inferiority, which may be described as that which “rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment.” It is precisely Bonaventure’s use of the word “inferioritas” as a synonym of “minoritas,” however, that provides a key to this theologian’s appreciation of Francis’s use of the term.

Quite simply: inferioritas is the noun based on the comparative form of the adjective, inferus, meaning low or below. Hence to be inferior means to be lower or to be further below. It implies an important question: to be lower than what or who? In a similar way minoritas is the noun based on the comparative form of the adjective, parvus, meaning little or small, and minor, the comparative adjective, describes something or someone who is lesser; but, again, lesser than what or to whom? Bonaventure’s interpretation highlights the relative or comparative nature of minority and, in a sense, underscores the challenge of its flexible, changing character. What does Bonaventure’s subsequent neglect of the noun minoritas suggest, a neglect that appears not only in 1255, but also in his two portraits of Francis, or in the sermons he later delivered as Minister General on the feast of Francis, or in his Apologia Pauperum in which he reveals his profound knowledge of the Rule. Did Bonaventure perceive that Francis called his brothers minores to challenge them not to be comfortable, staid, or stagnant? Was the neglect of both men in defining the concept deliberately aimed at prodding us to keep in mind the relational character of our lives, that is, prodding us to ask ourselves who we are before others? To be less than others can be an uncomfortable measuring rod. In the 1220 world of Francis, how did a priest express being lesser before his brothers or how did any brother express being lesser among the less fortunate to whom he was called to live? In the 1255 world of Bonaventure, how did a professor express “lesser-ness” before his students or colleagues? Was it entirely relative or was there a mind-set, a fundamental paradigm that influenced how one saw himself, one that demanded continually new expressions?

In Search of a Paradigm

Contemporary considerations of minority seem to flow from two perspectives: the historical-contextual or socio-political and, more recently, the biblical. Attilio Bartoli Langeli and especially David Flood provided impetus to considerations of the socio-economic origins of the term when he examined the Assisi Pact of 1210, that is, in his numerous writings on the majores and minores of late twelfth, early thirteenth century Assisi. The considerations of Leonard Lehmann, Fernando Uribe, Bernard Holter, and Marco Bartoli are fundamentally historical in nature as they consider the origin of the term, its use in Francis’s or Clare’s writings, especially in the Earlier Rule, and its expression in the subsequent literary tradition. Only recently have Franciscans considered their life in light of the rich biblical theology as the contributions of Frederic Raurell, Michele Mazzeo, and Paolo Martinelli attest. In their light, Yannis Spiteris has identified expressions of a similar attitude in ancient monasticism.
If being minor is, as the word indicates and Bonaventure underscores, a relative term, the search for its theological underpinnings should somehow lead back Francis’s writings. In light of comments in Origins of the Franciscan Order, we might easily suspect that Kajetan Esser was also in search of some sort of theological insight into the name Fratrum Minorum. As he was completing his massive work on the critical edition of Francis’s writings, he taught a course on the Admonitions at the Antonianum and, shortly thereafter, in his 1978 introduction to the critical edition of Opuscula Sancti Francisci wrote:
In these twenty-eight admonitions, we can discover precious pearls of wisdom that are extremely valuable for Franciscan asceticism and for the life of a lesser brother. They have not yet been sufficiently explored. These admonitions form, in fact, an encomium of poverty of spirit and, for that reason, an encomium of a minor brotherhood.

Esser was simply echoing the judgments of Angelo Clareno, Bartholomew of Pisa, and, perhaps more significantly, the weight of the thirteenth century manuscript tradition in which only the Admonitions, not the Rule and Testament, are consistently present.
Nearly twenty-five years later, Esser’s judgment still holds true, especially in our considerations of minority. It was probably Esser’s comment that prompted me in 1985 to look at the Admonitions for insights into our Capuchin prophetic presence and, in doing so, convinced me of their role in delineating the contours of a life of minority. The result was “The Prophetic Implications of the Admonitions” in which I took exception to Esser’s describing them as Francis’s “Canticle of Inner Poverty,” and called them, instead, his “Canticle of Minority.” Surprisingly only Fernando Uribe acknowledged the Admonitions in the 2003 symposium at the Antonianum as a significant source for its understanding.

