This essay intends to show what kind of ideal animated the constitution in the early Franciscan Order. In order to solve this problem, we must above all examine the writings of St. Francis of Assisi, especially the First and Second Rulus of his Order. According to these documents, we can find the names and roles of officials in his Order, e.g. a general minister, a provincial minister, a custodian and a guardian. But it seems strange to us that their functions, competences and statuses are too vague. It seems to us that, among them, only the general minister has a clearly definited status and authority. Besides, his power and competence has no limit except for the revision of the Rule of Order. Therefore, some people might say that the general minister had almost absolute power and the early Franciscan government was a kind of dictatorship. It is true that the early Franciscans were exposed to such a peril. However, St. Francis of Assisi and his true followers strongly hated such an absolute power within the constitution of their Order. Then, we must ask the reason why St. Francis conceived those Rules in which the peril to dictatorship originated. At first, we must notice that St. Francis and his followers renounced not only to the world and its properties but also to their legal status in the civil and ecclesiastical society. Following up such a heroic ideal, they could not form such corporation as a judicial person in its strict sense of the word, For this reason, when St, Francis and his followers drew up the Rules of their Order, they intentionally avoided the strict legal words. The result of this was that they could not make the clear legal provision which would have kept off the peril of tyrany. In other words, Franciscan Order was not any legal corporation but a frateral congregation of strangers and pilgrims who all had no legal privileges at all. Therefore, theoretically speaking, not only the general minister but also any official in Franciscans could not have any legal power as to their colleagues, because the Order itself was not a legal corporation at all.
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