The Spirituals were a group within the Franciscan Order which arose in the wake of the conflict on the nature of Franciscan poverty. Even such a radical counter cultural movement like that of the Franciscans needed some adaptation to the changing culture of the times. This historical adaptation and compromise were supported and executed with the active help of the official Church which had a special interest in making the Franciscan order an instrument of reform in the Church. But there was a group among the friars, which was not ready to be under such controls of the Church and wanted the ideal of poverty to be lived radically like Francis. Moreover, in a Church that itself was immensely wealthy, it was bound to become an emotional issue. More importantly, it soon turned out to be a theological problem, too, when some tried to interpret poverty Christologically by saying that the ideal of absolute poverty came from the historical Jesus and His immediate disciples themselves and thus making poverty an essential element of being Christian.

Thus the question of poverty first of all had its inner Franciscan side, eventually giving birth to divisions in the order, the Spirituals and the Conventuals. The Spirituals were those who did not accept the historical compromises that were made and wanted to practise radical poverty in the spirit of Francis and his Testament. The Conventuals allowed adaptation and mitigation of the rule and the use of papal privileges and considered obedience to the Church important in the spirit of Francis himself and followed the way as the papacy had decreed in its constitutions.

It became an issue for the whole Church when the spirituals wanted to make poverty an essential sign of the Church making use of the apocalyptic theology of the Cistercian monk, Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). He divided history into three ages: the age of the Father which is the Age of the Old Testament and the age of the Law, the age of the laity and married; the Age of the Son which is the New Testament Age and the Age of love, the age of the clerics and the hierarchical Church; and the Age of the Holy Spirit, which is the final Age, the Age of the monks, the friars and the spiritual Church. The spiritual theology of Joachim was also a veiled critique on the wealthy and corrupt medieval church. The Spirituals co-opted this idea and saw the Franciscan order as the sign of this new age. In fact, there was support for the Spirituals even from the official Church when Pope Nicholas III, in 1279 decreed that Jesus and the apostles did not possess anything but they had used earthly goods. But radical spirituals like Peter Olivi and Ubertino Cassale were not satisfied. They accused the Church of being the ecclesia carnalis, the Church of the flesh, and of not following the Gospel because it was not practising radical poverty. The final suppression of the spirituals happened with much force under John XXII in 1323 who condemned the position of the Spirituals as a heretical doctrine. He also condemned four spiritual Franciscans to be burnt at the stake reminding them that “poverty is great but obedience is the greatest good.” They, under the leadership of William of Ockham, declared the Pope a heretic because he had gone against an “infallible” teaching of a previous Pope because Peter Olivi, one of the radical Spirituals, had propagated the idea of “papal infallibility” in 1280 because he wanted that the teaching of Nicholas III on Franciscan poverty should not be changed by anyone declaring that the teaching of a Pope on faith and morals is infallible and the teaching of Pope Nicholas that Jesus and the apostles did not possess anything was a matter of faith. John XXII condemned the doctrine of papal infallibility also as a heretical doctrine, calling it “a mischief of the devil, the father of all lies.” According to some historians this is the beginning of the doctrine of infallibility in the Church. Thus the movement was, for the time being, suppressed but its spirit went on creating various directions in the Order. The Capuchins are generally considered to be those following the spiritualist tradition.