One of the fundamental problems prompting a neglect of this invaluable source of insight is a question of the literary genre of the Admonitions, a problem that continues to emerge with a similar document, Exhortatio et Commonitorum. Do they belong among Francis’s legislative works as earlier editions of Francis’s writings have placed them? Or are they, as Martino Conti and Robert J. Karris suggest, a collection similar to the Sayings of the Desert tradition? Presenting the Admonitions alphabetically or among simply “the undated writings” tends to reduce them to the ascetical, exhortatory literature of the Franciscan spiritual life. Esser’s other assessment of the Admonitions, however, sees them as “Francis’s greatest writings of exhortation…not directed against theoretical trespasses but seeking to correct real and actual abuses” in daily fraternal life. From this perspective they provide valuable tools with which to unpack the meaning of what is the meaning of a fraternal life of minority. This is particularly true since in the Admonitions Francis presents not only the dichotomies or polarities that have resulted from sin; at the same time, he sketches the contours of a prophetic life that witnesses to the Gospel way of undoing sin.

There are a number of advantages to examining minority through the lens of the Admonitions. From a historical perspective, they are somewhat timeless. While there have been various attempts to place them into a historical framework, for the most part, these have been unsuccessful. In all simplicity, therefore, they convey the sense of a daily life with which we of the twenty-first century can relate as easily as those of the thirteenth. From a literary point of view, they approximate the catechetical methods of Francis’s time in which a brief biblical passage, image, or allusion would be brought ad mentem of a listener and followed by a down-to-earth, practical application. In this light, these twenty-eight passages communicate his biblical spirituality and insights into how it might be fleshed-out. One final benefit offered by the Admonitions is their ability to fulfill the task of all Gospel spirituality as described by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. “Nothing in the Church is mere abstract principle,” he writes. “Everything that is valid for all rests on concrete persons, or better, on concrete walks entrusted to concrete persons…” The wonder of the Admonitions is their transparency, their concrete character, and their ability to communicate to the ordinary person the spirituality of the Gospel in way that is not elitist in nature.

The Biblical Foundation of the Pursuit of Lesser-ness

In the emerging literature concerning spirituality in the academy, the role of symbol is growing in importance as a means of capturing its theological, historical, and anthropological dimensions. From this perspective, the Second Admonition is one of the richest expressions of Francis’s symbolic thought and, although generally overlooked, a principle means of entering into his understanding of minority. At first glance, it is simply the re-telling of the biblical drama of the Garden in the opening of Genesis expressed in the familiar terms of the patristic, monastic and contemplative tradition. Each element, however, is worthy of consideration: the image of God as the source of all good, the invitation of God to eat of every tree but one, the hunger for knowledge, and the symbols of the trees and of the apple.

In his The Prayer of Saint Francis, Leonardo Boff may provide an ideal approach for entering Francis’s telling of the story. While analyzing the forces that drive our contemporary society, Boff suggests that we tend to live symbolically or diabolically. Playing with the etymology of the two words, symbolic and diabolic, Boff sees the harmonious or communion forces of the symbolic and the divisive or disintegrating forces of the diabolic. By changing the specific person, Adam, to the impersonal pronoun, ille, and the tenses of the verbs from the perfect to the present, Francis suggests that Adam provides a rich symbol evoking the call of every human being, an invitation to enjoy the all the gifts of creation, to wallow in the goodness of the all good, generous God and to be, quite simply, the primary beneficiary of the largess of the Creator.

From its opening paradoxical set of divine commands, “Eat…do not eat,” Francis focuses on the symbol of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and contrasts it unique place among all the trees of paradise: “[Adam] was able to eat of every tree of paradise, because, while he did not go against obedience, he did not sin.” As long as Adam recognized his place before the Creator, as the lesser before the greater, he was able to live symbolically, that is, in harmony. In the vast panorama of freedom, that one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, became Adam’s stumbling block and his downfall. Curiously Francis now focuses on the tree of the knowledge of good while seemingly overlooking the tree of the knowledge of evil. In doing so, he puts his finger on what he sees as the drive of every human being: to know and, in this case, to know what God knows. “For that person,” he writes, “eats of the tree of the knowledge of good who appropriates to himself his own will and, thus, he exalts himself over the good things that the Lord says and does in him.” He appropriates, takes what isn’t his, in order to have more and, in doing so, lifts himself up in order to be higher. Francis offers his interpretation of the sin: rather than listen to the Creator, he responds to the suggestion of the devil and the tree of the knowledge of good became the pomum [apple] of the knowledge of evil. Rather than respecting the symbolic, he gives into the diabolic and, in doing so, shatters the peace and serenity of his world. Francis is then very clear in the devil’s role in this tragedy: the devil only suggests; Adam is the transgressor. Hence the tragedy of the sin becomes more striking: the punishment may well be seen in the struggle to appreciate the overwhelming love and goodness of God, to live on the level of symbol, and, instead, to give ourselves to the diabolic, that which places wedges between us.

