mendicant
- adjective
- /ˈmɛn.dɪ.kənt/
- Formal
:
mendicante
- Within religious orders, and especially among the mendicant orders of the church, debates over the nature and extent of true religious poverty were of central concern to reform or observant movements.
- mendicant orders
Examples
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Study remained important when the friars went outside of Europe. During this period, the 13th century, a movement had developed among the mendicant orders seeking a rapprochement with Islam, and study played a role in it.
Academic text (2008) -
The Mendicant Orders (as well as the Cistercians and others) spent much of the century trying to distance themselves from female communities, and only uneasily accepted a permanent settlement of this question at papal insistence by the 1260s.
Academic text (2007) -
The term "religious orders" here refers to monastic orders, as well as to mendicant orders and congregations of religious sisters and religious brothers.
Academic text (2018) -
In political terms, bishops objected to mendicant orders operating in their diocese but essentially independent of their control.
Academic text (2003) -
A third group of clergy important in parish life, although intermittently, was the mendicant religious orders, either through seasonal preaching campaigns or, in the seventeenth century, through missions.
Academic text (2018) -
Critical to the examples under consideration here, the early observant position on poverty also seems to have generated significant conflict between proponents of reform and the devout laity, those who sought to share in the Dominican order's mendicant ideal.
Academic text (2003) -
And the intense persecutions in Basel in the early fifteenth century, too, originated to a large extent in tensions between the secular and mendicant clergy in that city, especially the mendicant friars of the Franciscan order.
Academic text (2003) -
John of Wales admonishes his mendicant reader, "Unless you act like the Good Samaritan, your brother's blood will cry out to God against you, as the Lord said to Cain (Gen. 4:10), who was not a Samaritan because he refused to care for his own brother."
Academic text (2006) -
Concerned over the moral implications of wealth, lay people often felt themselves drawn to and inspired by the impoverished vita apostolica practiced especially by the mendicant orders of the church, lavishing on these poor orders tremendous support and, somewhat awkwardly, great material wealth.
Academic text (2003) -
The mendicant monk asked for donations to help the poor in his community.
Antonyms
How Needy
Surface Forms
Etymology
Mendicant comes from the Latin words mendicare 'to beg' and mendicus 'beggar'. It was used for groups who lived by asking for 'alms', so as an adjective mendicant describes people or orders that depend on charity or begging.