A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition by Deane Jennifer Kolpacoff; Deane Jennifer Kolpacoff;

Author:Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff; Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff; [Deane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2010-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Despite all his efforts, Pope John XXII had not fully uprooted the tendency toward apostolic rigor; it returned periodically in small scattered bands of Spirituals or Fraticelli hunted by inquisitors through the middle of the century, and in the spread of Spiritualist writings. The book of Revelation was on the minds of many, and increasingly the pope himself was identified by critics as the Whore of the Apocalypse. One cannot avoid the sense that history had painfully come full circle from 1208 and Pope Innocent III’s willing embrace of Francis and his band of ragged “apostles.” Over the century between the saint’s death and the consigning of Spiritual Franciscans and beguins to the stake, multiple fault lines had converged: particularly divisive had been the challenge of institutionalizing pious ideals, reconciling competing interpretations of scripture, and settling the question of ultimate spiritual authority. A booming cash economy had exacerbated the tension between wealth and poverty, as had new understandings of history and the End of Days.

Various attempts to establish austere wings of the order were initiated and quelled until, in the early years of the fifteenth century, a rigorous movement of “Observants” emerged whose special regard for the Franciscan Rule set them apart from their brothers. At the Council of Constance in 1415, a division was actually approved between Observants and Conventuals, and in 1428 the pope restored the distinction between ownership and use, making the order propertyless once again. In 1517 (the same year in which Martin Luther’s theses ignited the early Reformation), the pope finally split the Franciscans into two separate orders, formalizing a tendency that had been three centuries in the making. Since 1982, moreover, the Rule followed by religious members of the Franciscan Third Order is not Supra montem with its initial antiheretical injunction, but rather Francis’s Letter to the Faithful, which welcomes “All who love the Lord with their whole heart, with their whole soul and mind, and with all their strength [Mark 12:30] and love their neighbors as themselves [Matthew 22:39] and who despise the tendency in their humanity to sin.” The order had changed over time both in purpose and in function, as institutions do; Francis himself could not have prevented it.

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