The undoing of the sin, the continuing call to penance, as Francis perceives it demands a response that must be expressed in the anthropological terms of the original sin of Adam, that is the undoing of the sin demands a return to the original state of minority. To express this simply: the Second Admonition prompts us to live wrestling with the tendencies of life to grasp or appropriate and to place ourselves over and above another.

Minority: The Undoing of Appropriation

In all its simplicity the Second Admonition estabishes the agenda for those that follow. Because they are so difficult to date, these twenty-six provide insights into a daily life centered on the Gospel, a daily life with which we can easily relate for it is composed of individuals much like ourselves. The persons Francis describes as continuing the grasping and self-exalting ways of Adam are ourselves and those with whom we live.
Kajetan Esser was correct in underscoring poverty as the central issue of the Admonitions. Such an understanding flows quite logically from the paradigm of the second that, in some manuscripts of the fourteenth century, is placed as the first, that is, as a prologue. Nowhere in the Admonitions, however, does Francis speak of poverty in terms of material possessions. Whereas our tendency is to initiate our discussions of poverty on this material, concrete level, Francis–at least in the Admonitions–takes a different approach. It may be argued that, ever the idealist, Francis considered poverty in relation to material things as something resolved at the beginning of the year of probation when one gave all he had to the poor. His writings, especially the Admonitions, reveal that his understanding of a life sine proprio penetrated much more deeply. From this perspective, Lázaro Iriarte’s comment is extremely apropos: “The whole complex of problems that grew up…around the theme of poverty…was due to the impossible effort on the part of the sons of Francis ‘to be poor’ without having the courage to be ‘minors.’” Had his early followers understood that Francis intuited an almost sacramental quality in material poverty, their approach might have been different. Had his followers understood the role of poverty in deepening Francis’s sense of being a lesser brother, they might have struggled more authentically with expressing its reality in their lives.

When poverty is examined in the writings of Francis, it appears as a contradictory yet consistent call. Francis does not write about living sine rebus huius mundi or in destitution but sine proprio, without anything that is my own or without anything proper to me. From this perspective material poverty becomes “sacramental,” an outward, twofold sign of an inner reality. The more radically it is embraced, the more effective it is in leading us to deeper levels of poverty and in challenging us to respond to the question: what can I call my own? As it emerges in the Admonitions, a life sine proprio, without anything of my own, is pursued on three levels: in relation to my inner self, in relation to my brothers, and in relation to God. Since it is appears as a virtue integrally associated with another, it should not be forgotten that it is relational in character and, therefore, essentially relative.

Most extensive is Francis’s consideration of poverty in relation to one another. The Eleventh Admonition points very clearly at those who do not let go of anger or being upset with others: “That servant of God who does not become angry or upset with anyone lives correctly sine proprio.” The Fourteenth, a commentary on Matthew’s first Beatitude, begins with a reference to those who insist on prayers, obligations, and acts or rigorous asceticism, yet are preoccupied with their good name. Clinging to offices or ministries is part of the considerations of the Third Admonition, a point that returns in Chapter Seventeen of the Earlier Rule when Francis considers apostolic activities.
The Admonitions also call us to examine poverty in relationship to our inner selves what we might call “poverty of spirit.” It touches those very things to which we most frequently cling. The Fifth Admonition, for example, highlights not only spiritual but also natural gifts, while the Seventh considers the self-centered, self-aggrandizing ways in which we use and cling to knowledge, as the Twentieth the ability to provoke others to laughter. It is the Third Admonition, however, that touches the most prized of all possessions and that which brought about the fall, the human will, that to which the human clings as to a most precious possession.

