Sanctity, Heresy, and Superstition: Saint Francis, the Heresiarch "Peter" Waldo, and a Holy Greyhound

In this episode Ellen and I examine how Saint Francis became a saint and Waldo a heretic while following the same call to apostolic poverty, and why in the mid-thirteenth century it was heretical to deny that a consecrated communion wafer contains the actual body of Christ but not to venerate a dog as a saint with healing powers. Please join us!

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

Transcript

Script:

Richard: Welcome to our podcast, Tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages. In today’s episode Ellen and I will be talking about heresy and sanctity in the High Middle Ages, focusing on an apparent paradox. In the year 1184 Waldo, a wealthy merchant from the southeastern French city of Lyon, and his followers were condemned by the Church as heretics for preaching and following a life of apostolic poverty.  A generation later, Francis, the son of a wealthy merchant from the central Italian city of Assisi, and his followers also embraced a life of apostolic poverty in imitation of Christ, but Francis’ following became a monastic order and he himself was canonized as a saint a short two years after his death. Why the papacy responded so differently to these two men sheds light on the complicated relationship between the medieval church and the Christian ideal of apostolic poverty. Focusing on these two movements and on the thirteenth-century folk cult of the holy greyhound St. Guinefort, Ellen and I will explore the differences between medieval sanctity, heresy, and superstition.

Ellen: Today anyone who radically challenges mainstream thought is called a heretic. When medieval Christian writers used that term, they had a very specific definition in mind. A heretic was not simply someone who held beliefs or followed practices contrary to Catholic dogma. A heretic was someone who obstinately and knowingly maintained the truth of those errors after correction.  

Richard: Medieval heresy required an orthodoxy against which to dissent. Heresies were born from disputes over the doctrines of the Catholic Church. The interpretation that prevailed became dogma; the opposing view, heresy.

Ellen: The Arian heresy is a good example. 

Richard:  In the centuries following the Crucifixion, churchmen argued about the nature of Christ and his relationship to God the Father. Trinitarians contended that Christ is God. There is one God, and the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, are three persons of one divine substance. That view was associated with the fourth century bishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius. The followers of another fourth-century north African priest named Arius disagreed. 

Ellen: So that there is no misunderstanding, Richard is talking about the A-R-I-A-N heresy, not some medieval Nordic supremacist movement.

Richard: Right. Arians asserted that although Christ is a divine being, he is separate from and subordinate to the Father. Christ was created, not begotten. 

Arius’ interpretation became the Arian heresy after the First ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 found in favor of St. Athanasius’s position, expressed in the Nicene creed, which was most fully expressed in a canon of the First Council of Constantinople in 381.

Ellen: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; ... And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.

Richard: Ah, the advantages of a Catholic upbringing.  The controversy over the relationship of Christ to the Godhead didn’t end there. A disagreement arose in the early Middle Ages over the role played by the Holy Spirit in the Trinity.  The original Nicene Creed just mentions the Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed as reformulated at the First Council of Constantinople has the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father.  When the Greek text was transmitted to the West and translated into Latin, the translators “corrected it.” Surely, the Holy Spirit must proceed from the Son as well as the Father, so they added the word “filioque,” and from the Son to the text. In the Latin West the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son; in the Greek East, only from the Father. In 1054 a cantankerous papal legate, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, and the Patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicated each other and their followers over the “filioque” question.

Ellen: And over the relative authority of the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople.

Richard: Yes. The result was a Roman Catholic Church that looked to the pope as its primate, and an Eastern Orthodox Church, that looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Following the schism, the two churches continued to diverge theologically. Each considered the other’s heterodox beliefs and practices to be heretical. Reunification was temporarily achieved by the sword, as the Fourth Crusade culminated in 1204 with crusaders capturing the city of Constantinople and establishing a Latin Empire of Constantinople that lasted 57 years.

Ellen: Another example of a Roman Catholic heresy is the denial of the real presence of Christ in the consecrated host and wine during Mass. The nature of holy communion was debated heatedly in the early Middle Ages. When Jesus said, this is my body and this is my blood, did he mean that figuratively? Was communion memory and veneration of the Last Supper? Or did he mean it literally? Did the words spoken by a priest actually transform the wafer into the body of Christ and the wine into His blood? Before 1215 this could be and was a subject of theological debate. The question was definitively resolved at the Fourth Lateran Council, which pronounced “There is one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation. In which there is the same priest and sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood…. And this sacrament no one can effect except the priest who has been duly ordained in accordance with the keys of the Church, which Jesus Christ Himself gave to the Apostles and their successors.” 

Richard: The miracle of transubstantiation now became Church dogma, as was its reservation to the priesthood. How the consecrated bread and wine could contain respectively the actual body and blood of Christ while retaining the appearance of bread and wine was hotly debated by medieval theologians, but the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation was now a matter of faith. 

The growth of heresy paralleled the development of the Catholic Church into a centralized, hierarchical institution in the late eleventh through fourteenth centuries. This was in large part because of the papacy’s ability to organize local parishes, dioceses, and provinces into a unified church structure. Twelfth and Thirteenth-Century popes, like Roman and Byzantine emperors, were intent on imposing unity of belief upon what they defined as an inerrable, Catholic, that is universal, apostolic Church. They also had the tools to identify local heterodox beliefs and practices and, with the establishment of the Franciscans and Dominicans, a mechanism to suppress them. 

