Job 19:21-27
Psalm 27:1-14
Luke 10:1-12

The Age of St. Francis

The encounter with God is all encompassing. Spiritual discernment should begin by writing an autobiography to discover recurring themes and motifs, for each life is a holy book, which needs to be read through and studied and underlined in key passages. My ordaining bishop required a long, detailed document giving evidence of an honest call to the priesthood, for God's plan must proceed from God.

In recent weeks I have tried to stick only with facts as we together discern the significance of the extraordinary events around us. In the long, twisting road of the Church's history, it turns out that St. Francis has played a decisive role in God's plan. There are the those who believe we are living in the Age of St. Francis, actually the Age of the Holy Spirit, which began with God's call to the little man in rags. I am one of them. But let us begin at the beginning.

The year is 1000. Now, that is a round number. It would not take long to reach three digits in the year's name. Some people believe that St. John lived to see three. But four digits? That is momentous. We shall never see five.

The year is 1000, and a new kind of Church is about to be born. This too had never been seen before. From the time of its founding there had always been One Catholic and Apostolic Church. The modern innovation of Protestantism was still a long way off. And Christianity had always been just that: Christianity, Christendom, One. But now a new Church would be born. Momentous.

For a thousand years, the ancient Catholic priesthood had been steadied by married priests. Yes, any priest was permitted to follow a call into religious orders, where he might "put it all on the line" and live according to the Counsels of Perfection: poverty, chastity, obedience (or stability in the case of Benedictines). Alternatively, men who already were vowed religious — monks, friars, canons, lay brothers — could also become candidates for the priesthood. But the brotherhood of all priests had always been anchored by married men, men who were not going it alone, but who profited from the counsel and consolation of a most-trusted and wise soul mate. In this case, two-made-one must be called. Is this a rarity? Don't you know that God's raises up rarities, treasures, pearls? For this is what God's Church requires and deserves. He sees to it, not us. We must trust Him.

This new Church would be a splinter group — part of the One Church for a thousand years. And this enormous splinter group in the year 1000 was dominated by reforms that had begun in the Benedictine Monastery of Cluny, a monastery dedicated to St. Peter. They were Peter boosters par excellence, and they wanted a separate and distinct Church, which they saw as being "Peter's Church." Collectively, this new Church would be made up of dioceses from the original Church that occupied the old Western Roman Empire.

Without question, reforms were badly needed in the monasteries of the West by the tenth century giving rise to the Reforms of Cluny. Religious houses had devolved into centers of depraved sexuality and indifference toward devout life. The famous cardinal and later Doctor of the Western Church, Peter Damian, was just finishing his great tome, The Book of Gomorrah (1051) deploring the conduct of monks and calling for wholesale change in monastic life. And he knew of what he spoke, for he had come up through a Benedictine monastery.

The Cluniac reforms would be far-reaching, for these influential monks were dissatisfied with the Church in general. Their vision was of a new kind of Church, an experiment that had never been tried before: a more monkish Church, a Church in which only celibate men, monkish men, would be ordained to the priesthood. It was, to be sure, a high ideal. And it was an innovation, as history now records, that had never been attempted anywhere else and never would be attempted anywhere else .... except the Church that would become known as the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, within her own communion the twenty-three Eastern Churches continue to ordain married men to the priesthood as ancient custom required.

This new Church would be a formidable undertaking. From its inception, from its beginnings, the priesthood was an institution that had been dominated by married men. It had evolved that way. A process of natural selection, a species of natural law, had governed it. And now we would see an act of rupture from this thousand-year tradition. For the first time in history, it was not to be. Gone would be the steadying force of families within the priesthood. A new vision was to supplant it: priests were to look more Benedictine. They would be celibate. They would pray the Hours. They would practice stability, the Benedictine vow to devote oneself only to one monastery during a lifetime. Yes, before these reforms, priests often did stay in one diocese, but canon law did not require it until the Third Lateran Council of 1179. The overall effect of these reforms would be to engineer and construct an isolated and insular world of men-without-women. Look at any culture in the world in all history where men are confined to one geography without women — take prisons, for example, all over the world — and you will find a culture where homosexuality dominates and regulates life. As the title of Peter Damian's Book of Gomorrah suggests, the chief ill within these enclosed and secretive worlds — monastery by monastery, diocese by diocese over time — was a sexual brotherhood that had become epidemic, even pandemic, in the monasteries and would become pandemic among the new "monkish" priests, who gradually would be deployed throughout the world.

