It was definitively constituted about 1330-1340, but it was in the air long before. With the patience of four Benedictines (of the best days) we should doubtless be able to find our way in the medley of documents, more or less corrupted, from which it comes to us, and little by little we might find the starting-point of this dream in a friar who sees blinded humanity kneeling around Portiuncula to recover sight.[10]
It is not difficult to see in general what led to the materialization of this graceful fancy: people remembered Francis's attachment to the chapel where he had heard the decisive words of the gospel, and where St. Clara in her turn had entered upon a new life.
When the great Basilica of Assisi was built, drawing to itself pilgrims and privileges, an opposition of principles and of inspiration came to be added to the petty rivalry between it and Portiuncula.
The zealots of poverty said aloud that though the Saint's body rested in the basilica his heart was at Portiuncula.[11] By dint of repeating and exaggerating what Francis had said about the little sanctuary, they came to give a precise and so to say doctrinal sense to utterances purely mystical.
The violences and persecutions of the party of the Large Observance under the generalship of Crescentius[12] (1244-1247) aroused a vast increase of fervor among their adversaries. To the bull of Innocent IV. declaring the basilica thenceforth Caput et Mater of the Order[13] the Zealots replied by the narratives of Celano's Second Life and the legends of that period.[14] They went so far as to quote a promise of Francis to make it in perpetuity the Mater et Caput of his institute.[15]
In this way the two parties came to group themselves around these two buildings. Even to-day it is the same. The Franciscans of the Strict Observance occupy Portiuncula, while the Basilica of Assisi is in the hands of the Conventuals (Large Observance), who have adopted all the interpretations and mitigations of the Rules; they are worthy folk, who live upon their dividends. By a phenomenon, unique, I think, in the annals of the Church, they have pushed the freedom of their infidelity to the point of casting off the habit, the popular brown cassock. Dressed all in black, shod and hatted, nothing distinguishes them from the secular clergy except a modest little cord.
Poor Francis! That he may have the joy of feeling his tomb brushed by a coarse gown, some daring friar must overcome his very natural repugnances, and come to kneel there. The indulgence of August 2d is then the reply of the Zealots to the persecutions of their brothers.
An attentive study will perhaps show it emerging little by little under the generalship of Raimondo Gaufridi (1289-1295); Conrad di Offida (
1306) seems to have had some effect upon it, but only with the next generation do we find the legend completed and avowed in open day.