Ellen: One of my favorite of these local medieval beliefs  is the cult of the holy greyhound, St. Guinefort. 

Richard: Love the story, which served as the basis for a not so bad 1987 French medieval movie, Le Moine et la Sorcière, “The Monk and the Sorceress,” released in the U.S. as “Sorceress.”  As weird as it was, this cult dedicated to a holy dog was not technically a heresy. The story appears in a treatise on superstition by a mid-thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon.  You brought it up, so you should tell the story.    

Ellen: A knight returned to his home to find his infant son’s nursery in shambles. The baby’s cradle lay overturned on the floor with the baby was nowhere in sight. When the knight’s faithful greyhound Guinefort ran up to greet him with a bloody maw, the knight, assuming that the dog ate the baby, killed the beast. But when he lifted up the cradle, he discovered beneath it his child safe and unhurt. Lying beside the child was the mangled corpse of a deadly venomous snake. Guinefort had suffered martyrdom because he had saved the child. The knight in remorse deposited the dog’s body in a well and planted trees around it to honor him. The well soon became a local shrine. Mothers would bring their sick children to the well to be cured by the martyred greyhound. 

But you said this was not a heresy. Denying that a consecrated wafer contains the actual body of Christ was a heresy but venerating a dog wasn’t? Explain.

Richard: Stephen of Bourbon was certainly appalled by the cult and ended it by removing the bones and burning the grove before he departing the village, but for him the cult of St. Guinefort was a superstition and not a heresy—and as a Dominican preacher and inquisitor Stephen, if anybody, would have known the difference.

Ellen: The difference being?

Richard: For thirteenth-century churchmen a superstition was a religious rite performed out of ignorance. Heresy was a belief held knowingly that contradicted dogma. 

Ellen: So the cult of St. Guinefort was superstition rather than heresy because the peasants didn’t know any better.

Richard: Yes. To be heretical a belief had to be deliberately and knowledgeably opposed to dogma. This did not apply to a folk cult—unless that folk cult was continued after it was prohibited.

Ellen: On the other hand, every Protestant sect would have been seen as a heresy by the Catholic Church. Luther and Calvin, from the Catholic viewpoint, were heretics. 

Richard: And at the same time, Luther and Calvin denounced other Protestant sects as heresies because, in their view, they diverged from the truth of the Gospels. Religious toleration only became seen as a virtue in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Before then tolerating heresy was turning one’s back on the duty to love one’s neighbor. 

Ellen: We’ll talk about that more in our next episode. 

Richard: Michael Servetus, a sixteenth-century Spanish theologian, hit the trifecta of heresy: he was condemned by the Church, by Luther, and by Calvin for denying the Trinity, and ended up burnt in Calvin’s Geneva, atop a pyre made up of his writings. 

Ellen: The Anabaptists didn’t fare much better. Everyone wanted to burn them. But they survived and are now recognized as a Protestant religion.

Richard: As are the Waldensians. One man’s heresy is another’s religion. 

Ellen: I guess what distinguishes a religion from a heresy is viewpoint and the ability of that belief system to survive persecution and suppression. 

Richard: Heresy requires an orthodoxy against which it dissents, and orthodoxy presupposes a church that has the power and authority to establish dogma. The fourth and fifth centuries were awash with heresies because it was in these centuries that the Catholic Church established its basic dogma. The eleventh through fourteenth centuries also gave rise to many heretical movements, but for reasons that had as much to do with socio-economic and ecclesiastical developments as theology.

Ellen: Could you explain how socio-economic change gave rise to heresies?

Richard: It didn’t so much create heresies as identify existing practices and beliefs as heretical. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christendom was awash in local heterodox beliefs and practices.

Ellen: Life the cult of St. Guinefort.

Richard: Yes, like the cult of St. Guinefort. These heterodox local beliefs and practices had formerly flown below the papacy’s radar. But now that they had been brought to light, those who continued in them after correction were defined as heretics.

Ellen: Okay, and how did socio-economic developments contribute to proliferation of heresy?

Richard: The short answer is through economic growth that widened the gulf between wealth and poverty. Toward the end of the eleventh century, Western Europe underwent a commercial revolution made possible by an increase in agricultural production.  The food supply increased due to improved climate, technological innovations, forest clearance, and more effective exploitation of arable land. The result was an increase in trade, the growth of commercial cities, and, eventually, the development of an integrated European-wide monetized commodity economy. The towns of Flanders and northern Italy became centers of textile production in what some historians call the First European Industrial Revolution. The fairs of Champagne in France served as wholesale markets at which the merchants and cloth makers of these regions bought and sold commodities. During the thirteenth century the growth of international trade led to the emergence of banking houses in Italy developed instruments of financial exchange that side-stepped the Christian prohibition on money-lending, which was termed usury. 

Ellen: Okay, this all sounds good. Prosperity was on the rise. What does this have to do with heresy?

