My Franciscan Story

by Cathy Hampton, IPS Student

In the Fall of 2007, I interviewed on two separate occasions for the position of development director at Washington Theological Union (WTU) in Washington, D.C. I learned about the WTU community the prior year (2006) when I lived on Capitol Hill in N.E. DC, not too far from WTU and Catholic University of America. In 2006, I was development director at the Mosaic Foundation in McLean, VA, a private foundation established in 1998 by Princess Haifa al-Faisal, the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan who was the ambassador to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia, and the other wives of the Arab ambassadors to the U.S. My purpose in going for the WTU position was to begin graduate studies in theology while working with WTU’s president to raise funds for the Union and for interreligious programs.

The position ended up going to a Washington, DC native who worked for the Pontifical North American College. Although I did not get the job, the time was not right for me to become a part of the WTU community. God was at work on my behalf in this negative decision because WTU’s president ended up resigning in early 2008, after only 18 months in the position. The key fundraiser for any institution is the president which leaves the development director in limbo during a leadership transition, especially when the director is from outside of the area. Despite the setback, I persevered with my plan to do graduate work in theology and spirituality and instead began my studies at IPS in January 2008.

I never forgot how much I liked the WTU community and the Franciscan charism working in harmony with the special gifts of the Carmelites, Dominicans, Jesuits and other religious orders. There was something more that I needed to investigate while keeping in contact with my former colleagues in the DC area. In early 2009, I was accepted into WTU’s distance learning graduate certificate program in Franciscan Theology and Spirituality.

My first course was on the Spiritual Franciscans and The Struggle for the Soul of the Order and constituted the bulk of my 2010 “summer vacation.” The six-week course was taught by Dr. David Burr, professor emeritus of history at Virginia Tech who was the author of The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis. We read Dr. Burr’s work and the work of Angelo Clareno, a spiritual Franciscan, who wrote A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor. In the course we were asked to identify the cross roads or turning points in the history of the conflict between the spiritual Franciscans, the Conventual community, the wider Church and the secular world at large.

How we go about identifying the key crossroads of history tells us a great deal about our own values and key centers of power. Throughout the course, I tried to understand and synthesize the historical conditions that led the Franciscan community to persecute and murder their spiritual brothers and then finished with observations on how the lessons learned from encountering the Spiritual Franciscans could be applied to 21^st Century life. I focused on the key players in the controversy over usus pauper (the restricted use of goods). Basically the controversy between the spirituals and the conventuals was over strict adherence to the vow of poverty that all Franciscans take upon joining the order and a more lax observance of the same vow of poverty that allowed room for owning property and enjoying wealth.

Over several generations of violent struggle within the order between 1274 and 1350, along with the rise and fall of several Popes, the controversy culminated in the burning in the 1320’s of intransigent spirituals and lay Beguins as heretics in Southern France, under the leadership of Pope John XXII. What stood out the most for me in this introduction to medieval times was that the events in the century after the death of Saint Francis in 1226 helped to set the stage for the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century. The most critical question that came out of the persecution of the spirituals by their conventual brothers, despite their success in destroying the spiritualist movement, was that if a spirituality of absolute Gospel values was now condemned, by what rules were the mainstream Franciscan friars living, or claiming to live? Essentially, they were living lies and posing as superior to other orders because they were Franciscans.

In the course, I was introduced to Peter John Olivi (1248 – March 14, 1298), a Franciscan theologian and mystic who believed in the coming of a new third age and the end of the second age that was envisioned by Saint Francis. Olivi extended this belief to writings on apocalyptic experience that were based on the teachings of Blessed Joachim of Fiore (1135 – 1202). One of the indicators that the signs of the times were undergoing major invisible and visible changes (e.g., earthquakes, eclipses of the sun and moon) was the growing religious enthusiasm of the time. In the 13^th Century, Olivi and the Spiritual Franciscans became allies and friends of the lay order of Beguins in Southern France, men and women who were considered to be members of the Third Order of Franciscans and followers of Joachim. Many Beguins were captured, interrogated by the Inquisitors, condemned for heresy for letting themselves be influenced by the spiritualist friars and burned at the stake.

