Description
Throughout the eighteenth century, the Franciscan moralists worked intensely on commentaries and interpretations of the Rule of St Francis, an activity that their predecessors had begun as early as the thirteenth century. Naturally, they paid great attention to the regular prescriptions about fasting and abstinence, whose observance was threatened during the Enlightenment period, even though the Roman magisterium, under the pontificates of Benedict XIV and Clement XIII, tried to reaffirm the great principles of the Catholic Lenten discipline. The Franciscan moralists, who are studied and quoted in this essay, defended a strict respect for the dietary constraints enunciated by the Seraphic Rule, but, at the same time, they made concessions to mitigating customs which were too well established to be ignored.
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