Capuchins (Order of Friars Minor Capuchin)

The Capuchins are a reform branch of the Franciscans that grew into an independent order, founded on the wish to recover the plain and austere life of Francis himself.

Back to the beginning

The order began with Matteo da Bascio in the Marche of Italy in the 1520s and was approved by Clement VII in 1528, its founders seeking to return to the strict poverty, solitude and simplicity of the earliest Franciscans against the more settled life of the existing observance. They adopted a rough brown habit with a long pointed hood, the cappuccio that gave them their name, kept the beard as a sign of the primitive ideal, and combined a strong eremitical strand of prayer and retreat with preaching and care of the poor. The reform was one more turn in the recurring Franciscan argument over how literally the poverty of the founder should be lived.

From reform to order

The Capuchins were at first a branch of the Franciscan family and became in time a fully independent order, one of the three branches into which the Friars Minor are now divided. They became noted preachers and missionaries and, through their work among the poor and the sick, one of the most popular of the mendicant bodies. The order kept its reputation for austerity and closeness to ordinary people, and it stands as the most enduring of the many attempts, across the whole history of the Franciscans, to bring the order back to the poverty from which it began.

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.