The Digambara-Svetambara disagreement over how absolutely non-possession must be practiced has a striking parallel in medieval Christian monastic history, where an almost identical argument over the limits of a poverty vow split a major religious order and drew papal intervention.
The Franciscan poverty controversy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries turned on whether Francis of Assisi's original rule, requiring friars to own nothing whatever, could be maintained by a rapidly growing order that needed buildings and resources to function. The Spiritual Franciscans insisted on a rigorous reading close in spirit to the Digambara position, holding that friars could have only the use of goods owned by others, never ownership itself, and treated any softening as a betrayal of Francis's founding vision. The Conventual Franciscans accepted a workable arrangement in which the order held property collectively, or had it held in trust by the papacy on the order's behalf, closer in spirit to the Svetambara acceptance of a minimal permitted set of possessions.
The dispute escalated further than its Jain counterpart: Pope John XXII, in the 1320s, condemned the Spiritual view that Christ and the apostles had owned absolutely nothing as heretical, precipitating some Spirituals' departure into open dissent and, in a few cases, conflict with the Inquisition. The comparison illuminates a structural point: a rule stated in maximal terms for isolated ascetics generates institutional strain once lived out by a growing community needing material infrastructure, and the two traditions facing the identical problem resolved it with very different degrees of institutional peace and violence.