Richard: In the U.S. today Christianity and capitalism go hand in hand. Prosperity theology is a particularly American form of Christianity. If you pray and tithe, God will not only reward you with salvation but with earthly wealth:

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Protestant ministers such as Joel Osteen, Oral Roberts, and Kenneth Copeland are not shy about flaunting their own prosperity”

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Medieval popes and bishops could give these televangelists a run for their money. By the twelfth century the Church as a whole held 20 to 25 percent of the landed wealth in Christendom. Abbots were the lords of large landed estates worked by peasants, and of knightly tenants who owed them military service. The line between church and state was blurry at best. Bishops served as royal officials, for whom even they raised armies and led troops. Bishops were not only the spiritual heads of their diocese but possessed regalian authority over their Cathedral cities.  The twelfth through fourteenth centuries were a heyday of grand cathedral construction. Bishops justified their wealth and the grandeur of their cathedrals as earthly reflections of the glory and heaven. Medieval society was hierarchical and the social order was based to a large extent upon wealth. So it is little wonder that princes of the Church should compete  with the princes of the earth, their kinsmen, in pageantry and display. 

But there is an older strand of Christianity that is far less approving of wealth, and which found sanctity in renunciation of the world. The evangelists and the Patristic Fathers regarded wealth with suspicion. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, a rich young man goes to Jesus and asks what he must do to gain eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep the commandments. He says he has done this, but what is required of him. Jesus tells him, “If you wish to be perfect, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” The young man walks away sadly, because, as the Gospels explain, he was very wealthy. Jesus ups the ante by telling his disciples that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The disciples react with amazement. If this be so, who then can be saved? 

Ellen: We should explain that Judaism in Jesus’ day revolved around the Temple and sacrificial offerings to God. The rich could better afford these offerings. That is why the disciples respond with amazement. If rich men who gave the best burnt offering to God could not gain heaven, who could? 

But don’t some people claim that “the eye of the needle” referred to a narrow gate in Jerusalem that required merchants to unload their camels before they could pass through it? 

Richard: That explanation is first attested in writings of the fifteenth century. There is no archaeological or literary evidence to support it. Animals passing through the eye of a needle was a Near Eastern metaphor for an impossible task.  It can be found in the Jewish Talmud and Muslim writings. I would like to congratulate the churchman who managed to finesse this disturbing Gospel passage by making the task for a rich man difficult but not impossible. The idea of the narrow gate was part of a wealthy institutional Catholic Church’s counter-offensive against religious movements of apostolic poverty, some of which became heretical. 

       The emergence of a wealthy class of urban merchants distinguished by luxuries and the increasing wealth of the institutional Catholic Church, especially among the bishops and great monasteries, provoked a spiritual backlash. It took different forms. Some urban laymen became nervous about the worldly lives and lack of piety they perceived in the clergy upon whom their salvation depended. They wanted a clergy who lived more as they thought clergy ought to live. In the second half of the eleventh century, they found a strong ally in the papacy, and the result was the so-called. Gregorian Reform. Resentment against the wealth of popes, cardinals, and bishops and their financial demands upon clergy who sought redress of wrongs also provoked criticism. In the middle of the twelfth century, an anonymous cleric expressed his disgust with what he saw as a church for sale in the so-called Gospel according to the Mark of Silver. 

Ellen: Punning on the denomination of currency called the mark. 

Richard: [insert spiritual background music] And it is written, that it came to pass that a certain poor cleric came to the Curia of the Lord Pope and cried out, saying, "Do you, at least, have mercy on me, you doorkeepers of the Pope, for the hand of poverty has touched me. I am indeed needy and poor. Therefore, I beg you to come to my aid." But when they heard him they were exceeding angry, and they said, "Friend, you and your poverty can go to hell. Get thou behind me, Satan, because you do not smell of money. Amen, amen, I say to you, you shall not enter into the joy of your lord [the Pope] until you pay your last farthing." So the poor man went away and sold his coat and his shirt and everything he owned and gave it to the cardinals and doorkeepers and chamberlains. But they said, "What is this among so many?" They threw him out, and he went off weeping bitterly and inconsolably. Later on, a certain rich cleric came to the Curia. He was gross and fat and swollen, and had committed treacherous murder. He bribed first the doorkeeper, then the chamberlain, then the cardinals. But they put their heads together and demanded more. However, the Lord Pope heard that his cardinals and ministers had been lavishly bribed by the cleric, and he was sick even to death. So the rich man sent him medicine in the form of gold and silver, and straightway he was healed. The Lord pope summoned his cardinals and ministers and said to them, "Brethren, be vigilant lest anyone deceive you with empty words. My example I give unto you, that you might grab just as I grab."

Ellen: Pretty scathing, but it isn’t heretical. We’ve both seen satirical versions of federal guidelines in our workplaces.

Richard: Yeah, I’ve written a couple. Pious laymen and clerics were equally critical of the secular clergy. Their hostility was directed in particular against worldly clergy, whom they deemed unworthy of their order, and bishops who acted more like counts than prelates.  Frustration with the perceived indifference of Church authorities could turn movements of religious reform heretical, and socio-political resentment against the financial demands of bishops could take on a religious coloring.  Arnold of Brescia, an Italian canon from Lombardy and former student of the scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard, preached against the worldliness of the clergy, calling upon bishops to renounce their political powers and wealth. He was condemned by the Second Lateran Council in 1139, exiled from Italy, but made his peace with the Cistercian Pope Eugene III who summoned him to Rome in 1145 to submit to judgment. Upon arriving in the city, Arnold found himself in the midst of a political revolution. The townspeople had formed a commune, a sworn association, and declared a republic. Arnold joined the uprising and preached that clergy who held property forfeited their spiritual authority and lost their sacramental powers. Pope Eugene III was forced to flee Rome and excommunicated Arnold for his part in the uprising. Ultimately, the papacy returned to Rome with the support of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and in 1155 Arnold was captured by imperial, tried as a rebel by the Papal Curia, hanged and his body burnt. Similar anti-episcopal movements arose in other cities.

