throughhiseyes said:
Wolsley thank you for responding to this.....why did the Capuchin Franciscans split from the Franciscans? What is the third order Franciscans? I've never heard of the Conventuals.......what are they? another Order? Why are there so many different Orders .... all being of Catholic faith?
Well, the problem with the Franciscans was the same problem with all human institutions---they couldn't get along with one another.
By the middle of the 16th century, the Franciscan Order had gotten so popular that it was massively huge, and many of the more conservative members felt that it had drifted from Francis' original ideas of poverty and simplicity. At meetings of the Order's leadership, they spent all their time arguing about how the Order ought to run. So, eventually, they split into what was called the Observants (the original Order) and the Conventuals.
Some time later, the Capuchins split from the Observants, which felt that they were too liberal.
The Third Order Regular started out as a group of laypeople who wanted to live by the Franciscan Rule. (Many Orders have Third Orders for laypeople, including Dominicans and Benedictines, among others.) Eventually, these folks got together and decided to join the Order itself, but were refused for various reasons, so they formed their own Order which was eventually recognized by the Vatican.
So, the Franciscan Order consists of four main branches:
the Order of Friars Minor, or OFM (the original Order, also formerly called the Observants);
the Conventuals, or OFM Conv.;
the Capuchins, or OFM Cap.;
and the Third Order Regular Franciscans, or TOR.
Add to this the women's Orders, such as the Poor Clares.
All of them are separate Orders, but all of them belong to the Franciscan family. The Franciscans are sort of unique in that they have fragmented this way---most Orders do not split up like this. You do have branches, in Orders like the Cistercians, where you have monasteries which follow the rules of a certain motherhouse, such as the monastery of La Trappe in France (thus the nickname "Trappists"), but they don't form separate Orders.
Orders usually get started to fill a certain ministry. The Benedictines stressed separation from the world and prayer, as did the Cistercians, Carthusians, and others; this is what we would call a "contemplative" Order. Jesuits were focused on mission work, especially in Asia. During the Crusades, certain Orders such as the the Order of St. John of God focused on hospital work for the wounded soldiers. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne work strictly with cancer patients; the Daughters of St. Paul are in Catholic communications ministry, as are the Redemptorists. During the Renaissance, many Orders got started to help with widows, orphans, and poor children, such as the Salesians.
They are all Catholic, but they all meet a certain need. In the United States, there were Orders that focused strictly on helping the immigrants who came here.
BTW, I think it's so cool that you were once a Capuchin Francisican!