Assisi Today

Twelve sackclothed vagrants with no visible means of support gathered in A.D. 1210 in the little Italian hill town of Assisi and started what Danish Roman Catholic Historian Johannes Jorgensen called "the most powerful attempt since Christ to make the world truly Christian." Their leader was a gentle little man who began life as a gay young gallant with a yen for glory--until, riding off to war at 22, he heard a voice ask, "Why do you desert the Lord?" Not long after, Francis of Assisi turned to prayer and fasting. Haled into an episcopal court for selling some of his merchant father's best fabrics to help a poor priest, he stepped out of his fine clothes before the stunned bishop and handed them back to his father, thenceforth renounced the ways of the world.

In a few years Francis and his order of Frati Minori, or Little Brothers (they did not at first aspire to the priesthood), had become a mass movement dedicated to holy poverty. When Francis got around to writing down a formal rule for his order, he prescribed "vile vestments" and, in preaching, "brief discourses, because the Lord while on earth talked briefly."

Last week the successors of the Little Brothers, now the world's second largest religious order (largest: the Society of Jesus, membership 33,000), wound up their first convention in six years. The scene: Assisi. The 94 friars from 31 countries who met for a two-week General Chapter represented some 30,000 Franciscans, O.F.M. (Order of Friars Minor). Their garb, if not vile, was still mostly the traditional brown, rough cloth and sandals. As for their discourse, it was anything but brief.

Into the Black. The Franciscans' Minister-General, Father Augustine Sepinski, gave an eight-hour progress report (in Latin) on the order's advance during the six years since he was elected: 132 new friaries, schools and churches built, 144 new parishes opened, 18 Franciscans appointed bishop and four archbishop. Some 4,000 Franciscans are working in 132 missions; 2,635 novices have entered the order. The Franciscans' Second Order, a cloistered group of women known as the Poor Clares, numbers 6,000. The Franciscan Third Order Secular is for laymen; the 3,500,000 members wear white cords around their waists under their clothes and pledge themselves to frugality, charity and piety. (Among Third Order members have been such disparate figures as Dante, King Louis IX of France, Christopher Columbus.)

In the U.S. today, members of the Order of Friars Minor numbers 3,685, up 1,000 since World War II. Many of them are teachers, as are some 40,000 Franciscan lay sisters. Franciscans altogether teach an estimated 1,500,000 U.S. schoolchildren.

The friar delegates at Assisi could also look out to a growing network of more or less affiliated Franciscan groups, for no order has been more beset with sectarianism. Soon after St. Francis' death, his simplicity and fervor living on in his followers caused a profusion of Franciscan-rule sects and splinter groups--Spirituals, Moderates. Celestines, Observants, Intransigents. In 1517 the Conventuals were constituted a separate order; they permit their monasteries to hold property (most other Franciscan property is held and administered by the Holy See), and they wear black habits, shoes and birettas. The more ascetic Franciscans split from the order in 1525 to become the bearded Capuchins.*

In addition to these main groups today, there are other communities following the Franciscan rule, e.g., the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, the Missionary Sisters of St. Francis, etc.

Stronger Than Ever. During their two weeks in Assisi. the delegates sang the songs of their order's medieval days, laughed at Latin digs aimed at other orders, mourned the news from China, where 700 Franciscan missionaries have been reduced to one. Then they re-elected Minister-General Sepinski for a twelve-year term.

Stout, smiling Father Sepinski, 56, who grew up in the smoky French mining town of Audun-le-tiche on the Luxembourg border, holds doctorates in theology and canon law, seems constantly to be ricocheting from one Franciscan province to another (he has visited England, Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, the Holy Land and the U.S.). At his Roman offices in the Franciscan Curia General, near St. Peter's, he rises at 5 a.m. for Mass, works most nights until midnight. Said Father Sepinski of his reelection: "I think the next twelve years will kill me, but it doesn't matter. The Franciscan spirit is stronger than ever in the world."

-*Divisions aside, the Franciscans also produced more canonized saints than any other--94 canonized, 202 beatified. Among Franciscan saints: Anthony of Padua (patron of motorists), St. Bernardino of Siena (advertisers).

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