Francis returned to Italy unhealthy and subdued. He spent some time in retreat on an island near Venice, praying and preparing for his return to Assisi and the altered circumstances that he knew he would find there. His order had changed in his absence: the vicars Gregory and Matthew whom he had left in charge had brought the Franciscan houses even further into line with the established monastic orders and further away from their simple beginnings.
New fasts, even more rigorous than the old, had been prescribed. Ugolino had imposed a rule, his Constitutions, on the Second Order that rendered them little different from Benedictine nuns, without regard for their unique beginnings or their desire to live as their male counterparts did. John of Capella was attempting to split off from the rest to found an order of lepers. Friar Peter of Staccia was known to be living in a comfortable house in Bologna with a library of books and a group of other friars, in utter disregard of Francis’s wishes. Several friars had been martyred in Spain, the first Franciscan martyrs.14 Furthermore, a rumor that Francis had died abroad left many uncertain of their future direction. Francis undoubtedly had much to deal with on his return, and little energy with which to do it.
Francis, uncharacteristically enraged, swept the house in Bologna clean of its inhabitants, even the sick who were lying there, much in the spirit of Christ purging the Temple of its money-changers. Then he proceeded directly to Pope Honorius at Orvieto, there to bare his soul to the pope and seek his guidance. Honorius, while sympathetic, did not waver: the Order was to be led by the dictates of the Lateran Council, the curia, and the pope. Ugolino would be the Order’s Protector, and it would be to him that Francis would now appeal. To Ugolino’s credit, at Francis’s appeal he reversed some of the more objectionable innovations that he had previously sanctioned or prescribed, but Francis resigned any role of leadership in the Order, and bowed to the inevitable.
At some time before this period, Francis was said to have had a vision of a small black hen that “had so many chicks that it was unable to gather them all under its wings, and so they wandered all around her in circles” (Legend of the Three Companions 63). He recognized himself in the hen, and his brethren in her chicks, his many sons whom he could no longer protect. From this he learned the lesson that he must resign his order into the care of the church, but he hesitated to burden Honorius himself with the charge. And so he was glad to hand them over to Ugolino as protector, despite their differences. As Pope Gregory IX, Ugolino would be “a remarkable benefactor and protector of the brothers as well as of other religious, and above all, of Christ’s poor” (Legend of the Three Companions 67).
Peter of Catanio then became Vicar General of the Order (or Minister General; the terms are often confused in the sources); when Peter died shortly afterward, the position went to the brilliant but flawed Brother Elias. Elias was extremely devoted to Francis and was appointed by the pope to oversee the construction of Saint Francis’s Basilica in Assisi, but power corrupted him in the end. He lapsed into luxury and treated his confreres so highhandedly that he had to be ousted and excommunicated.
Another outcome of Francis’s exile and return was that Ugolino had ended the informal and easygoing relations between the men’s houses and the women’s. Francis could no longer spend time in long conversation with Clare. Nor did he take an active interest in women’s foundations, despite Clare’s wishes; in part, this was at Elias’s insistence, but it was also in line with Ugolino’s Constitutions. Francis was perhaps more willing to part company with the women’s houses than they were to lose him and the brothers. Ugolino became most truly the guide of the Second Order, in Francis’s absence, although the friars continued to act as visitors to the houses and deliver sermons, hear confessions, and administer the sacraments, generally performing the services that the sisters were unable to perform on their own behalf.
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