In the early twelfth century several heretical groups arose with anti-materialist and anti-clerical programs. A common thread was a rejection of religious rites and even sacraments that lacked scriptural authority. Peter of Bruys, a defrocked priest, traveled throughout southwestern France in the 1120s preaching a doctrine that in some aspects is a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation.  Peter taught that only the Gospels represent the true teaching of Christ; that there was no value in the sacrament of communion; that transubstantiation was a false doctrine; that baptism only had value for those who have reached the age of understanding, and therefore infant baptism was useless; that church buildings are needless, as God hears the prayers of the faithful in all places; that the prayers and good works of the living faithful do not benefit the dead;  and that crucifixes should be destroyed, because the instrument by which Christ suffered ought not to be venerated. The burning of crucifixes in bonfires became the calling card of the Petrobrusians. And it got Peter killed. In 1131 an enraged mob of villagers from St. Gilles interrupted him as he was burning crucifixes and pushed him into the flames.  His mission was picked up by a renegade Cluniac monk Henry of Lausanne, who was denounced by the Cistercian St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and was imprisoned for life by the bishop of Toulouse.   

In the early thirteenth century two movements of apostolic poverty flourished in Italy and southern France, the Waldensian heresy and the orthodox Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans. These were the two most successful of several urban religious movements of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that preached apostolic or evangelical poverty, a reflection of the spiritual anxiety produced by the growth of the commercial economy and the wealthy urban middle class it created. 

Ellen: I think it important to understand that these movements did not fetishize poverty in itself. Being poor did not make one spiritually meritorious. It was the renunciation of wealth, and devoting oneself to relieving the suffering of others that did.

Richard. Exactly—and I think that’s the point of Jesus’ counsel of perfection. The founder of the Waldensians, Waldo of Lyon, had been a wealthy merchant, and Francis was the son of a successful merchant in the town of Assisi. The men who followed them were much like themselves, the sons of merchants. Waldensians and Franciscan embraced evangelical poverty in repudiation of the values of fathers, who measured success by the accumulation of wealth and expressed it through conspicuous consumption. 

Ellen: They sound a little like the hippy movement of the 1960s, upper middle class kids who rejected their parents’ materialism.

Richard: Yes, if free love, drugs, and rock n’ roll can be seen as spiritual. But I do see the parallels. How about if I tell the story of Waldo’s conversion, and you do Francis?

Ellen: Sounds good.

Richard: In the 1170s Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyon in southeastern France and a pious Christian, embraced a life of evangelical poverty after hearing a trouvere singing about St. Alexis, a rich noblemen who had given all that he owned to the poor. Waldo, who could read the vernacular but not Latin, paid a priest to translate the Gospels for him.  Upon discovering that St. Alexis had been acting upon Christ’s counsel of perfection to the rich young man. Waldo decided to emulate him. He went to his wife and gave her the choice of either having his houses, shops, and land, or his moveable wealth. She chose the real estate. Waldo then sold everything else. He used some of the money to buy places in a convent for his two daughters, but the bulk of it he distributed in alms to the poor. Penniless, he began preaching in the streets of Lyon and begging food from his neighbors. This mortified his wife, who complained to the bishop. The bishop made Waldo promise to beg for food only from his wife, pitching it as his duty to his wife so that she too could enjoy the spiritual benefit of charity. Waldo then left Lyons to become an itinerant preacher. Those who followed him became known as the Poor Men of Lyons, or, more colloquially, Waldensians. In 1179 Waldo and his followers went to the Third Lateran Council in Rome to seek approval for their Order from Pope Alexander III. Alexander was impressed by their piety but had reservations about their lack of theological learning. Walter Map, a wiseass English court cleric, wrote about how he exposed their ignorance. 

“Do you believe in the Father”

“We do.”

“Do you believe in the Son?”

“We do.”

“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?”

“We do.”

“Do you believe in Mary, mother of Jesus?”

“We do.”

After a stunned silence, the gathered clerics at the Council began to laugh.

Ellen: And that was funny why?

Richard: First, Mary is not a member of the trinity. Second, it should have been Mary, mother of God, not Mary, mother of Jesus.”

Ellen: All right….

Richard: I’ve seen worse ambushes at academic conferences. Alexander III commended Waldo and his followers for their devotion and way of life but forbade them from preaching without first receiving the permission of the local bishop.  Waldo respected the authority of the pope and the clergy and believed that there was no salvation except through the sacraments of the Church, but he believed that God had called him to preach, and that the authority of God is greater than that of any man, including the pope.  So Waldo and his followers continued to preach. This flagrant defiance of a papal order led Alexander’s successor Pope Lucius III to condemn the Poor Men of Lyon as heretics at the Council of Verona in 1184. 

Following this condemnation, the Waldensian movement split. Waldo was a reluctant revolutionary. He and his followers in Lyons continued to preach, as it was their calling, but they continued to accept the validity of the sacraments and the authority of priests in all other things. 

Ellen: In fact, I remember reading in the inquisitorial register that we worked on together that Waldensians actually preached against the Cathar heretics in churches in southern France.

