Secular Franciscans in the Social Sphere
“From the Gospel to life and from life to the Gospel”
To those who wanted to follow him while remaining in the world, Saint Francis "gave a rule of life and indicated the way of salvation to each according to his own condition" (FF 384). The official birth of the Franciscan Order of Penitents (later called the Franciscan Third Order; today the Order of Secular Franciscans) was approved in 1221 by Pope Honorius III by way of a document considered to be the Order’s first rule. Men and women of every social status have belonged to this Order over the centuries: rulers, popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, politicians, writers, scientists, and many other diverse lay faithful. All equally committed themselves to a continuous conversion of life "by passing from the Gospel to life and from life to the Gospel", recognizing Christ in their neighbor, while living in a lifestyle inspired by Francis of Assisi, each according to his or her state of life.
In the 19th century, their focus was to give birth to workers' associations, mutual aid societies, Catholic publications, day cares and schools for small children, orphanages, and hospitals. Among many outstanding Franciscan tertiaries, we remember Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam (1813-1853), who with some friends founded the "Conferences of Saint Vincent de 'Paul" in April 1833, in order to help the poor under the protection of that saintly patron. Ozanan was an advocate for bringing together Catholicism and democracy, fighting to ensure that the Church was a leaven in the context of the political and social conditions that emerged from the French revolution.
Another secular Franciscan tertiary Léon Pierre Louis Harmel (1829-1915), a well-known entrepreneur, founded the "Work of the Workers", in order to give business a partnership and Christian character. At his factories in Val de Bois, he established a workers’ organization that was a model for all the works of assistance and social security suggested by the most enlightened social criteria. Along with the priest, Léon Delion, he was a promoter of the Christian corporative unions, which consisted of working priests and social workers.
The tertiary sociologist-economist Giuseppe Toniolo (1845-1918), was founder of the Catholic Union of Social Studies and the FUCI (Italian Catholic University Federation), as well as collaborator with the Opera dei Congressi. He perceived the economic initiative of individuals, ordered to the common good, by way of freely established, intermediate institutions, capable of tending to individual and collective interests, as regulated by clear legislation. One of the sources for the inspiration of Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Toniolo was the intellectual soul of the Italian Catholic social movement until the First World War. With determination, he carried out his program of reaction to the utilitarian-individualistic conception of the economy, by employing a modern application of the dictates of the Christian faith to the economic problems of his time.