What Francis did was something that concerned the entire Church. The experience as San Damiano proves this. There the voice from the crucifix said: “Francis, go, repair my house, which, as you see, is falling completely to ruin” (2Cel 10). At first Francis takes this literally. He renovates three different church buildings. But what was meant, and this he later recognized, was to rebuild the church on the foundations that Jesus had laid. Francis recognized very well, indeed, that his first task was to remind the Church of the Gospel and to live the priorities that were expressed therein. His fraternity was to be, therefore, an ‘ecclesiola’, a Church in miniature that would be modeled according to the New Testament ideals. For him it was to be a radical return to a life according to the Gospel. He did not castigate the abuse, or indeed the irrelevance of the Church of his time. Clergy and hierarchy did not hear from him stinging condemnations. But Francis and his brothers were living witnesses, the expression of the innermost essence of the Church.
The echoes of the prophetic tradition were clear enough in this. They become even clearer when one recalls that the Hebrew Testament prophets were often nomadic prophets with no fixed abode, that Jesus and his disciples also lived this nomadic existence. Without possessions, wandering through the world, they preached repentance and conversion of heart, solidarity with the poor and those deprived of their rights. All these are essential characteristics, common to the biblical prophets as well as to Francis and his movement.
Francis does not take the Early Church to be the standard model. He goes further back to the nomadic way of life of Jesus and his disciples, or, to express it differently, to that way of life that is described in the mission speeches of the Gospels (cf. Mt 10; Lk 9f).
CCFMC, Lesson Unit 5, C 7.1
back
print