The mendicant orders constitute a truly innovative element in history, a new model of Christian life, kindled by the Holy Spirit in the twelfth century. Until then monasticism, born when the era of the martyrs came to an end, represented the ideal of Christian life, the sign of total dedication to God. In the monasteries, safe oases during the time of the barbarian invasions and great social upheaval of the early Middle Ages, it had been possible to preserve the Christian values and cultural richness generated by the encounter between Graeco-Roman civilization and the Gospel. By now well-established, the monastic orders manifested between the tenth and the twelfth centuries an intense and diversified movement of reform oriented towards the return of religious life to the simplicity of the origins and the reform of the entire Church. Nonetheless, the transformations brought by the resumption of trade and the rebirth of towns, as well as the ever-present need for Christians to convert to the original model of the early Church, generated a widespread spiritual ferment of preachers who forcefully called for conversion. In large part these preachers, such as Pietro Valdo, and their followers, began with the authorization of the hierarchy, but the fact that they vehemently attacked the Church structure soon transformed them into heretical movements emphasizing to a fault certain Christian values like poverty.
In this context the first two great new orders arose. In the early thirteenth century, Domingo de Guzman, known to us as Saint Dominic, give rise to a group of preachers who devoted themselves particularly to combating the Albigensian heresy and spreading the true faith. Saint Francis of Assisi, too, a true protester like many heretical preachers against a mercantile society that made wealth the principal goal in life, “married Lady Poverty” in order to live dependent on his only great Good: the love of God. Francis’s radicalism, however, never took the form of an attack on the Church; rather, he constantly sought the approval of his bishop and the pope, succeeding in this way in promoting an authentic movement of reform of the institution of the Church, leaving his mark on the personal conscience of everyone he met. Another characteristic of the new orders was the choice to live above all in the towns, or rather on the edge of town, often in the most indigent neighborhoods, in order to devote themselves to the assistance and evangelization of the poorest ranks of the population.
The title of “mendicants” is due to the fact that, rather than the kind of work done by the monastic orders, which had given rise to major productive enterprises, the friars lived mainly on alms and the charity of the faithful.
Among the principal mendicant orders are, besides the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Augustinians, the Servants of Mary, the Carmelites, and the Jesuates.