When I first learned to pray the divine office I was taught to do so by a Dominican priest. Having learned from a Dominican I was taught to chant the hours rather than simply reciting them. I remember he made a joke about how Franciscans never chant because they want to get back to work and Benedictines never stop (or something similar).
So I know that St Francis banned Gregorian chant, but I can’t find any explanation of why he did so. Sts. Francis and Dominic were contemporaries and I’ve always heard stories (legends) of them trading belts/cords upon meeting so it can’t be just a separation of the times in which they lived. So why did St Francis ban it when St Dominic (or his children) embraced it so readily? Was there a theological reason, some reason he believed it somehow harmed the community, or did St. Francis simply dislike it?
It had nothing to do with the Dominicans. Francis and Clare wanted one family of brothers and sisters. The trend of the time was to have parallel communities.
For example, monks has lay brothers and choir monks. Nuns had lay sisters and choir nuns. Dominicans had Fathers and Cooperator Brothers.
The choir monks, choir nuns and fathers chanted the Divine Office in choir. The lay brothers, lay sisters and cooperator brothers prayed the Office of the Paters. The also prayed less hours, because their role was to keep the house running. They did all of the manual labor.
Francis and Clare wanted the entire family, religious and seculars, ordained and non ordained, to pray together.
It was also a Benedictine custom that those who could not chant, even if they could read Latin, were considered not to have a vocation to the monastic life. They were admitted as lay brothers, but not as choir monks. This reduced the lay brothers to a lower class, often times considered less intelligent and less talented.
In the Franciscan tradition, such a distinction only served to inflate the ego of those who could read and chant. This was to be avoided.
Finally, the male Franciscans were not to make any distinctions between priests, brothers and laity. Everyone was called Brother, be he a priest, a brother or a layman. Only Francis and his successors were called Father. To follow Dominic’s model would be to created a friar who would be different from his confreres who were not ordained.
This was fine for the Dominicans, because they were founded as an order of nuns and priests. The cooperator brothers were a support system. That’s not how the Franciscan family came about. Among the first followers of Francis there was only one priest and 9 laymen + Francis.
There is no big mystery here and nothing against Gregorian Chant. It was an attempt to preserve collegiality. Franciscans adopted it from the College of the Apostles, meaning “equals under one father”. Hence the term “the Apostolic Life”.
