An Order Founded to Own Nothing, and Split Over Exactly That

The Franciscans were the first of the mendicant orders, and the question that founded them, whether one can own nothing at all, became the crisis that divided them.

Mobile poverty

Unlike monks bound to a single house, the Friars Minor were mobile preachers who owned nothing individually or in common, living by work and by begging and devoted to preaching and to the care of the poor and the sick. The short rule of evangelical poverty written by Francis of Assisi received oral approval around 1209 to 1210 and a definitive papal rule in 1223.

The poverty controversy

Whether an order could truly own nothing became a doctrinal crisis rather than an internal disagreement. The order divided over the interpretation of poverty into Conventuals and Observants, and the dispute reached the point at which John XXII condemned the strict Spiritual position in the 1320s. The later Capuchin reform was a further return to the original austerity. The recurring split over how literally to take the poverty of the founder is the defining feature of Franciscan history, and the enclosed womens branch, the Poor Clares, secured its own radical privilege of owning no property even in common.