How about you close your pie hole and stop criticizing people who want to help others. In case you haven’t noticed lately, the world is in short supply of such people.

Maybe if some brothers had helped you as a child you wouldn’t be the negative, pissed off person that you are today.

Monks are fundamentally Benedictines, and monastic (alone) living males.

As a former friar (1960-73) i enjoyed this piece immensely–but i cringe when friars are called monks. I dearly love my Benedictine brethren and other monastics–but what i love about Francis and his followers is that they slept in doorways and identiffied with their lesser brothers–and they also advocate for peace and social change. so when a friar–like my old clasmaate Louie Vitale is arrested for opposing militarism at Ft. Bennng-there is little that anyone can do but say, ‘hey, he’s a friar. that’s what friars do.’

A correction for you:
Franciscans are _friars_, NOT “monks.”
There’s a substantial difference.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friar#Friars_and_monks .
(Also, fyi, monks live in monasteries; friars live in friaries.)
The progression, monks –> friars –> clerics
(as in Benedictines –> Franciscans –> Jesuits),
was a historical evolution in Western European Christianity.
Monks have been around for millennia in several religious traditions.
Friars are (more or less) unique to Christianity, and they were considered quite revolutionary when the first religious orders of friars were founded in the 12th & 13th centuries.

AMDG,
Tadgh Muircheartach
(Timothy Joseph Francis Corrigan O’Malley Ryan X).
Ann Arbor, MI