St. Peter of Alcantara/Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Peter of Alcantara, as well as commemorating the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. St. Peter was born in Alcantara in Spain in 1499. Though he came from a noble family, from an early age he discerned a vocation to the religious life and decided to became a Franciscan. He joined the friars of the Stricter Observance at Manxaretes in 1515. He later founded a new community at Badajoz and was ordained priest in 1524. He was appointed Guardian of the friary of St. Mary of the Angels at Robredillo. He also became noted as a preacher. In 1538 he was made minister provincial of the province of St. Gabriel of Estramadura. His reforms met with much opposition and he resigned and retired to live an eremetical life. Other friars came to join him and in due course further communities were established.
He travelled to Rome in 1555 and obtained permission from Pope Julius III to found further friaries under the jurisdiction of the Conventual Franciscans. This eventually became the province of St. Joseph. St. Peter’s reforms now met with greater success and in 1562 the new province was placed under the Minister General of the Observant Franciscans. He also assisted St. Teresa of Avila with the reform of the Carmelite order. He died in 1562.
What was the distinctive Franciscan charism and why did St. Peter of Alcantara believe so strongly in the need for the reform of the order? The friars (the Franciscans and the Dominicans) had played a pivotal role in the development of the life of the Church in the High Middle Ages. Prior to this point those who had taken upon themselves the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience had sought to withdraw from the world and live an enclosed life, whether alone as a hermit or corporately as a monastic community. Hence, there were two types of ministry within the Church, the regular clergy (those who belonged to a religious order such as the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Carthusians or any of the other orders) and the secular clergy (the parochial clergy).
This system had served the Church well for many centuries. But with the growth of towns in medieval Europe a new type of ministry was required to address the expanding urban population. This was the ministry of the friars. Friars were those who had taken upon themselves the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, but unlike the traditional religious orders they lived in the world, rather than seeking to withdraw from it. St. Francis took as his model the pattern of life of Christ himself who had sent out his followers without purse and scrip to preach the Gospel in the towns and villages of Galilee and Judea. The first disciples of Jesus had not lived an enclosed life in isolation from the world like the later religious orders nor were they assigned a specific cure of souls as in the later parochial system, but had lived an ascetic life preaching the gospel within the world. Jesus had called his followers to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, to be a sign within the world that the Kingdom of God, future in its fullness, was now being manifested in his own person and ministry. What had been the pattern of preaching and living for the first followers of Jesus St. Francis took as the pattern of preaching and living to be followed in medieval Europe.
It is important to remember that while in theory the Church was available for everyone in practice there were those who fell outside the system and were not reached by either the parochial clergy or the conventional religious orders. This was especially the case in the newly expanding towns in medieval Europe. There was a dearth of preaching and it was this deficiency that the friars sought to address. They were to focus especially not on the type of settled ministry exercised by the parochial clergy or the enclosed life of a conventional religious order, but on preaching the Gospel. St. Francis realised that this preaching would only be taken seriously if the friars led by example and lived by the gospel that they preached. Though St. Francis himself was hostile to the world of books and academia (which he saw as a distraction from the Christian life) the ministry of the Franciscan order in the towns and their role as preachers led them to take a prominent role in the universities. Along with their Dominican counterparts they were to form the two great rival schools of theology who dominated in the universities in the middle ages.
Over the course of time this led to a relaxation of the strictness of the original Franciscan rule. It was this deficiency that St. Peter of Alcantara decided to remedy. He found the existing Franciscan friars too lax and desired that they should be return to a pattern of living closer to the ideals of the founder. In other words, he tried to do for the Franciscans what his contemporary St. Teresa of Avila did for the Carmelites. They both believed that their respective orders had become too worldly and needed to practice greater asceticism and a stricter life of poverty.
This inevitably led to conflict and controversy with their more relaxed brethren. Instead of achieving the reform of the order as a whole, what in practice happened was that only some communities followed the stricter rule while others remained more lax.
It has always been difficult to achieve the right balance between having clear principles and being pragmatic about what is possible in a given situation. St. Francis had a clear vision of how to follow the pattern of living that Jesus and his first disciples had exemplified. However, he was not a natural organiser and consequently the order had to make pragmatic adaptations to continue to function effectively. Over the course of time this led to a falling away from the distinctive Franciscan charism and it fell to St. Peter of Alcantara to try to reform the order so that it would be more in conformity with the ideals of the founder. But he himself discovered that he had to be pragmatic about what was realistically possible after his initial attempts at reform met with such opposition that he had to abandon them. It was only later that he would have greater success, a reminder that initial failure is often a lesson to teach us greater patience and perseverance.
Let us seek to follow the example of St. Peter of Alacantara today in the task of reforming the Church in our own time and place and also pray for grace to persevere in the face of opposition and adversity.
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