It is this that leads us to poverty in relation to God and to a further reflection on the Second Admonition and the temptation to appropriate what is not our own and to make it such. Once again Chapter Seventeen of the Earlier Rule is helpful as Francis reminds us: “Let us know with certainty that nothing belongs to us except our vice and sins.” Thus the challenge of a life sine proprio is one of penance, the call of the Prayer before the Crucifix to “enlighten the darkness of my heart,” and through the gift of our life together to have the courage to look at the unchartered depths of our lives. It is quite simply as Francis writes in the Eleventh Admonition: “Blessed is the one for whom nothing remains except to return to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

Humility: The Undoing of Self-Exaltation

Much of Thomas of Celano’s references to the call to be lesser brothers are couched in the language of humility. In this very context, Bonaventure introduced the very word minoritas. When this phenomenon is seen in the theological foundations upon which both of these men built, the equivocal use of humility and minority is understandable. Both men use images and phrases taken from the monastic tradition that preceded them, most especially in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux whose De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae became the handbook for those in subsequent ages. In doing so, however, Thomas and Bonaventure appear very much aware of the Francis’s approach which differs from Bernard in three ways.

In his analysis of De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, Basil Pennington maintains that, according to Bernard, truth is the goal of humility: the truth in oneself, the truth in one’s neighbor, and the Truth itself. Francis, on the other hand, seems more concerned with seeing humility in the context of revealing goodness, the goodness that God is continually saying or doing in oneself, in one’s neighbor, in all of creation. While one might argue that there is only a slight nuance here, one based on a perception of revelation, the texts convey emphases that the two passionate communicators seem eager to express.

For Bernard, humility is a sister virtue of love. Without love, he maintained, humility is empty of warmth. Francis has a different perspective: humility is a sister virtue of poverty. The genius of Francis’s approach consists in his understanding that a life sine proprio brings us before God as we were created, enabling us to recognize our dependence and placing us before the all good, generous God as we truly are, grasping and arrogant. Thus, humility is not defined in terms of lowliness or nothingness, but in terms of authenticity or transparency. As such it is a far more positive entity that never ceases its challenging ways.

This leads to another of the significant differences between the two, i.e., Bernard and Francis, is the context in which they perceive growth in humility. One could read Bernard’s De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, clearly a work of monastic literature springing from a cenobitic context, and not discover the same intensity of fraternal relationships as in the writings of Francis, especially in his Admonitions. Unlike the monos pros monon approach of monasticism, Francis intuited that our fraternal dealings with one another offer us invaluable opportunities for making what the Second Admonition states clearly more transparent: it is the Lord who says and does good in and through each and every one. Unlike Bernard, then, Francis sees the living out of poverty and humility, that is the recognition of the dynamic goodness of God in the other, in the relational environment of fraternal life and, as such, the surest path to God.
The Third Admonition is the crossroad of the two virtues: poverty and humility. Its verbs are difficult: renunciation, loss, self-surrender, acquiescence, sacrifice, obedience. Francis manages to challenge his brothers to undo the roots of sin by acting contrary to their appropriating and self-exalting ways. Notice the dimension of totality present in its second sentence: “That person leaves everything he possesses and loses his body, who offers himself totally to obedience in the hands of his prelate.” But the manner in which Francis describes those involved is also, for us, difficult: the person who offers himself to a praelatus becomes a subditus. In other words, that is, to offer himself totally to one placed before or above implies becoming one placed below or underneath.

Furthermore, Francis manages to introduce the haunting problem of perception as the use of videre [to see] and sub specie [under the appearance of] suggest. When this nuance is placed in the context of the frequent call to overcome blindness, to open our eyes, and to be careful of what appears good, i.e., sub specie, his consciousness of one of the fruits of sin, deception, becomes evident. Thus the challenge of discerning what is meliora or utiliora is placed in the shade of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and is couched in terms of how easily we are deceived.

