The Family of the Franciscans of the Immaculate, Friars, Sisters, Poor Clares, and the Third Order members known as the MIM (the Mission of the Immaculate Mediatrix), was founded by two holy Italian priests: Fr. Stefano Maria Manelli and Fr. Gabriele Maria Pellettieri. It was the Immaculate who willed the existence of this religious family and chose these two holy friar priests to be its initiators.

I.

Our Holy Prophets

Terrain, roots, fruit

The Family of the Franciscans of the Immaculate is made up of friars and sisters. But who willed that this “family” exist? Where did it come from? What are its beginnings?

A family of consecrated souls is not born inadvertently, by chance, but by the loving disposition of divine Providence.

Indeed the Immaculate willed the existence of this “family” and chose two friar priests to be its ‘initiators’: Fr. Stefano Maria Manelli and Fr. Gabriele Maria Pellettieri.

Both of these friars received their Franciscan and Marian formation among the Order of Friars Minor, Conventual, in the school of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, masters and models of incomparable greatness. Moreover, Fr. Stefano Maria Manelli was a spiritual son of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, the Franciscan saint made ‘giant’.

Together the two Fathers began living out their experience of the Rule of St. Francis and the Marian Traccia, or pathway, on August 2nd, 1970, in the Casa Mariana, or Marian House “Mary Most Holy of Good Counsel” at Frigento, Italy. