Property, poverty and St Francis of Assisi

In today’s culture wars, governments in some countries take a confrontational approach and ratchet up the pressure. In Italy the approach is more subtle. A Bill is making its way through the Italian legislature to designate a new national holiday in honour of St Francis of Assisi.

It is hard to think of someone who appeals to more diverse constituencies than this 13th-century saint. Francis refused official positions (check, anti-Establishment), wrote hymns to celebrate the natural world (check, environmental protection), debated with Muslims (check, immigrant integration). There can be no faction, surely, that would be upset by honouring Francis of Assisi.

There was, however, a certain aspect of his work that was provocative. In fact, however inoffensive and self-denying as he was, Francis of Assisi caused one of the deepest controversies of the medieval church.

Its beginnings were innocent of contention. Francis simply insisted that he had to rid himself of any claim on property. After all, that was what Jesus and the apostles had done. He was so conspicuous for refusing to have any property at all that he became known by the epithet il poverello: the little poor guy.

Renunciation of private property became a core feature of Franciscan spirituality.

As long as Francis was alive and his order was small, the practicalities of living without property were manageable. But after Francis had died and Franciscans fanned out into cities across Europe, what started as a management issue escalated into a question of theology. Franciscans lived in houses and drew endowments, so how could they claim they were poor? Theologians challenged Franciscans as to whether Jesus had really never had any property. Had Jesus not handed out alms?

Over the course of the century three pontiffs had to intervene.

In 1230 Pope Gregory IX issued a formula that seemed to fit. Franciscans did not own any buildings, they used them. This formula kept critics at bay for a time. But murmurings became louder after Gregory IX had died and the Franciscan estate kept getting bigger. How, it was asked, could one tell the difference between someone who owned a building as opposed to someone who used one? And if Franciscans did not own their buildings, well, who did?

In 1279 Pope Nicolas III propounded a new formula. Franciscans lived in monasteries, much the same way as children lived in a family home. Children had a right to a home, after all, even if that home was owned by their parents. By analogy, the Franciscans lived in their estates where the true owner was the Holy See.

In 1305 the Holy See intervened a third time. Pope Clement V invoked a definition for the particular Franciscan notion of use, namely usus pauper. This poor use was something quite different from use in its ordinary sense. The Franciscan theologian Bonaventura had enumerated four grounds for usus pauper: need; charity; civility; and gift. Yet the subtleties of usus pauper did not silence murmurings. The fact that all over Europe Franciscans resided in representative estates strained the notion that they were users merely.

In 1209 the order had begun with twelve friars; a century later there were 30,000. The order had flourished for a hundred years when it celebrated its first centenary in 1309. Within less than a decade after celebrating the Franciscan centenary, four Franciscans were convicted for heresy. The turnaround was precipitated by the election of Pope John XXII in 1317.

The new pontiff, who came to his career with an education in law and in theology, shredded the notion of poor use. As a lawyer, he dismissed the fine distinction between owning and using. How could anyone eat an apple without owning it? The distinction between owning and using made no sense. As a theologian, he waved aside the question of whether Jesus had owned any property (on which issue the literature by now was vast). He pointed out that Adam and his descendants had owned property, so property had been part of creation from the beginning.

The endgame of the dispute over usus pauper was bitter. In 1318 four Franciscans who had refused to recant were burnt at the stake.  Other Franciscans who held out against John XXII escaped that fate by fleeing abroad. In 1329 church doctrine proclaimed that private property had divine origin, almost exactly a century after the death of Francis of Assisi in 1226.

Looking back, il poverello had been the source of contention over property rights that overshadowed the pontificates of four pontiffs. John XXII silenced dissent, but his ruling left a bitter aftertaste. It still resonates with culture critics today. John XXII featured in Umberto Eco’s popular novel The Name of the Rose as a malicious bureaucrat hounding Franciscan dissidents. Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher known for his critiques of contemporary materialism, reprised Franciscan property denial in The Highest Poverty.

Property rights are every bit as contentious now as they were then. Not just in Italy. Oxfam times its annual publication of global wealth distribution to coincide with the Davos summit. Popular books such as Limitarianism make the case for capping wealth. And the ethics of owning property are questioned even amongst the super-rich. Patriotic Millionaires is a lobby that promotes voluntary sacrifice of inherited wealth.

If Italian legislators hope that a spotlight on St Francis will help tone down the tensions of Italy’s own brand of culture wars, they might think twice before they cast their vote. Francis of Assisi may just once become topical again in ways that the authorities did not foresee.

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