Once again the Admonitions express a quasi-sacramental approach. Our expressions of humility before one another are outward expressions of a much deeper attitude of our place before God. At the same time, humility in our dealings with one another, especially as brothers, leads us to or deepens within us humility before God. Humility in our fraternal life is one of those other-centered activities of the Spirit of the Lord that strengthen the bonds between God and ourselves as well as deepen our commitment to one another. The Twelfth Admonition, for example, provides a norm for discerning the vitality of our spiritual life in such terms: “A servant of God can know he has the Spirit of the Lord in this way: if, when the Lord does some good through him, his flesh, because it is always opposed to every good, does not exalt itself; but regards himself viliorem [the more worthless] and judges himself minorem [less] than all others.”
While reading so many of the Admonitions in which Francis challenges us to embrace humility, it is difficult to avoid the verbs that express the ascending/descending movements of daily life and the comparative adjectives with which we describes ourselves and one another. The Nineteenth Admonition expresses this in similar terms:
“Blessed is the servant who does not consider himself meliorem [better] when he is praised and exaltatur [exalted] by others, than when he is considered worthless, simple, and looked down upon. For what a person is before God that he is and nothing more. Woe to that religious who has been placed in alto [on high] by others and, by his own will, does not want descendere [to come down]. And blessed in the servant who is not placed in alto [on high] by his own will and desires to be always under the feet of others.”
But this introduces one further theme of the Admonitions, one that may reveal why minority has been an issue so very much neglected in our Franciscan tradition: the embrace of vulnerability. It reveals itself through repeated references to patient suffering not only when confronted by our enemies but also in our daily fraternal life.

Minority: The Embrace of Vulnerability

While the embrace of minority in the context of poverty and humility emerge in the Admonitions as difficult enough, especially in the fraternal life, Francis recognizes how vulnerable they make us. The theme of patient suffering frequently appears in the Admonitions, as it does in almost all of his writings. Generally these appeal to the image of Christ or to the Suffering Servant; frequently they echo the words of Jesus: “Whoever wishes to save his life must lose it.” We might wonder if this is the punishment Francis envisioned in the Second Admonition. It is clearly the way Christ teaches to undo the sin tendencies to which we are heir.

Ever the realist yet never departing from his love of the ideal, Francis envisions that the embrace of loving obedience easily makes us vulnerable to one another. Not only does obedience at times demand the sacrifice of our better and more profitable judgments; it also places us in awkward positions in which we are caught for reasons of conscience. If he could suggest that a minister could suffer physical harm because of his brothers, Francis does not hesitate to offer advice to someone in such a bind who could suffer persecution as a result:
…if a prelate should command something contrary to his conscience, although [a subject] does not obey him, still he should not abandon him. And if, in consequence, he suffers persecution from others, let him love them even more for God’s sake. For whoever chooses to endure persecution rather than be separated from his brothers remains truly in perfect obedience for he lays down his life for his brothers.

The encouragement offered here to love those who inflict harm on us and to endure persecution rather than separation is import in understanding Francis’s view of patient suffering. It finds an echo in the twenty-second chapter of the Earlier Rule:
Let us pay attention, my brothers, to what the Lord says: Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you, for our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose footprints we must follow, called his betrayer a friend and gave Himself willingly to those who crucified Him. Our friends, then, are all those who unjustly afflict upon us trials and ordeals, shame and injury, sorrow and torment, martyrdom and death. We must love them greatly for we will possess eternal life because of what they bring upon us.

Variations on this theme can be found in a number of the Admonitions. The ninth, for example, is dedicated to authentic charity yet it is set in the context of patient suffering. Admonitions thirteen and fifteen offer two commentaries on the seventh Beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and dwell on the same theme, patient endurance. As we see Francis encouraging his brothers to accept a lesser position in the embrace of poverty and humility, we can notice a similar encouragement to embrace patient suffering. In addition to counseling peaceful reception of the abuse and injustices that come from our brothers, Francis would have us find our place “under the feet of others” not in positions of prestige, as he writes in the Nineteenth Admonition. In addition to singing the blessedness of the servant who willingly remains “under the rod of correction” in the Twenty-second Admonition, he extols the one who suffers the accusation, blame and correction of another as if they were coming from himself. Yet, as if reaching for an even lower condition, Francis write of one who accepts these humiliations although he did not commit the fault for which he suffers. Although there is, in these passages, only a scriptural reference to the faithful and prudent servant of Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 24:45), Francis clearly has the example of the innocent suffering servant, Christ, before his eyes as he proposes this aspect of minority to his brothers.

“Learn from Me…”

Living the Admonitions, I believe, has the power to bring about that with which you are about to struggle: minority or, what T.S. Eliot called “a condition of complete simplicity.” They encourage us to work against, but to live differently. Living the Admonitions is our manner of coming to grips with the Fall and reversing its dynamics. According to the medieval catechetical method they follow, the Admonitions teach us to follow the Word of God into a deeper and deeper lesserness— minoritas—until we return to the simplicity of God’s original plan.
In one of his offhanded comments, Thomas of Celano writes of Francis as having attained original innocence. After considering Francis’s growth in the virtues of humility and poverty, in the eighth chapter of the Major Legend, Bonaventure makes the same claim, but with a major difference. The theological underpinnings of Bonaventure’s portrait envisions us doing the same and places that challenge within the cosmic embrace of peace, “the tranquility of love.” This prompts us to return to Bonaventure’s Evening Collatio of October 4, 1255. “Learn from me to be meek and humble…learn from me to be a lesser brother.”
A number of authors have recently attempted to identify the biblical inspiration for Francis’s concept of minority highlighting, in particular, Matthew 20:20-28 and Luke 22:24-24. The Admonitions present over and again the image of the Servant of God whose praises are sung and contrast him with the religious whose life is frequently described as lacking in authenticity. The image of the servant may clearly be seen as a reflection of the servant of psalms 22, 56, 68, etc., those psalms that appear through Francis’s Office of the Passion. More powerfully, however, the image may be seen as that of the Songs of the Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah and, above all, in portrait of Jesus in the Gospel of John. Recent scholarship on the writings of Francis may offer us another perspective, a sacramental one.

One might argue that the sacramental dimension of Francis’s thought became much more profound after his reception of the stigmata. The Tu es of his Praises of God, written for Brother Leo while still on La Verna, echoes throughout the entire piece proclaiming the presence of God in everything, a presence that explodes in Francis’s poetic soul as, in the following Spring, he composes his Canticle of Brother Sun. His Letter to the Entire Order takes on meaning in this light. Many have seen it as the most profoundly theological of Francis’s writings; it is certainly his most Eucharistic. “Kissing your feet… and with all that love of which I am capable,” he writes, “I implore all of you brothers to show every possible reverence and honor to the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in Whom that which is in heaven and on earth is brought to peace and reconciled to the all-powerful God.”

This is the mystic Francis who writes, the Francis who has experienced the wonder of Incarnate Love at Greccio and of the Redemptive Love at LaVerna. This is the Francis who, ever conscious of the Gospel mission to bring that love to all humankind, now writes of the reconciliation of all things in the Eucharistic Body of Christ. This also the Francis who call his brothers to embrace that Eucharistic minority of God: “Let everyone be struck with fear, the whole world tremble, and the heavens exult when Christ, the Son of the living God, is present on the altar in the hands of a priest! O wonderful loftiness and awesome dignity! O sublime lowliness! O lowly sublimity! The Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that He hides Himself under an ordinary piece of bread!” The words pour out of this mystic Francis with passion and intensity and express a vision of Christ that might best be expressed in that simple concept: minor. He is “present on the altar in the hands of the priest;” he “so humbles himself that He hides under an ordinary piece of bread!” And this is the Francis who calls to his brothers: “See the humility of God, brothers, and pour out your hearts before Him! Humble yourselves that you may be lifted up by Him! Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, so that He Who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally!” The mystery of Eucharistic minority!

A few of the fourteenth century manuscripts place the First Admonition of Francis in a category unto itself; commentators frequently place it in the same category as the Letter to the Entire Order. Side by side, the Eucharistic themes of the two writings seem very much alike. The First Admonition, however, is far more direct and flows from a different context, that of the daily struggle of faith. It begins with Jesus’ words during the Last Supper discourse to the interruptions of Thomas and Philip: “We don’t know where you are going; how can we know the way?” and “Lord, show us the Father and it will be enough for us.” It continues with recognition of the struggle to see God and opens into considerations of seeing the Incarnate Lord and of seeing the Eucharistic Lord Jesus according to the Spirit and the Godhead. It draws to a conclusion with those powerful words:
Therefore: children, how long will you be hard of heart? Why do you not know the truth and believe in the Son of God? Behold, He humbles Himself each day as when He came from the royal throne into the Virgin's womb; each day He Himself comes to us, appearing humbly; each day He comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of a priest. As He revealed Himself to the holy apostles in true flesh, so He reveals Himself to us in the same way in sacred bread.

This is a sacramental vision of life, one that defines the Gospel life of Francis of Assisi. His Gospel intuition of minority deepened into an sacramental intuition and expressed itself in his patterns of thought, manners of speaking, and examples of life. Each day Francis perceived the Most High assuming minority; each day emptying Himself, each day lowering Himself, each day becoming vulnerable in our hands. Could we not do the same?
Fr. Regis Armstrong, OFMCap

Introduction

No reform can be understood on its own terms. Genuine reforms do not arise from a fundamentally new inspiration but seek to live with new energies a charismatic model from an earlier age. Periods of church reform often eagerly hark back to the ideals of the “primitive community”. Monastic reforms frequently sought to transpose the Benedictine Rule into a new age. Franciscan reform groups resolved to take up once again the radical form of life of the Poverello and his first companions. Religious re-forms take a fresh hold on an inspired and inspiring form of life.

If the number of reforms among the Friars Minor exceeds those in any other Order, this is essentially because their founder was such a radical and his movement so full of vitality. Francis became to a certain extent the victim of his own success, inasmuch as the radically evangelical life of a small group of wanderers attracted, in a short time, hundreds and thousands of new members. A movement composed of thousands needs organisation and structure, requires stable dwellings, offices, income and training. In short: the lifestyle of a small, radical group of charismatic brothers must adapt to the needs of the wider society. Or, as Th. Desbonnets said: “Through crises of growth the intuition of the early years seeks its institution”.

Isnard W.Frank, a church historian from Mainz, hit the mark when he highlighted what happened with practically all the lay-led charismatic groups that appeared in the thirteenth century and whose first aim was to live the gospel in poverty - the Church and civil society changed them into mendicant Orders that made themselves useful, pastorally and culturally, to the new world of cities. They became communities of educated priests, living in urban friaries and committed to pastoral care, in the universities and in society. All groups and new Orders who could not demonstrate their “usefulness to the Church” by 1274 were all suppressed at the Second Council of Lyon.

The Franciscans differed from all other successful thirteenth-century Orders in that, while indeed allowing themselves to be transformed into a clerical mendicant Order, thereby adopting the model of the Dominicans, they at the same time took with them through history the personal example of their Founder. Frank speaks of the “person-ideal” of the Poverello and of the “work-ideal” of the Dominicans, both of them leaders in the tension-filled history of the Friars Minor. A radical return to the person-ideal provoked more and more new reforms - of which the largest, most successful and enduring was the Capuchin reform.

Let us briefly look at the three dominant models of religious life that mark the thirteenth century and also throw light on our Capuchin history. Poverty/Minority and itinerancy play a really key role in the process.

page 2

The ideal of life in medieval monasteries/friaries: three basic forms
The search for God and its impact on the world in monastic, Dominican and Franciscan spirituality.

Bededictines-
Cistercians:
Place: Abbey
Life: stable life; solitude; silence
Model: the primitive community in Jerusalem

Dominicans - Lyon 1274

Place: urban friary
Life: vita pastoralis - dynamic, involved
Model: the work of the first apostles in Jerusalem, Paul

Franciscans
up to 1230/50:

Place: “The whole world is our cloister”
Life: itinerant life - a wanderer life, being brothers to all
Model: The life of the apostles with Jesus on the way through Galilee

The classic ideal of radical religious life in the Carolingian era, which held the monopoly, was oriented towards the desert Fathers and the great Father of monasticism Benedict of Nursia:
the search for God, away from the world, from the busy world of people.
“Fuga mundi” became the only external movement, leading to lifelong stability: a retreat into solitude, where the monk lived, settled in the alternative world of his abbey. The abbey aimed to be a “city of God”, closed in on itself, allowing the primitive community to spring up again and at the same time to proclaim the new Jerusalem - far from people, in quiet forests or lonely hills, in mountains or river valleys.

In contrast to the old monastic ideal, Dominic of Caleruega let himself be positively challenged by the busy world of people, choosing to live a religious life with his preacher brothers in the midst of the people - not remote from society, but rooted in the new world of the city. Dominicans lived in pastorally active, open friaries instead of in closed, contemplative abbeys. Their ideal looked beyond the primitive community to the activity of the apostles after Pentecost: instead of assuring their individual salvation and seeking God in silence in collective enclosure, the preacher brothers sought to accompany the people in their search for God, built new, urban pastoral structures, set foot in the universities, fought against heretical movements and conducted their mission in the spirit of St Paul.