Richard: We’ll talk about that register in the next episode. Waldo’s followers in Lombardy, on the other hand, responded to the condemnation by becoming increasingly anti-clerical. The Poor Men of Lombardy condemned popes, bishops, and clergy for their wealth and worldliness. They rejected the Church’s teaching that only priests could perform the Mass,  claiming that all men in a state of grace had sacramental power. Persecution further radicalized the movement, and by the end of the thirteenth-century the Waldensians had repudiated the Roman Church, calling it the Whore of the Apocalypse (Revelation), and had proclaimed itself to be the “true Christian church.” 

Ellen:  They somehow survived the worst the Inquisition could do to them.  The man who married us, a Unitarian, claimed Waldo as a Unitairian

Richard:  Waldo, who died in 1218, still believing himself to be a faithful son of the Church, was remembered by both his followers and the inquisitors as Peter Waldo. For the former he was the second Peter who refounded the true church. For the inquisitors, he was its heresiarch.

Ellen:  The similarities between Waldo and his younger contemporary St. Francis of Assisi are striking. Following a serious illness in 1204 and a mystical vision, Francis di Bernardone, the twenty-three year old son of a wealthy merchant in the central Italian city of Assisi, experienced a religious conversion that led him to renounce his father’s wealth and worldly things. 

Richard: An interesting piece of trivia. Francis’ baptismal name was Giovanni. His father, Pietro di Bernardone, changed his son’s name to Francesco after he returned from a very profitable trip to France.

Ellen: Francis had the reputation of being the life of every party. He dressed fashionably, drank to excess, and spent his father’s money lavishly. His ambition was to become a knight, which his father supported. 

Richard: It would have been impossible for the son of a textile merchant to become a knight in northern Europe, but in Italy the boundaries between the wealthy urban patriciate and the old feudal families were blurred. Social status was based on wealth as well as birth. 

Ellen: A disastrous military expedition against Perugia that resulted in a year of captivity, followed by a serious illness, made Francis question his goal of becoming a knight. That did not prevent him from planning to join the crusade launched by the pope against his political enemies in Sicily. A series of dreams and visions led him to return home. A bleeding crucifix at the local church of San Damiano spoke to him and ordered him to “rebuild my crumbling church.” Francis took this literally and physically repaired churches in the area. (including the Porziuncola chapel, now housed within a huge basilica church). He stole textiles from his father’s shop from his father’s warehouse to obtain the money needed to restore these churches. When he tried to give the money to a priest, the priest, afraid of the anger of Francis’ father, refused to accept the money, so Francis left the bag filled with coins in a corner of the church. When his father learned of this, he was enraged. He locked Francis away in a room, but Francis’ mother released him when Pietro was away on business. Upon his return, Pietro took his son to the bishop of Assisi to announce his intention to disinherit him. Pietro pointed out to Francis that even the clothes on his back belonged to his father. Francis responded by stripping naked in the town square. The bishop wrapped him in a cloak and led him away.

In 1208, Francis, having heard a sermon about Christ sending his apostles to preach in the world, became a wandering preacher. Barefoot and clad only in a rough cloak without a staff or purse, he emulated the apostles by preaching a doctrine of apostolic poverty:  “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Matthew 19,21); “Take nothing for your journey” (Luke 9,3); “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me” (Luke 9,23). Other wealthy young men from the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy began to join him as a wandering preacher. 

Richard: Only clergy, monks, and laity who were granted the privilege by a bishop were allowed to preach. Waldo and his followers were pronounced heretics initially not because of heterodox doctrines—that would follow—but because of their insistence on preaching after they were ordered to desist. 

Like Waldo before him, Francis and his followers sought the approval of the Church for their chosen life. Sponsored by the bishop of Assisi and Cardinal Ugolino, the nephew of Pope Innocent III and the future Pope Gregory IX, Francis and his original eleven followers went to Rome in 1209 to ask the pope for recognition as a new monastic order. Pope Innocent III was initially dismissive of this ragged, dirty young man who smelled like he had slept in a pig pen. We can get a sense of the figure that Francis struck as he stood before the pope from a report made by a cleric Thomas of Spalato, then a university student, who witnessed Francis preach in Bologna in 1222 “His tunic was filthy, his figure contemptible and his face far from handsome.” 

Ellen: Given the medieval tolerance for stench, Francis must have reeked.

Richard: Innocent showed his disgust by ordering  Francis to preach to the pigs.  Much to Innocent’s surprise, Francis, who seems to have been excessively literal minded and obviously missed the pope’s sarcasm, immediately obeyed the pontiff’s order. Innocent recognized and was impressed by both Francis’ piety and his veneration for the clergy. According to the sources, Innocent III overcame his skepticism after having a dream in which he saw Francis holding up the Lateran Basilica. 

Ellen: The subject of Giotto’s famous painting.

Richard:  Innocent, probably to the surprise of most of the cardinals, gave his approval to the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans.

Ellen: A betting man would have given long odds on Pope Innocent III responding as he did. 

Richard: Whether or not he was persuaded by a dream, Innocent was a lot more astute than either Pope Alexander III or Pope Lucius III when it came to dealing with dissent, whether religious or political. Their response to Waldo had created heresies that Innocent now had to deal with. 

Ellen:  It also probably didn’t hurt that Francis, unlike Waldo, came endorsed by bishops.

Richard:  Innocent saw in Francis and his followers an orthodox answer to heretical lay movements of apostolic poverty, not only the Waldensians and but also other movements such as the Humiliati. Francis’ celebration of nature as God’s creation, which has made him the patron saint of environmentalists, was an answer also to the dualist Cathars’ rejection of the physical world as the work of the devil. But I’ll talk about that in our next episode.

