The Fraticelli (Italian for “Little Brethren”) or Spiritual Franciscans were multiple Christian monastic sects who split from the Franciscan Order due to opposition to changes to the rule of Saint Francis of Assisi, especially with regard to poverty. They also regarded the wealth of the Catholic Church as scandalous, with the view that the riches of individual churchmen invalidated their status. The Fraticelli were declared heretical in 1296 by Pope Boniface VIII.
The Fraticelli appeared in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, principally in Italy, all having split from the Franciscan Order on account of the disputes concerning poverty. It is necessary to differentiate the various groups of Fraticelli, although the term may be applied to all. The primary groups were the Fraticelli de Paupere Vita and the Fraticelli de Opinione (also called Michaelites).Matthew Mills, "Fraticelli", in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2022).
The Apostolics (also known as Pseudo-Apostles or Apostolic Brethren) are excluded from the category, because admission to the Order of Saint Francis was expressly denied to their founder, Gerard Segarelli. The Apostolics had no connection to the Franciscans, in fact desiring to exterminate them.
Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose is set against the persecution of Fraticelli.
Etymology Fraticelli is a diminutive of the Italian frate (plural frati),Bihl, Michael. "Fraticelli." The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 6. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. 31 December 2019 itself derived from Latin Frater “brother”, often shortened to Fra when referring to members of religious orders.
Frati was a designation of the members of the mendicant orders founded during the thirteenth century, principally the Franciscans. The Latin term Fraterculus does not occur in historical records concerning the Fraticelli. Etymologically, the name Friars Minor (Fratres Minores) is equivalent to the diminutive Fraticellus. The ideal of the founder of the Friars Minor, Saint Francis of Assisi, was that his disciples, by evangelical poverty, complete self-denial, and humility, should lead the world back to Jesus Christ. The Italian people designated as Fraticelli all the members of religious orders (particularly mendicants), and especially hermits, whether these observed monastic precepts or regulated their own lives.
Background
The Spiritual Franciscanism refers to two related but distinct phenomena in the first two centuries of the history of the Franciscan movement: a broad and loosely defined current of radical evangelical poverty traceable to the lifetime of Francis of Assisi himself, and the Spiritual Franciscans (or Spirituals, from the Latin: Spirituales), a general term for several groups of Friars Minor active in the second half of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries who claimed to observe the Rule in its original severity, in opposition to the main body of the order.
Early Spiritual Franciscanism Early Franciscans were itinerant preachers, who, following their founder Francis of Assisi, took to heart Christ's injunction in : “Take nothing for the journey – no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt.”Gospel of Luke 9:3, New International Version: "When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, 2 and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. 3 He told them: 'Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt. 4 Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. 5 If people do not welcome you, leave their town and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.' 6 So they set out and went from village to village, proclaiming the good news and healing people everywhere." But also:
"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me." — "Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me." — "Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me." — "And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him." — "And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." — "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." — "And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." —
Living by such a rule required constant begging for alms, and over time this produced tensions, both with potential benefactors faced with repeated appeals from mendicant friars, and with established monastic orders accustomed to aid from the same pool of benefactors.
Early Franciscan poverty, as lived under Francis himself, was an informal and largely unregulated practice, dependent on the personal authority of the founder rather than on legal or doctrinal formulations, and it posed no organised challenge to ecclesiastical or Franciscan authority because no rival institutional structure yet existed to oppose.
Even before Francis's death in 1226, two tendencies could already be distinguished within the fraternity: those who wished to mitigate the rigour of the rule of poverty and remodel the order into a more structured institution, and those later known as "Zealots" or "Spirituals," who wished to preserve the founder's original way of life unchanged. This latent division became increasingly visible as the Rule was progressively modified in the years following Francis's death, as the order grew from a small, close-knit fraternity into an institution that the Church increasingly called upon to supply bishops, university masters, and inquisitors — a transformation that put growing strain on the informal, charismatic style of life practised by the first companions.
