Franciscan Friars History

Filed in archive Franciscan Friars on June 16, 2010

© blues_brother

Franciscans are also called Minorites or Lesser Brethren, a religious order of the Roman Catholic Church, founded in 1208 by St. Francis of Assisi. Some idea of the extra ordinary extension of the remarkable institute may be formed from the startling statement that, in the dreadful plague of the Black Death in the following century, no further from 124000 Franciscans fell victims to their zeal for the care of the sick and for the spiritual ministration of the dying.
In the original scheme of the institute its great fundamental characteristic was poverty, which St Francis proposed to render in his order not only more perfect theoretically but more systematic in its practice. The Franciscans order has been the parent of many other religious institutes. The earliest of these is that of the 'observantists' or brethren of more strict observance called in France Cordeliers. Fran Franciscans history we find that the Franciscan order in its several branches has all time maintained its popularity in Roman Catholic Church. The popes Nicholas IV, Alexander V, Sixtus IV, the still more celebrated Sixtus V and Clerment XIV also belonged to the institute of St Francis.