mendicans

Latin mendicare means "to beg," from mendicus, "beggar." A mendicans is "one who begs"—the present participle. In Roman society, begging was shameful. Mendici were the lowest social class, below even freed slaves. No Roman would have called begging a vocation.

Francis of Assisi changed that. In 1209, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant stripped naked in the town square, renounced his inheritance, and began living on alms. He attracted followers. By 1210, Pope Innocent III had approved the Franciscan order—friars who owned nothing individually or collectively. Dominic de Guzmán founded the Dominican order on similar principles in 1216. These became the mendicant orders: religious communities whose survival depended on begging.

The mendicant revolution was controversial. Parish priests resented friars who preached on their territory and collected alms from their parishioners. The University of Paris nearly expelled Dominican and Franciscan scholars in the 1250s. But the mendicants had intellectual firepower: Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, Bonaventure was a Franciscan, Roger Bacon was a Franciscan, and Duns Scotus was a Franciscan. The beggars became the scholars.

Four major mendicant orders survive: Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians. Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar before he broke with Rome. The mendicant tradition of voluntary poverty influenced movements far beyond Christianity—Gandhi's ashram life, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, and the simple-living movements of the 21st century all echo the 13th-century decision to beg rather than own.