But did not most of the men of '89 believe themselves good and loyal subjects of Louis XVI.?
The Church was to our ancestors what the fatherland is to us; we may wish to remodel its government, overturn its administration, change its constitution, but we do not think ourselves less good patriots for that.
In the same way, in an age of simple faith when religious beliefs seemed to be in the very fibre and flesh of humanity, Dante, without ceasing to be a good Catholic, could attack the clergy and the court of Rome with a violence that has never been surpassed.

St.Francis so surely believed that the Church had become unfaithful to her mission that he could speak in his symbolic language of the widowhood of his Lady Poverty, who from Christ's time to his own had found no husband.

How could he better have declared his purposes or revealed his dreams?
What he purposed was far more than the foundation of an order, and it is to do him great wrong thus to restrict his endeavor.

He longed for a true awakening of the Church in the name of the evangelical ideal which he had regained.

All Europe awoke with a start when it heard of these penitents from a little Umbrian town.