Notwithstanding this the bishop, it is said, offered to make interest for them with the princes of the Church.
We may suspect that his commendations were not very warm.

At all events they did not avail to save Francis and his company either from a searching inquiry or from the extended fatherly counsels of Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo[14] upon the difficulties of the Rule, counsels which strongly resemble those of Guido himself.[15] What Francis asked for was simple enough; he claimed no privilege of any sort, but only that the pope would approve of his undertaking to lead a life of absolute conformity to the precepts of the gospel.

There is a delicate point here which it is quite worth while to see clearly.

The pope was not called upon to approve the Rule, since that came from Jesus himself; at the very worst all that he could do would be to lay an ecclesiastical censure upon Francis and his companions for having acted without authority, and to enjoin them to leave to the secular and regular clergy the task of reforming the Church.
Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo, to whom the Bishop of Assisi presented them, had informed himself of the whole history of the Penitents.

He lavished upon them the most affectionate tokens of interest, even going so far as to beg for a mention in their prayers.