Dominicans and Franciscans

11 Key excerpts on "Dominicans and Franciscans"

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  The Church and the Empire

  Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304

  • D. J. (Dudley Julius) Medley(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Militia Jesu Christi, the Soldiery of Christ. In the case of both Orders this close contact with the laity irrespective of class was a source of great strength and influence. Many, from royal personages downwards, enrolled themselves among the Tertiaries or hoped to assure an entrance to heaven by assuming the garb of a friar upon the death-bed.

  [Sidenote: Friars as missionaries to the heathen.]

  Since both Orders were founded with a missionary purpose, it is not surprising to find that at a very early date they extended their efforts beyond Europe. No real distinction of sphere can be profitably made; but perhaps the Dominican work lay chiefly among heretics, while the Franciscans devoted the greater attention to the heathen. Certainly St. Francis himself did not deal with heretics as such. He did, however, try to convert the Mohammedans and became for a while a prisoner in the hands of the Sultan of Egypt. Both Orders established houses in Palestine and both Orders were employed in embassies to the Mongols. The Dominicans brought back the Jacobite Church of the East into communion with Rome, while the Franciscans won King Haiton of Armenia, who entered their Order. Stories of martyrdom were frequent. At any rate, the friars were among the most enterprising of mediaeval travellers, and were the first to bring large portions of the Eastern world into contact with the West.

  [Sidenote: Change from original principle.]

  The story of the Dominican Order in the thirteenth century is one of continual progress. It was devoted to poverty no less than its companion Order. But circumstances soon showed that this was a principle which in its strictness made too great a demand upon human nature. Relaxation of the Rules was obtained from more than one pope; the popularity of the Orders brought them great wealth, and land and other property was held by municipalities and other third parties for the use of the friars. Their houses and their churches became as magnificent as those of the monks. But while this grave departure from the original ideal gave rise to no qualms among the more worldly and accommodating Dominicans, it rent asunder the whole Franciscan Order in a quarrel which forms perhaps the most interesting and important episode in the religious history of the Middle Ages.

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  The Landscape of Pastoral Care in 13th-Century England

  • William H. Campbell(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The similarities between the orders are marked, since both sought to follow the new concepts of vita apostolica, imitation of the life of the Apostles. 3 Both orders were committed to seeking support through begging rather than endowments; both lived in convents but circulated among the common people more readily than monks did, where they aimed to teach by setting a visible example. They became more similar as time went on: the Dominicans were probably prompted to higher stan- dards of ascetic poverty by the Franciscans, while the Franciscans quickly evolved from a lay movement into an educated clerical order like the Dominicans. 4 1 Brentano, Two Churches. 2 D’Avray, Preaching. 3 Little, Religious Poverty; Rivi, Francis; Brooke, Coming of the Friars, 40–90; Vicaire, Dominic, 199–200. 4 ¸ Senocak, Poor and the Perfect, denies that the Franciscans simply copied the Dominican education system. 61 The Coming of the Friars Dominic Guzman founded his order primarily to stem the tide of heresy but preaching to orthodox Catholics was also part of the Dominians’ mission from the start. 5 Best known as Dominicans or as Blackfriars, from their black habits, they took the title of Ordo fratrum praedicatorum, Order of Friars Preachers (abbreviated OP). The mission of preaching and teaching required the Dominicans to be a priestly order. 6 Moorman assumed that the Dominicans faced a crisis in Eng- land because of the lack of organised heresy there but neither evidence nor reason supports this conclusion. 7 Even among English clergy and laypeople, medieval ‘popular religion’ accommodated heterodoxy. 8 Nor were Dominicans concerned only with mistaken belief. A major target of their preaching was accidia, spiritual sloth or lethargy. Combating this capital vice required more than catechesis: it called for moral exhortation. Tugwell concluded that ‘in the thirteenth century . . . one is hard- pressed to find any [Dominican] spiritual books at all, let alone “spiritual classics”’.

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  The Contested Theological Authority of Thomas Aquinas

  The Controversies Between Hervaeus Natalis and Durandus of St. Pourcain, 1307-1323

  • Elizabeth Lowe(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  clerici until the General Chapter of 1249.

