The year is 1220 and Francis has just announced his decision to step down as “leader” of the Franciscan brothers.  In last week’s installment, I described Francis’ reason for stepping down.  Francis had already seen the effects of a vacuum in spiritual authority brought about by his year-long absence while in the Middle East.  It is in leaving to his “vicar” and to the Roman Church the care of making decisions of a normative or disciplinary type that he could hope to preserve a superior authority, of a spiritual type, that would only have been diminished in the heat of daily administration. Continue reading →