John XXII inherited a papacy already relocated to Avignon by his predecessor Clement V, and rather than treating the move as temporary, he built the administrative machine that would keep the papacy there for decades. He centralized taxation of the clergy across Western Christendom, expanded the system of papal appointment to benefices, and left the treasury far stronger than he found it, an efficiency later critics of the Avignon papacy would cite as evidence of a church grown too focused on money and bureaucracy.
His pontificate also reopened a dispute within the Franciscan order that had simmered since the death of Francis of Assisi a century earlier. A faction called the Spiritual Franciscans held that Christ and the apostles had owned no property whatsoever, individually or in common, and that the whole church should imitate this absolute poverty. John XXII, in the bulls Cum inter nonnullos of 1323 and others that followed, declared this specific claim, that Christ and the apostles owned nothing at all, to be heretical, since scripture itself records the apostles holding a common purse. The ruling put the pope in direct conflict with much of his own Franciscan order and, more dangerously, with the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, who sheltered dissenting friars and had John XXII declared a heretic in turn by an antipope he set up in Rome.
The dispute was never simply theological. Apostolic poverty was also a claim about how much authority and wealth the institutional church itself was entitled to hold, and John XXII's ruling against the strictest reading of Franciscan poverty was, in practice, a ruling in favor of the church's right to own property at all.