The ‘Mendicant Problem’ in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Almost from their foundation, the mendicant orders proved problematic. Their insistence on poverty, their preaching skills, and their responsiveness to contemporary spirituality challenged the Church at many levels, providing standards against which the secular clergy might be judged and found wanting. Their dependence on papal privileges which limited episcopal oversight, and their claims to a special role as confessors and preachers, threatened the Church’s current order, especially in parishes. By undermining the parish priest’s authority — jurisdictionally by offering confession and absolution, financially by encouraging burial in their houses — the friars in fact undercut some of the aims of the early thirteenth-century reformers, most notably by disrupting the demands of Omnis utriusque sexus, the decree requiring annual confession to the ‘proprius sacerdos’, issued at the Fourth Lateran Council. The most important resolution of these ‘grass root’ problems was provided in Boniface VIII’s Super cathedram of 1300, which by 1326 applied to all four of the main mendicant orders, and formally became part of canon law when enshrined in the Clementines. Unfortunately, Super cathedram seemed incompatible with Omnis utriusque sexus, and debate on the resulting discrepancy persisted throughout the Middle Ages, despite attempts at resolution such as Vas electionis of 1321.

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