       Francis’ veneration of the priesthood and the sacraments of the Church was absolute. In his Testament he instructed his followers to give absolute obedience to priests:

“God inspired me and still inspires me with such great faith in priests who live according to the laws of the holy Church of Rome, because of their dignity, that if they persecuted me, I should still be ready to turn to them for aid. And if I were as wise as Solomon and met the poorest priests of the world, I would still refuse to preach against their will in the parishes in which they live. I am determined to reverence, love and honour priests and all others as my superiors. I refuse to consider their sins, because I can see the Son of God in them and they are better than I. I do this because in this world I cannot see the most high Son of God with my own eyes, except for his most holy Body and Blood which they receive and they alone administer to others.”

Ellen: I can see why Innocent III was willing to take a gamble on Francis. He understood that Francis’ embrace of apostolic poverty was his personal attempt to follow Christ’s counsel of perfection. Francis did not intend it to be a reflection upon the Church’s wealth or a challenge to the moral worthiness of priests. Francis’ great virtues for Innocent were his humility and submission to authority. He did not threaten the Church but reinforced it.

Richard: Absolutely. Francis, as I said, did not honor poverty for its own sake but as a sign of his renunciation of the world. He followed what he believed to be the Gospel’s message to feed the poor. 

Franciscans were the first order of “Friars,” a new and radical species of monk that were an expression of urban piety. Traditional monasticism, whether eremitic or coenobitic, 

Ellen:  HUH?

Richard:  Sorry, eremitic refers to hermits and coenobitic to monks who live in communities. Some of listeners may be familiar with the term coenobites from our Pinhead in Clive Barker’s “Hell Raiser” movies. Ellen:  Yecch!

As I was saying, traditional monasticism entailed separation from the world—although complete separation was never achieved and wasn’t even probably desired by most abbots and monk.  Medieval monasticism was too plugged into the economics and social world of the countryside, which is why there were reform movements like the Cistercians.  While monasticism was a rural phenomenon, orders of friars belonged to the rising urban sector. When the papacy established convents for Franciscans to bring them more securely under the authority of bishops, those convents were in towns. A key aspect of the Franciscans’ mission was the care of the urban poor. 

Ellen: A medieval version of social justice Catholics? Pope Francis’ choice of name makes sense given his emphasis on the Church’s need to care for the poor and call out social injustices.

Richard: As long as social justice Catholicism does not challenge the existing political and economic order. One of the things that made the Franciscans acceptable to the medieval Church was the mainstream order’s acceptance of a divine order that divided the world into the rich and the poor. 

Although Francis is today best known as the birds and bunnies saint, the life he chose would probably appall many of those who enjoyed films like “Brother Sun and Sister Moon.” Francis embraced not only apostolic poverty but the suffering of Christ.  There is a famous story told in “The Little Flowers of St. Francis,” a collection of early anecdotes about the saint, that tells us what Francis thought perfect joy to be. It is both surprising and, at least to me, disturbing. While they are walking together toward a town where they will seek shelter, Francis called out to Leo, write this down brother: perfect joy is not to be found in 

Judah Ivy reading the text

Leo, if the minor friar knew all tongues, and all sciences, and all the Scriptures, so that he was able to prophesy and to reveal not only things to come but also the secrets of consciences and souls; write that therein is not perfect joy". Going a little farther, St. Francis yet again shouted loudly: "O Friar Leo, little sheep of God, albeit the minor friar should speak with the tongue of angels, and knew the courses of the stars and the virtues of herbs, and albeit all the treasures of the earth were revealed to him and he knew the virtues of birds and of fishes and of all animals and of men, of trees, of stones and of roots and of waters; write that therein is not perfect joy". And going yet farther a certain space, St. Francis shouted loudly: "O Friar Leo, although the minor friar should know to preach so well that he should convert all the infidels to the faith of Christ; write that therein is not perfect joy". And this manner of speech continuing for full two miles, Friar Leo, with great wonder, asked and said: Father, I pray thee in the name of God to tell me wherein is perfect joy". And St. Francis answered him: "When we shall be at Santa Maria degli Angeli, thus soaked by the rain, and frozen by the cold, and befouled with mud, and afflicted with hunger, and shall knock at the door of the Place, and the doorkeeper shall come in anger and shall say: 'Who are ye?' and we shall say: 'We are two of your friars,' and he shall say: 'Ye speak not truth; rather are ye two lewd fellows who go about deceiving the world and robbing the alms of the poor: get you hence'; and shall not open unto us, but shall make us stay outside in the snow and rain, cold and hungry, even until night; then, if we shall bear such great wrong and such cruelty and such rebuffs patiently, without disquieting ourselves and without murmuring