  Secondly, the clerical status of the Dominicans, in conjunction with their formative experiences in Toulouse and the traditions of the Augustinian canons, did much to influence the vita apostolica. The friar preachers merely pushed the idea to a more radical extreme than did their clerical predecessors.32 Previous scholars have pointed out that the more widely representative Waldensians and Franciscans emphasized the vita, whereas the Dominicans emphasized the apostolica portion of Luke 10, in which Christ instructed his disciples before they set out.33 The difference reflects a fundamental variation in tone and purpose. The early Franciscans sought to imitate the apostles in detail, viewing the vita apostolica as a means of attaining personal holiness. The first-generation Dominicans, on the other hand, adopted the vita apostolica in order to enhance the effectiveness of their preaching and took up preaching in order to answer a need in the Church.

  The creation of the Order of Preachers signaled a fundamental shift in the approach of the Medieval Church to the cura animarum. Scholars have traditionally defined the ecclesiastical significance of the Dominicans, aside from that accorded to the mendicant orders in general, in terms of the history of preaching: bishops had been the ordinary ex officio preachers throughout the Middle Ages and the institution of an order of preachers was a radical departure from that tradition. Preaching by clerics in the twelfth century was scarce: the spiritual shepherding of the laity was largely confined to the administration of the sacraments.34 In contrast, the ministry of the Dominican Order was so focused upon preaching that it has often been characterized as unsacerdotal. The Dominican approach to pastoral ministry is rooted in the historical context in which the Order developed. Preaching was at the core of the twelfth-century evangelical awakening: by 1215, the cura animarum, could not, realistically, be undertaken without it.35

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  Catholic Teaching Brothers

  Their Life in the English-Speaking World, 1891–1965

  • T. O'Donoghue(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 2 The Church and Its Teaching Orders Since the Middle Ages religious orders have played critical roles in the internal struggles of the Catholic Church. The mendicant orders—the Dominicans and the Franciscans—have fought to maintain Catholic orthodoxy and religious devotion to poverty. As Italy entered the Renaissance, friars from both orders were in the forefront of those excoriating the spread of what they called epi- cureanism or worldliness. Their interventions, of course, were not always appreciated by secular and ecclesiastical princes devoted to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The Dominicans have maintained an institutional base in the Inquisition and its suc- cessor congregations (presently CDF), while the Franciscans have continued to represent papal interests in the Holy Land. 1 The work of the teaching orders can be added to this list of the long and extensive involvement of the religious orders in the affairs of the world over the centuries. This chapter outlines some broad param- eters within which such work took place. It opens with an account of the involvement of the Catholic Church in education from the early days of Christianity, with particular attention being given to the great expansion in the teaching orders and their work in the period from the early decades of the nineteenth century until the immediate years after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The second part of the chapter sketches out developments in Catholic education and the presence of teaching brothers in the enterprise in the United States, England, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, which are the princi- pal English-speaking countries in which the orders were active over the period 1891–1965. 2 Finally, there is a broad outline of the origins of, and developments within, some of the major religious orders of teaching brothers. T. O’Donoghue, Catholic Teaching Brothers © Tom O’Donoghue 2012

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  Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree

  Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949

  • Erick D. Langer(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  In the case of the nineteenth-century Chiriguano missions, these friars had passed their youth, the formative period in their lives, in a peculiar context of the Risorgimento, marked by the struggle between the Catholic Church and the republicans 62 chaptEr twO who wanted to unify the Italian peninsula into one country. The republi-can forces, one of the main groups, were generally anticlerical. They saw the existence of the papal states as one of the most serious impediments to their efforts to unify Italy. This struggle affected the friars who went to Bolivia, who took with them certain perceptions of their roles and that to their charges in the missions. Knowing how the Catholic Church was treated so poorly in their homeland inevitably also had an effect on how the missionaries perceived Latin American religiosity, the state, and the Indians they were to administer and convert. The men who became Franciscans (rather than secular priests or, say, Jesuits) followed a special brand of Catholicism. Since its inception the Franciscan order has been a very special organization within the Catholic Church. St. Francis of Assisi founded the order in Italy during the early thirteenth century as a reform movement within the Church. The sim-plicity of Francis and his followers, their concern for the poor and disad-vantaged, and their vows of poverty, giving everything they had to the Church and begging for alms, made them a popular religious movement in late medieval Europe. Francis was canonized only a few years after his death, and the Franciscans (or Friars Minor) became an important force within the Catholic Church, with branches in many places, including the Iberian Peninsula.1 When the Spanish encountered the New World, the Franciscans, motivated by eschatological ideas, went in droves as mission-aries to convert the Indians in Mexico and elsewhere.