In the early years of the fraternitas, Francis resisted the attempt of the Roman Curia to make the traditional model of religious life palatable to his group: either the life of a monastic community, away from the world, or a colony of hermits. In the final years, the Poverello turned resolutely against the temptations of the “fratres sapientes”, during the growth crisis of the young Order, to seek refuge in monastic norms and “old Rules”. Since the Poverello rejected even the Rule of St Augustine as well as of Benedict, he was, in practice, rejecting the “Dominican way” as the one his movement would follow.

The first Franciscans chose a life that differed in its original inspiration both from the classic monastic model and the new model of the Dominicans. What inspired the new Franciscan movement was the wandering life of the apostles, making their way through Galilee with Jesus: “to follow barefoot in the footsteps of Christ”. This was the itinerancy of lay people, and later also of “priests without status” [Manselli], who lived the gospel with empty hands and who placed themselves as “subject to all” at the service of everyone they met, as Christ did on his journeys.

The primitive model of Franciscan life is already apparent in an early testimony of Jacques de Vitry, writing in the autumn of 1216, that the “lesser brothers” gave up all their wealth, spent their days working in the cities and retreated at night to lonely places, to make space for prayer: commuting between silence and the city, thus joining contemplation and action in a dynamic union. But Jacques de Vitry’s first impression is mistaken on one point: their model is not the primitive Jerusalem community, with their own houses in the city (Acts 2-6), but being “on the way” in the footsteps of Jesus (as in Mark 10 and Matthew 10). The Sacrum Commercium adds to this that these brothers lived in a radical state of no fixed abode: they see their home, their place of work and their cloister in the “whole world, as far as the eye can see”.

For Francis never speaks of a cloister or a friary, but only of “places” or “hermitages”, in which the brothers stay for a while. He never speaks of “community”, or of “common life” or “stable life”, but of brothers, who go about in the world. “Stable” applies to their hope, not to their way of life, and “common” refers not to their life together but to their vocation and their Lord, Christ, the Lord and God of all people, who makes all human beings brothers and sisters to everyone.

The radically unorganised itinerant life of the first Franciscans is linked to
- faith in the “common Lord of all”,
- who sends the Apostles at Easter to preach the gospel to all creatures
- and whom they follow, barefoot and in the same poverty he lived with his friends in Galilee.

Of course, the lifestyle of a small group of charismatic laymen was impossible for a movement of thousands - and was too much for society, which was not prepared to feed a growing number of homeless beggars and obliging idealists. The friars had to organise and to appear useful even as a movement.

Francis’ successor, Br Elias, did not prevent the increasingly settled communities from turning to the monastic model, both structurally and communally. Already from 1230 on, large urban friaries took on monastic forms of community life and liturgy.
Yet the actual model of successful, modern religious life in the 13th century was to be far more helpful and influential in the organisation and structure of the Franciscan Order than the monastic ideal. Isnard Frank speaks of a “Dominicanization” of the Friars Minor, so that until 1250 it developed into the twin of the Dominicans in lifestyle, activities, architecture, studies and means of support.

At the same time, the first internal opposition from the “frati zelanti” arose, who saw in the clericalisation, urbanisation and conventualisation of the Order a falling away from the original ideals: in the following decades and centuries, “zelus religionis” and “observantia regulae sine glossa” (religious zeal and observing the rule without commentaries) became the guiding principle of a whole host of new reforms, which again and again started with similar aims:

• to leave the stable structures of large friaries and settled pastoral work
• to move far away from cities, and retreat to hermitages and itinerant apostolates
• to abandon monastic features in liturgy and return to contemplative sobriety, plain prayer in choir and a personal cultivation of silence
• to give up established pastoral work in “privileged” competition with the secular clergy and other mendicant Orders, in favour of an alternative, itinerant style of preaching, charitable works and apostolates among the neglected country dwellers.

The Capuchins were not the first, but they were the last great reform whose return to its origins showed this typical characteristic. Before them the “Zelanti” and the Spirituals in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Italian and French observance of the 14th and 15th, and Iberian reforms up to that of Juan de Guadalupe in 1500, had followed similar paths (to name only the best-known renewal movements).