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2 - Catching the Franciscan Spirit: John Moorman and St Francis in his Student Days
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- By Petà Dunstan
- Edited by Patrick Zutshi, Michael Robson
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- Book:
- The Franciscan Order in the Medieval English
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 11 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 10 July 2018, pp 25-48
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- Chapter
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Summary
Abstract
Bishop John Moorman was one of the foremost Franciscan scholars of the twentieth century. Making use of his personal journals from his early years, this chapter explores the origins of his passion for St Francis, including his founding and running of a Franciscan society at the University of Cambridge, his early attempts to publish on the saint, his first visit to Assisi, and his association with Anglican Franciscan friars and the founding of a Third Order. It also explores the main themes of Moorman's engagement with the Franciscan tradition and ethos: poverty, evangelism, and the religious life.
Keywords: Assisi, Brother Douglas, Professor Francis Burkitt, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, G.K. Chesterton, Fallowfield, Fr Cuthbert, Hilfield Friary, parish of St Matthew at Holbeck, Dr A.G. Little, Leeds, Ripon, Thomas of Celano, Society of St Francis, Westcott House, Cambridge
John Moorman distinguished himself as a bishop and an Anglican ecumenist during his lifetime – but it was his devotion to St Francis and the exploration of the life and legacy of the saint which were the passion of his intellectual concerns. He was by his own admission brought up a ‘staunch Protestant’ within the Church of England, yet he found himself attracted to the life of St Francis of Assisi, despite that saint's association with medieval Roman Catholicism. This was in common with many other Christians outside the Roman Catholic Church, and was a phenomenon evident since the mid-nineteenth century. But when and how was Moorman's own passion for St Francis first ignited?
Unexpectedly perhaps, it is possible to trace his Franciscan journey because Moorman began to keep a journal when he was still at school, and continued to do so for most of his life. It is not merely a chronology of appointments but an account of his doings and thoughts day by day. He noted the books he read and the people he met. He recorded the routine but also illuminated the important developments in his life. On some things he was reticent but on others, including his interest in St Francis, he was forthcoming in what he wrote. The journal allows the historian to glimpse his world as it enfolded from the 1920s onwards and reveals much that shaped his attitudes and enthusiasms.
Moorman was born in June 1905 into a middle-class family, his father a professor of English Literature at Leeds University.
17 - The ecumenical appeal of Francis
- from PART II - The heritage of Francis of Assisi
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- By Petà Dunstan
- Edited by Michael J. P. Robson, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi
- Published online:
- 28 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 273-287
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Summary
St Francis was for centuries a saint widely revered, yet only by Roman Catholics. After the East–West split of 1054 within the Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches rarely engaged with those declared holy by Rome in the following centuries. After the fracture of the Church in the west at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Protestants included in their theological outlook a rejection of what they saw as the false claims for saints and their cults, along with the monastic system itself. A founder of a medieval religious order such as Francis therefore had little appeal for them. Even Anglicans, whose ecclesiastical position became eventually a mix of Catholic structures and reformist views, found a saint like Francis too associated with what they regarded as mawkish superstition and misdirected fervour. In any case, political events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stoked fears of ‘papism’, meaning there could be little attraction in any saint closely associated with loyalty to Rome.
All the more remarkable therefore was the marked change in the nineteenth century, a period that ended with St Francis being the medieval saint most admired by Anglicans and Protestants. Adopted in various guises as one of the most inspiring religious figures in Christian history, his emergence as an ecumenical icon was astonishing.
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
The origin of this change can be found in the Romantic Movement. From the final years of the eighteenth century, the social and political pressures wrought by revolutionary ideology and the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, and also by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, saw a reaction that involved looking back in history for inspiration.