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against him; and shall think humbly and charitably that that door-keeper really believes us to be that which he has called us, and that God makes him speak against us; O Friar Leo, write that here is perfect joy. And if we persevere in knocking, and he shall come forth enraged and shall drive us away with insults and with buffetings, as importunate rascals, saying, 'Get you hence, vilest of petty thieves, go to the hospice. Here ye shall neither eat nor lodge.' If we shall bear this patiently and with joy and love; O Friar Leo write that herein is perfect joy. And if, constrained by hunger and by cold and by the night, we shall continue to knock and shall call and beseech for the love of God, with great weeping, that he open unto us and let us in, and he, greatly offended thereat, shall say: 'These be importunate rascals; I will pay them well as they deserve,' and shall come forth with a knotty club and take us by the cowl, and shall throw us on the ground and roll us in the snow and shall cudgel us pitilessly with that club; if we shall bear all these things patiently and with cheerfulness, thinking on the sufferings of Christ the blessed, the which we ought to bear patiently for His love; O Friar Leo, write that here and in this is perfect joy; and therefore hear the conclusion, Friar Leo; above all the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit, which Christ grants to His friends, is that of self-conquest and of willingly bearing sufferings, injuries and reproaches and discomforts for the love of Christ; because in all the other gifts of God we cannot glory, inasmuch as they are not ours, but of God; whence the Apostle saith: What hast thou that thou didst not receive from God! and if thou didst receive it from Him, wherefore dost thou glory therein as if thou hadst it of thyself! But in the cross of tribulation and of affliction

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we may glory, because this is our own; and therefore the Apostle saith: I would not glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Ellen: I can see how you would be disturbed by this, but it makes perfect sense for pre-Vatican II Catholicism, with its emphasis upon the passion of the Christ. It is too bad you couldn’t find a sound bite of Mel Gibson reading that passage. It also makes sense that the ultimate sign of Francis’ sanctity was that he was blessed with the stigmata, the five wounds suffered by Christ on the Cross.

Richard: Francis was a charismatic preacher. Thomas of Spalato who commented upon Francis’ ragged appearance, also observed the impact that his words had on his audiences:

“The reverence and devotion of people towards him,” Thomas wrote, “was so great that men and women rushed upon him, trying to touch the hem of his garment and carry off pieces of his clothing.”

But Francis was ill equipped to be the leader of an organization. He knew it and in 1218 appointed an early follower, Peter of Cataneo, as the order’s vicar general, while he himself traveled to Egypt to join the Fifth Crusade at the siege of Damietta. Francis wasn’t Joan of Arc. His mission wasn’t to lead the Crusaders to military victory, but to bring peace through the conversion of the Sultan, al-Kamil, Saladin’s nephew, or to earn martyrdom. Francis took advantage of a truce to cross enemy’s lines to preach before the Sultan.  The Sultan received him graciously, listened to him preach, and then sent him back safely to the crusader’s camp, without Francis having achieved either goal. Al-Kamil seems to have regarded Francis as a Holy Fool, a figure that inspires both laughter and respect in Islam.

As Ellen said, for the last two years of his life Francis bore the stigmata. His life in imitation of Christ earned him the painful joy of sharing in the Passion of the Lord. 

Ellen: The Church permits requires canonization only after the death of the saint. It has rules about how many miracles are required for beatification and canonization. Francis’ sanctity was recognized during his lifetime, and stories about his miracles proliferated. He died in 1226 and was canonized two years later.   

Richard: Francis did not expect anything so extreme from the members of his order as embracing the passion of Christ. But he did expect them to remain faithful to the core principles of the primitive rule. This is clear from his Testament that enjoins the Lesser Brothers to live lives of absolute poverty. 

Ellen: But Francis’ commitment to the ideal of absolute poverty, not only for individual friars but for the order itself, did not long survive him. 

Richard: Even during Francis’ lifetime, the Friars Minor were fragmenting into two parties, the “relaxed” Franciscans who accepted that the Order could own property, and the strict Spirituals who adhered rigidly to Francis’s doctrine of apostolic poverty and to the model of the wandering mendicant preacher. 

Neither the Church hierarchy nor traditional monks were truly comfortable with wandering mendicant preachers. This new type of monk, the friar, dispensed with the vow of stability required by the Benedictine rule. The Dominicans, the other new order of friars, also traveled and preached, but they at least maintained friaries in the towns.  The Franciscans didn’t because their rule forbade them individually and corporately to own property. Pope Gregory IX, who had been Francis’ supporter as a cardinal, answered this by issuing a decretal in 1230 that allowed friends of the friars to hold and receive property and money on their behalf and for their use—the beginning of trust law. St. Bonaventure,  the seventh Minister General of the Franciscans, used this decretal as the basis for what he saw as a compromise between the Relaxed and Zealous Franciscans.  Franciscan friars and the Franciscan Order itself would not own any property but would be the beneficiary of property held for them in trust by the papacy. Those who accepted Bonaventura’s compromise were called Conventuals. This is essentially the order as it exists today. 

Ellen: Bonaventura really was the second founder of the Franciscan Order.

Richard: Those brothers who clung to Francis’ own rigorous interpretation of apostolic poverty were called the Zealots, the Spirituals, or the Fraticelli. They were not yet heretics, but some among them began to identify St. Francis with the Angel of Revelation chapter 7, verse 2, who broke the sixth seal and announced the apocalypse.

Ellen: That’s getting out on the grassy knoll.

