Ad Dominum

The Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order, approved by Pope Paul VI in 1978, can easily be summarized in 16 points.

(For the full text of the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order, please follow this link.)

1. Follow the example of St. Francis of Assisi who made Christ the inspiration and the center of his life with God and people.
2. Seek to encounter the living and active person of Christ in your brothers and sisters, in sacred scripture, in the Church, and in liturgical activity.
3. Go forth as witnesses and instruments of the Church’s mission among all people, proclaiming Christ by your life and words.
4. Conform your thoughts and deeds to those of Christ by means of that radical interior change with the gospel itself calls “conversion.”
5. Join in liturgical prayer in one of the forms proposed by the Church, reliving the mysteries of the life of Christ. (This is almost always the Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours.)
6. Express your ardent love for the Virgin Mary by imitating her complete self-giving and by praying earnestly and confidently.
7. Faithfully fulfill the duties proper to your circumstance in life, even in difficulties and persecutions.
8. Seek a proper spirit of detachment from temporal goods by simplifying your own material needs, and purify your hearts from every tendency and yearning for possession and power.
9. Acquire purity of heart because of the vocation you have embraced, and set yourselves free to love God and your brothers and sisters.
10. Accept all people as a gift of the Lord, and strive to create for the lowly, conditions of life worthy of people redeemed by Christ.
11. Together with all people of good will build a more fraternal and evangelical world so that the kingdom of God may be brought about more effectively.
12. Be in the forefront in promoting justice by the testimony of your human lives and your courageous initiatives.
13. Esteem work both as a gift and as a sharing in the creation, redemption, and service of the human community.
14. In your family cultivate the Franciscan spirit of peace, fidelity, and respect for life, striving to make of it a sign of a world already renewed in Christ.
15. Respect all creatures, animate and inanimate, and strive to move from the temptation of exploiting creation to the Franciscan concept of universal kinship.
16. Seek out ways of unity and fraternal harmony through dialogue, an strive to bring joy and hope to others.

“May whoever observes all this be filled in heaven with the blessing of the most high Father, and on earth with that of his beloved Son, together with the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.” (Blessing of St. Francis from the Testament)