Three short years after the publication of Peter Damian's book, legates from Rome slapped a Papal Bull down upon the Main Altar of the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople announcing that the Roman Catholic Church would henceforth become a separate entity, forever divorced from the One Church ... and its ancient, married priesthood. The die was cast. It had always been an option for priests to enter religious life, mainly Benedictine religious life by the eleventh century, but now all priests were to be celibate, and stability would be enforced preventing priests from leaving dioceses. A new kind of priestly culture was implanted: a self-enclosed culture of men-without-women, where secrets would remain unshared .... and protected in a wrong-headed show of charity and fraternal loyalty.

Two centuries later, with things only growing worse, a rebellion among the faithful broke out across Europe from Bulgaria to France. The mania of unlicensed and uncontrolled sexuality among monks and priests was spilling out on to the faithful and especially on to boys who were being molested by priests. For parishes, unlike Benedictine monasteries, were by their nature public spaces where children wandered.

Disgusted with the Church, starved for spiritual life, and fearful for the welfare of their children, people walked out on the Church by the millions and attempted to establish, higgledy-widdgledy we might say, alternatives for spiritual life. France in particular would be a scene of mass exodus. The faithful gathered in the town of Albi, signifying whiteness (think of the words alb or albino), signifying purity. They dressed in white, becoming known as Albigensians (the word means "founded in purity or white"). They were also called Cathars because they wanted a catharsis within the Church — a purging, a season of purgatory-on-earth. They greeted each other with the salutation, "Good Christian" implying that those outside the group were bad Christians.

We can well believe that no priest or theologian dare come near to them, which meant they had to go forward under their own steam, trying to navigate through the fog, trying to emulate Christ. And they did what any Christian would do under these circumstances. They lived in community. They cared for neighbors in need, practicing poverty themselves. They followed a chaste life. The lived in obedience to the Gospel. They subscribed to St. Augustine's doctrine of original sin, seeing that humans are unaccountably drawn to evil. And they believed in supererogation — the doctrine that abundance of virtue can make reparation for those who have offended God with vice, a doctrine we now associate with the Blessed Virgin Mary.

To say that the Church felt threatened was to put it mildly. There were millions of these people roaming about Europe in their white religious habits. You'd see them everywhere, especially throughout France, preaching on street corners, gathered in large groups. Their message frequently centered on corrupt and depraved priests who plagued the Church. Pope Innocent III, seeing that their message was ringing true in the ears of the people, feared that the entire Roman Church might collapse. He suffered nightmares that the Lateran Basilica, symbolizing the See of Rome, was falling down. Yet, he felt powerless to stop this mass outpouring of frustrated, angry people who seemed to be protesting everywhere. So he announced a crusade, a Crusade Against the Albigensians. The very thought of it was disturbing in its lack of proportion: professional soldiers in phalanx drawing swords to kill pacifists, women, and children?! A people preaching the Gospel message of peace, poverty, and chastity? So the Church demonized them by labeling them "Gnostic heretics" saying that they had invaded Western Europe from Dalmatia (by implication blaming the Eastern Church). The Albigensians would be depicted as a dangerous incursion from the outside, you see, instead of what they were: a protest movement among the faithful — simple, uneducated people who longed for decent Catholic life.

The pope's armies advanced and slaughtered these gentle folk wherever they found them. Intellectuals of the period denounced the massacres as a genocide. These was the first time in history this word would ever be used. Indeed, the man who coined it, Raphael Lemkin, coined it to describe this unprecedented occasion: Pope Innocent III's Albigensian Crusade. All these people wanted from the start was a purified Church, not a different one. Historians estimate that as many as one million Albigensians were massacred by Pope Innocent III's armies.

The stage is now set. Enter Saint Francis. Innocent III began his Crusade against the Albigensians in the same year, 1209, that St. Francis gathered his Fratelli, the seed that would grow into the Order of Friars Minor and subsequently countless, other orders, congregations, communities, and hermitages living under Franciscan rules and claiming Francis as their spiritual father. As he entered the glittering court of Innocent III, Francis drew near to a man who manifestly was tortured and desperate, a man who believed the Church would collapse on his watch, and who was even now planning and organizing a vast slaughter of sincere Roman Catholic faithful (however misguided they might have been theologically). The legend is widely shared that the Pope saw in this young man's face the same face he had seen in his dreams — a little man in rags who took the Lateran Basilica on to his back and righted it.

Ironically, St. Francis represented many of the things that the Albigensians preached and practiced: poverty, chastity, simplicity, generosity, Gospel life. Yet there was a difference: not anger, but humility; not denunciation, but charity; not attack, but healing. It is well-established that the "Peace Prayer of St. Francis" ("Lord, make me an instrument") was written in 1912 by a French priest. Nonetheless, it captures all that St. Francis was — living proof that the Lord of Love could change the world if we had the courage to follow Him ... in His poverty, in His lowliness, and truly practicing His Law of Love. St. Francis would lead the way into something new and different: a way to live in the Church but not being of the Church, which tragically had become worldly and corrupt. Instead, he and his followers would embody the Church as the Gospel had envisioned it. And he would accomplish this by preaching silence, patience, and charity.