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  The Coming of the Friars

  • Augustus Jessopp(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  In 1219 the Franciscans held their second general Chapter. It was evident that they were taking the world by storm; evident, too, that their astonishing success was due less to their preaching than to their self-denying lives. It was abundantly plain that this vast army of fervent missionaries could live from day to day and work wonders in evangelizing the masses without owning a rood of land, or having anything to depend upon but the perennial stream of bounty which flowed from the gratitude of the converts. If the Preaching Friars were to succeed at such a time as this, they could only hope to do so by exhibiting as sublime a faith as the Minorites displayed to the world. Accordingly, in the very year after the second Chapter of the Franciscans was held at Assisi, a general Chapter of the Dominicans was held at Bologna, and there the profession of poverty was formally adopted, and the renunciation of all means of support, except such as might be offered from day to day, was insisted on. Henceforth the two orders were to labour side by side in magnificent rivalry--mendicants who went forth like Gideon's host with empty pitchers to fight the battles of the Lord, and whose desires, as far as the good things of this world went, were summed up in the simple petition, "Give us this day our daily bread!"

  * * * * * * *

  Thus far the friars had scarcely been heard of in England. The Dominicans--trained men of education, addressing themselves mainly to the educated classes, and sure of being understood wherever Latin, the universal medium of communication among scholars, was in daily and hourly use--the Dominicans could have little or no difficulty in getting an audience such as they were qualified to address. It was otherwise with the Franciscans. If the world was to be divided between these two great bands, obviously the Minorites' sphere of labour must be mainly among the lowest, that of the Preaching Friars among the cultured classes.

  When the Minorites preached among Italians or Frenchmen they were received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the people; and in the vulgar speech of the people--rugged, plastic, and reckless of grammar--the message came as glad tidings of great joy. When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they signally failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any rate, was denied, even to such faith as theirs. They were met with ridicule. The rabble of Cologne or Bremen, hoarsely grumbling out their grating gutturals, were not to be moved by the most impassioned pleading of angels in human form, soft though their voices might be, and musical their tones. "Ach Himmel! was sagt er?" growled one. And peradventure some well-meaning interpreter replied: "Zu suchen und selig zu machen." When the Italian tried to repeat the words his utterance, not his faith, collapsed! The German-speaking people must wait till a door should be opened. Must England wait too? Yes! For the Franciscan missionaries England too must wait a little while.

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  Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective

  From Frontier Zones to Lands in Focus

  • Gerhard Jaritz, Katalin Szende(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Économie et religion: l’expérience des ordres mendiants (XIIIe –XVe siècle), Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2009, pp. 247–69.
• Vargas, Michael A., Taming a Brood of Vipers: Conflict and Change in Fourteenth-Century Dominican Convents , Leiden, Boston, MA, Tokyo: Brill, 2011.
• Wrigley, Edward Anthony and Roger S.Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction , Cambridge: CUP, 2002.
• Žák, Alfons, Österreichisches Klosterbuch , Vienna–Leipzig: Kirsch, 1911.
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8 Friars Preachers in Frontier Provinces of Medieval Europe

Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig jakobsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315618876-12

In 1216, Europe saw the foundation of a new monastic order: the Order of Preachers, or as it is better known today, the Dominican Order. The basic idea of the order was to form a mobile corps of elite preachers, all specialists in theology as well as communication. Furthermore, the members were to live in accordance with what they were preaching, being good examples of Christian humility themselves, and for this purpose they were to be mendicants, that is beggars, only to live on alms and donations from the rest of society. The more profound aim of the Friars Preachers, as the members were called, was to fight heresy and paganism, and spread basic Christian knowledge among laypeople everywhere, to help improve their behaviour and increase their chances of salvation.

Geographically, the Dominican Order took off in the south of France and north of Italy and already by the beginning of the 1220s, only a few years after the foundation of the order, Friars Preachers were sent out to establish convents in all regions of Europe, including the more peripheral ones in the north and the east. Before 1228, Dominican convents in these frontier regions of Christianity were, just as in the rest of Europe, organized into provinces with a significant degree of semi-autonomy. The first line of such ‘frontier provinces’ in the north-east were Hungaria, Polonia and Dacia joined by the province of Bohemia in 1301, collectively covering the whole of central and north-eastern Europe.1 In the following, I will present a series of examples on just how Dominican life and interaction with the rest of society may have differed in these ‘frontier provinces’ compared to the rest of Europe – and at the same time helped integrate these provinces with the so-called centres of medieval Europe (see Figure 8.1