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albertziggy
Guest
Thank you very much, Brother JR for your response. This is truly encouraging and uplifting for us Secular Franciscans. Your responses make us feel special and not just like everybody else excluded from the equation.I feel that the most important part of following St. Francis is to be faithful to the Gospel as he was faithful. That being said, I think Chesterton puts it best when he said that Francis was madly in love with brotherhood.
It was not just a brotherhood of camaraderie. It was a brotherhood based on the Fatherhood of God. It was a brotherhood based on etiquette, charity, respect and trust in each other. His brothers were his family. They were not just his companions as were the monks in a monastery, nor were they his apostolic partners as are religious and seculars in apostolic congregations and associations, who come together for the sake of a ministry. That’s one reason why the Franciscan family has such a diversity of ministries and infrastructures. These were not as important to Francis as was the relationship among the brothers and their relationship with the world around them. For Francis, Brother was not just a designation that set you aside from priests and secular men and women. That’s why he calls his first secular followers, the Brothers and Sisters of Penance. He included the first secular followers in his family of friars and nuns. They were not outsiders. They had autonomy from the friars and the nuns. But autonomy is does not equal estrangement or exclusion. This is contrary to Francis’ worldview and certainly contrary to how we see him relate to the friars and later to Clare and her nuns.
The Franciscan religious have done a great disservice to the Secular Franciscans which we need to correct. The first disservice that we did to you was to take over your order. We made you dependent on us, thus promoting a hierarchy of Franciscanism where there is none. No one is more Franciscan than another. We are all sons and daughters of the same spiritual father. As the Minister General of the Capuchin Friars said at the SFO General Chapter in 2008, your profession is equivalent to our own. Our states in life are different, but our profession is on the same horizontal line. We all promise the same thing, to live the Gospel in the manner of St. Francis. Whether we live it in a religious community or in a secular community is accidental, not essential to being a Franciscan. What is essential to being a Franciscan is brotherhood. That makes our family different from every other religious family in the Church.
I know of no other religious family in the Church that has such a great attachment to its spiritual father as does the Franciscan family. That’s an anthropological phenomenon that merits examination. Why are we so attached to our spiritual father who is 800 years behind us? I believe that the answer is family. Francis infused a spirit of family into his order. He often referred to his feminine side by calling himself a mother and at times he would refer to the ministers as mothers and expect them to care for their fraternities as a mother cares for her children. From his writings and his actions we can clearly see that this was a family man. We, the Franciscan religious turned the title Brother and Sister into an ecclesial title to identify those in religious life. But by doing so, we excluded the largest number of Franciscans in the family. If truth be told, the SFO is the largest Franciscan Order in our family, but gets the least amount of recognition.
We also did another disservice to you that we must repair. We stripped you of your saints. You have given to the Church many saints. But we have failed to stand up for your saints, because we have been in positions where we can influence how the Church presents her saints and we have not used that influence. How many people know that St. Pius X is a Franciscan? Bl. John XXIII was a Franciscan. Thomas More, Angela Foligno, Elizabeth of Hungary, Joan of Arc, Louis King of France, the parents of St. Therese who were recently beatified, Margaret of Cortona and many others were also Franciscans. We proudly display and repeat the stories of our Franciscan religious, but not our Secular Franciscan saints. Some are not even included in the Roman-Franciscan liturgical calendar, because the Ministers General have not updated it.
The point is that all of this has come about because we have lost the Franciscan meaning of the words brother and sister. We have turned them into titles that refer to those in religious life. But Francis did not use them that way. He called the sun and the moon his brother and sister. To him, a brother and sister was anything and anyone that came from the hand of God and depended on God’s Providence for existence. This is the message that the Secular Franciscan should carry into the world, that we are all brothers and sisters and are all dependent on and graced by Divine Providence.
The usage of brother and sister should be liberally used by every Franciscan, because today, more than ever, the world needs a message of family. The family is under attack from every angle: abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pornography, divorce, domestic violence and so forth.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
Much work has to be done in changing our mindset, and this may have to take years, but with brothers like you around, I see a very bright future. I am very happy that you are Spiritual Assistant to one of our Fraternities and you continue to give us valuable insights.
In Christ,
albertziggy
