Francis, Dominic, and a Dispute Over Poverty That Split a Movement

The two great mendicant orders trace to specific founders within a few years of each other: Francis of Assisi gathered the first friars around 1209 on a rule of radical poverty approved informally by Pope Innocent III, while Dominic de Guzman founded his order in 1216 with a particular focus on preaching against heresy and on the theological training that made the Dominicans a scholarly order from the start, producing figures such as Thomas Aquinas within a century of its founding.

The Franciscan ideal of owning nothing, individually or in common, proved impossible to sustain at scale, and by the fourteenth century the order had split into factions over how strictly to keep it, the Spiritual Franciscans insisting on the founder's absolute poverty and the Conventuals accepting communal ownership of property, a dispute serious enough that Pope John XXII condemned the strict position as heretical in the 1320s. Later reform movements, including the Observant and Capuchin reforms, repeatedly tried to recover the founder's original austerity.

The mendicant orders remain active worldwide, with Franciscan and Dominican friars engaged in education, missionary work and parish ministry across every populated continent, though, like most Catholic religious life in the West, their numbers in Europe and North America have declined since the mid twentieth century even as some provinces in Africa and Asia have grown.