Richard:  In 1254 a Spiritual Franciscan Gerard da Borgo San Donnino published a treatise, “Introduction to the Eternal Gospel”, that identified the advent of the Franciscans with Joachim of Fiore’s prophesied new age of the Holy Spirit.  Joachim of Fiore was a Cistercian abbot and mystic from southern Italy who devised a new schema for providential history. Joachim, citing the “eternal gospel” mentioned in Revelations 14:6, proposed Three Ages of God’s dispensation, corresponding to the three Persons of the Trinity. The first was the Age the Father, representing God’s rule through power and awe, to which the Old Testament dispensation corresponds. In the second, the Age of the Son, hidden wisdom was revealed in the Son, represented by the New Testament and the Catholic Church. In the third, the Age of the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit will be established on earth based on a new dispensation of universal love, which will proceed from the Gospel of Christ but transcend the letter of it. In this third age there will be no need for the disciplinary institutions of the Church, which will disappear; the “reign of justice” will be replaced with the “reign of freedom.” Joachim held that the second period was drawing to a close, and that the third epoch would actually begin after some great cataclysm which he tentatively calculated as happening in 1260. Gerard da Borgo San Donnino’s identifications of Francis with the Angel of the sixth seal of the Book of Revelation and of the Friars Minor with Joachim’s “Order of the Just” led the secular masters of theology at the University of Paris to charge Gerard with heresy and denounce the mendicants as pseudo-prophets of a false apocalypse. Gerard was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment as a heretic. 

Ellen: All the mendicant orders were unpopular with the secular clergy. Bishops disapproved of friars hearing confessions in their dioceses without seeking permission. The secular masters of theology in the universities resented the Dominican and Franciscan masters who stood apart from them.  The papacy was uncomfortable with the proliferation of new orders of friars. This all came to a head in 1274 at the Second Council of Lyons, which ratified the Dominicans and Franciscans and suppressed the other orders of friars.

Richard: The Franciscans themselves were not social rebels. Even the Spiritual Franciscans accepted that the poor would be with us until the advent of the Age of the Holy Spirit. But the Franciscan model inspired in the 1260s a radical popular movement of apostolic poverty known as the Apostolic Brethren that appealed to the anger and resentment of the poor. The founder was Gerard Segarelli. As a young man he had asked for admission to the Franciscan convent in Parma, but was refused, according to a contemporary Franciscan chronicler, because he was “ignorant, foolish, illiterate, and low-born.”  

Ellen: Francis must have been spinning in his grave.

Richard: Segarelli responded by wandering the streets of Parma, distributing his meager earnings, and calling his neighbors to repent. In 1263 he and a small band of followers began to preaching throughout Lombardy. This was the beginning of the Apostolic Brethren, a lower-class incarnation of the ideal of apostolic poverty. Segarelli and his followers were condemned by both the Franciscan Order and the papacy. Segarelli was imprisoned, forced to recant, then after denying his recantation, was burnt at the stake. Segarelli’s successor Dulcino was more charismatic and effective a leader. Under his leadership, the Apostolic Brethren became both a peasant uprising and a religious movement. They established a stronghold in the mountains of the Piedmont and raided nearby villages if they wouldn’t voluntarily give them supplies. Dulcino justified these actions by citing Titus 1:15: “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.” The Apostolic Brethren became the target of a local crusade, and Dulcino also ended up burnt at the stake.  

Ellen: It seems clear that the Church wasn’t comfortable with the ideal of apostolic poverty. And that isn’t too surprising given the wealth and power enjoyed by the Church. The Spiritual Franciscans, especially the Joachimites, represented no less a threat than the Waldensians. If they were the true Christian ideal, what did that say about an opulent papacy and episcopacy?

Richard:  Pope John XXII recognized that the problem lay not in any particular movement but in the principle of apostolic poverty itself. In 1323 he issued the bull “Cum inter nonnullos,” which declared it heretical to deny that Christ and the Apostles owned and used property. In the following year he condemned as the Spiritual Franciscans as heretics. The Spirituals, with the support of the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria who was at war with the papacy, responded by denying John XXII’s papal legitimacy: since a true pope cannot err and the rule of St. Francis cannot be modified, a pope who modifies the Rule must be in error and hence cannot be a true pope.

Ellen: But ultimately the Conventual Franciscans became the modern Franciscan Order and the Spirituals were suppressed. The Church’s ambivalence about St. Francis’ message of evangelical poverty is given physical form in Assisi. Today one can still visit the Portiuncula, the tiny church beloved of St. Francis in which he began his order, although it has since been decorated with some beautiful late medieval frescoes. It can be found within the Baroque Papal Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, built between 1569 and 1679 to house the little church. 

Richard: A metaphor of the place of the Friars Minor within the Church?

Ellen: Once again we have run out of time, but would it be right to say that what distinguished Francis from Waldo and made him a saint was his humility, obedience and submission to the papacy and his reverence for the priesthood and the sacrament, and what made Waldo a heretic wasn’t his embrace of evangelical poverty but his defiance of the papacy’s order to cease preaching?

Richard: Yes, but we shouldn’t be overly rationalist about this. Francis never had to make the choice that Waldo faced, to obey the pope or to follow what he believed to be his divine calling. Waldo, like Francis, believed in the Church’s sacramental priesthood. What made Francis a saint was his personal sanctity which made him worthy of the gift of the stigmata, and his miracle-working. 

Ellen: The Church canonization procedure still requires evidence of a miracle. 

       Maybe Francis’ obedience wasn’t sufficient to make him a saint, but Waldo’s disobedience was enough to make him a heresiarch. 

It’s really ironic that by trying to create and enforce religious conformity and silence critics, the medieval Church created heresies. 

Richard: And then suppressed them. In our next episode Ellen and I will explore a very different medieval heresy, the dualist Cathars, and explain how the failure of a crusade to extirpate that heresy led to the invention of the papal inquisition. Please join us for it.