The apocalyptic teachings of Peter Olivi and Joachim of Fiore had a major impact on the Beguins, an influence that led to the theft of Olivi’s remains by conventual Franciscans and the destruction of many of his writings. Olivi, however, was unpopular with Pope John XXII and the Church hierarchy as the result of his apocalyptic writings which predicted that a mystical anti-Christ was coming soon and that this anti-Christ would take the form of the Pope in partnership with a King, the great anti-Christ.

Both Olivi and the Beguins practiced independent thinking, risking the ultimate sentence of being condemned by the Church as both heretics and heresiarchs (the teacher of error). The spirituals were heretics because they disagreed that the pope even held the authority to overturn their vowed obligation to God to observe strict poverty in matters of ownership and life style. A few centuries later, the resistance to the cruelty of Pope John XXII in using such violent means to enforce religious unity turned into a full-scale Reformation of Christianity; violence is never justified in the pursuit of religious goals.

The major challenge for me in absorbing the course material was that, when studying events from the 18^th, 19^th or 20^th centuries, we are in much more familiar terrain because we study the Constitution of the United States in grade school and learn all about the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War and the two major world wars of the 20^th century in high school and college. These historical events are major markers or cross roads for our understanding of who we are today as citizens of the United States. In religious education classes for public school students, we learned the basics of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, not the horrors of the Inquisition, the Crusades or the massive corruption of religious orders and a long series of Popes possessing an equally long history of fratricide, incest and nepotism.

As my confusion increased in learning so many details about people in Southern France and Northern Italy in the 14^th century within a brief six weeks, I began making parallels with centuries closer to my own point in time, turning to Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness and Robert Cole’s biography of Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion for support and encouragement. I also gained an appreciation for my own monastic-like lifestyle when I realized that my pursuit of social justice in my work as a grant writer and fundraising researcher has major overtones of living out the Franciscan story in my own uncompromising and yet flexible, creative way. I gained enormous appreciation for the Beguins of Languedoc who resisted the repression of the Inquisitors sent by Pope John XXII to terrorize them out of any form of independent thinking, each making a courage choice whether to lie or to tell the truth about their religious beliefs or whether to report their neighbors or friends.

I think that I was able at one point when reading the confessions of the Beguins to get beyond the issues that concerned the writers of the time. When the family members of Beguins burned in Lunel in October 1321 returned the next day to pick up the remains of their loved ones, the story of Esclarmonda Durban stood out as her family went about collecting her heart and some bones and flesh to save and preserve as sacred relics. From a long distance of time, we are in a sense doing something similar as the family members when we pick through the stories and legends of people that lived before us and write a paper about them in an effort to absorb and share their experiences.

A brief but deep feeling of sadness washed over me when I read that the pieces of bones and flesh of these deeply religious people were left lying around to be eaten by wolves or picked up by their family members. It becomes much easier to appreciate the light of our own time when we go back to pick up the pieces of another person’s body of writings and begin to reconstruct a more vivid picture of their lifestyles. The past can never be uncovered as it really took place; it is always reconstructed and reinterpreted by another person who becomes a link in a chain of events that lead us back to the early years of the Franciscan order and to the beginnings of Christianity.

My reasons for taking classes through both IPS and WTU are closely related to my own history and journey through time. What happened in 2006 and 2007 motivated me to make the imaginative leap out of being productive for the sake of monetary return to seeing myself as a “pass through” in which the money I earn goes directly to improving my ability to raise more money for non profits and for my ultimate goal of changing the world by sharing my story. Close encounters with the strange realities of the 13^th century also gives me hope that peace is possible in the 21^st century because we have such a long history of religious violence to learn from!