The Spiritual Franciscans movement The Spiritual Franciscans, by contrast, operated within an order that had by the late thirteenth century become a large, centralised institution with its own hierarchy, legal privileges, and papal protection; their insistence on absolute poverty was consequently articulated as a formal position, defended through appeals to the Testament, to papal decretals, and eventually to Joachimite prophecy, against a Franciscan leadership that increasingly treated such rigour as a threat to the order's cohesion and to its standing within the Church. Whereas the disputes of Francis's own lifetime were resolved, or at least contained, through personal mediation and the cohesion of a small fraternity, those of the Spirituals could only be settled through formal ecclesiastical instruments — chapters, decretals, and ultimately the Inquisition — reflecting a shift from a movement defined by shared practice to one defined by doctrinal opposition and, eventually, outright condemnation.
A first compromise, based on Bonaventure's contention that property bequeathed to the friars belonged in law to the Catholic Church while the friars retained only its use, was embodied in Pope Nicholas III's decretal Exiit qui seminat (1279); the Spirituals found this solution unacceptable, and it was reaffirmed without resolving the dispute in 1312. Some Spirituals also adopted the apocalyptic doctrines of Joachim of Fiore concerning an approaching "age of the Holy Spirit," a belief that widened the breach with the more moderate Conventual friars after the 1254 condemnation of Gerard of Borgo San Donnino's Introduction to the Eternal Gospel and the forced resignation of the Joachimite minister general John of Parma in 1257; the rift deepened further with the relaxations of the rule of poverty introduced after Bonaventure's death in 1274, and with the 1283 condemnation of the views of the Provençal Spiritual Peter John Olivi.
Over time, as the order grew, it faced the demands of caring for sick or elderly friars, and providing for its members sent to university for theological training.Jones, John D., The Poverty of Christ and the Apostles, PIMS, 1999, Intro p. 2 The order divided into two branches, the Zelanti, or Spirituals, and the Relaxati, known later as the Conventuals. The Zelanti strictly observed the poverty enjoined by the testament of Saint Francis, and lived isolated, simple lives. The Relaxati or Conventuals lived in convents in the towns, tending attached churches with the necessary liturgical furnishings and devoting themselves also to studying and preaching, which required the accumulation and use of books.
Declaration of heresy and the rise of Fraticelli In support of the friars’ commitment to “holy poverty”, Pope Gregory IX adopted a legal construct whereby gifts to the Franciscans were vested in the Holy See, thus only granting the friars mere loaned use of these. In this way, they did not need to be perennially destitute. Pope Innocent IV gave the Franciscans permission to appoint “procurators” to buy, sell, and administer goods given to them. Pope Nicholas III confirmed this arrangement in 1279, in the papal bull Exiit qui seminat. The Zelanti or "Spirituals" felt this abrogated the spirit of Saint Francis, and believed a restricted use of property was more in keeping with his rule. The differences were not fully adjusted nor was unity ever completely restored between the Spirituals and the main body of the order, the Community.
Neither Nicholas III's Exiit qui seminat nor Clement V's Exivi de paradiso, issued in 1312 in the wake of the Council of Vienne, succeeded in reconciling the two positions, and in 1317 Pope John XXII's bull Quorundam exigit formally censured the Spirituals; the following year four of the most obdurate friars were burned at the stake as heretics, while other dissidents, later known as the Fraticelli, continued to be prosecuted by the Inquisition. The dispute soon acquired a further, more theoretical dimension when John XXII, in the bull Cum inter nonnullos (1323), declared it heretical to maintain that Christ and the Apostles had owned nothing; the order's minister general, Michael of Cesena, together with Bonagratia of Bergamo and William of Ockham, rejected the ruling and took refuge with the excommunicated emperor Louis IV of Bavaria, whose Appeal of Sachsenhausen (1324) likewise repudiated the papal decision, although Cesena's successor as minister general, Geraldus Odonis, subsequently submitted to the pope on behalf of the order. Although persecution greatly reduced the numbers of the Spirituals, the movement nonetheless gave impetus to the rise of stricter reform currents within the order, first the Friars of the Strict Observance and later the Capuchins.
Various Fraticelli groups Angelo da Clareno and the Clareni