A Reform That Nearly Collapsed within Its Own Lifetime

The Capuchins survived a crisis in their earliest years that could easily have ended the reform before it took hold. Approved by Clement VII in 1528 as a return to the strict poverty and simplicity its founders believed the Observant Franciscans had already lost, the new branch grew quickly enough to alarm some in the wider church, and then suffered a severe blow in 1542 when Bernardino Ochino, the order's own vicar general and its most celebrated preacher, defected to Protestantism, an episode that briefly threatened to discredit the whole reform by association with its most prominent leader's very public departure.

The Capuchins recovered from this setback and expanded rapidly across Italy and beyond over the following decades, building a reputation less for scholarship, in the Dominican style, or for pastoral schooling, in the Salesian style, than for direct popular preaching and for hands on charitable work during plagues and other public crises, when Capuchin friars were frequently recorded tending the sick and burying the dead at considerable risk to themselves. That combination of austere poverty, plain preaching and physical charitable presence during disasters became the order's distinguishing public reputation across Catholic Europe long after the Ochino affair had faded from memory.