The Constitutions and General Statutes of the Order of the Friars Minor Conventual have been translated into Polish, thanks to the hard work of the Foederatio Europae Mediae et Orientalis (FEMO).
These translations will soon be made available to friars in eleven countries, namely, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Hungary.
The texts were worked on by a working committee composed of Friars Zbigniew KOPEĆ (Province of the Immaculate Mother of God in Poland [Warsaw]); Kazimierz MALINOWSKI (Province of St. Anthony and Bl. James of Strepar in Poland [Cracow]), Jan OLSZEWSKI (Warsaw) and Piotr GRYZIEC (Cracow).
After much discussion, the new text of the Constitutions were first approved and adopted by the 2018 Extraordinary General Chapter. The text was then submitted to the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. On November 29, 2018, the text was officially approved. On December 8, 2018, the former Minister General, Friar Marco TASCA, promulgated the new Constitutions and established them as legally binding starting February 2, 2019.
The General Statutes were subsequently revised. They were approved at the 2019 Ordinary General Chapter and were promulgated on August 14, 2019, by the current Minister General, Friar Carlos TROVARELLI. Friar Carlos himself pointed out their importance in his promulgation decree: “We created a new draft of our General Statutes, in order to observe even more concrete ways of living the Gospel in today’s historic setting.”
Friar Jan Maria SZEWEK