It is remarkable that Innocent III, facing an imminent, worldwide cataclysm, could see such promise in the unlikely figure of an affluent young man, who himself was living out a life of protest against the world-as-it-was: John Bernardone, whom his father called Francis to denote privilege and chic life as a wealthy man today might nickname his son Gucci or Versace. And the world would look into his cowl and hear his ironic name, and see the very same thing. Something is happening in this unlikely boy. We think of an obscure horse stall in dusty Palestine twelve hundred years earlier,, where wise men looked into the face of child born to homeless parents. Something is happening in this unlikely boy.

His little, repaired chapel of St. Mary and the Angels built on the piece of land called Portiuncula (Little Portion) would soon be thronging with the faithful who were starved for spiritual nurture. And there they were to find it. St. Anthony of Padua had given up his own life of luxury and aristocratic prerogative to devote himself to religious vows only to discover corruption and depravity within the walls of his Augustinian monastery. He would also set out to join the Franciscans. To everyone who knew them, they represented the real thing, Gospel life, Jesus-with-us. And they together would point the way ahead, which the whole world had sought, demonstrated vividly by the popularity of the Albigensians. And, of course, none of these unlikely, even miraculous, things could have happened unless they had been orchestrated by God.

The encounter with God is not a random thing, nor is it a neutral event. As our Gospel lesson this morning suggests, God sends messengers to us. And when He does, a response is expected. Here, Jesus indicates in the sternest and harshest terms that we stand at the crossroad of our lives. Postponement or non-response is not an option. Should you welcome it and choose for it, then you will begin new era of life, indeed, life will now have begun: abundant, safe, permanent. But to refuse it, to dishonor it, to reject God .... this will lead you to perpetual death. Where once your life pointed to a verdant and lush garden, you now find that you are being inexorably drawn into a vast and arid wasteland where God is not, nor ever could be. There is no middle way. The acceptable season of God's favor is here. Your kairos has arrived. And God is not to be taken lightly.

In Francis a new way of life for the faithful and for the Church had appeared. It is said that no life in history has touched as many Christians nor would change so many lives, except the Lord Jesus Himself, to Whom Francis' life conformed with such clarity, trueness, and simplicity.

Joachim of Fiori died seven years before the Order of Friars Minor was established. An Italian monastic founder, he was also a mystic, honored by Dante Alighieri and placed among the Spirituals in Paradiso in the Divine Comedy. Joachim famously proposed a Theory of Three Ages: the Age of the Father beginning with the creation of the world to the birth of Christ, represented by the Old Testament; the Age of the Son beginning with the birth of the Christ until the year 1260, represented by the New Testament; and finally the Age of the Holy Spirit, when the "Order of the Just" would appear — an age that would bring human history, at some time hence, to a conclusion. In retrospect, St. Francis and his worldwide movement has been identified as being this Order.

Francis offered a way ahead for all people: a religious order for men, an order for women, and an order for men and women who were married or who expected to marry or where were living that life,, each geared to their state of life. The appearance of St. Francis in human history would signify a new age. For he saw that the journey that ends in the Kingdom of Heaven must begin with and in each person, and no one is to be left out. Holy life is a universal call as surely as each man, woman, and child bears the Image of God. And he saw, we must be faithful to the Catholic and Apostolic Church, for it is the ark of the sacraments — Heaven's assistance on earth for the journey home. Most important, He saw that the Kingdom of Heaven and the ark of the sacraments are not the same thing. As corrupt as the Church was in his own time, he did not let it become a hindrance to his journey. Franciscans received from it all that it had to offer them — baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, reconciliation, anointing, for some holy orders, for some marriage — and then they headed off to Heaven. Where is the Church? Anywhere you can receive the seven sacraments and where you sense the presence of the holy.

And what of the vision of the reformers proposed in the year 1000? They had predicted a new kind of diocesan priesthood — a fraternity of wise, reverent, and holy men chanting the Divine Office several times a day. But that vision was never to materialize, not in the dioceses. However beautiful, that vision of monkish dioceses was never to be, and its requirement for universal celibacy would disfigure the ancient Church. For the Church had evolved for a thousand years with married men anchoring its priesthood.

Yet God has not left us alone nor without exemplars. And He has provided us with His instrument, an instrument of his peace, not reserved to the few, but standing as a light on a hill that welcomes everyone and offers religious life to one and all.

In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.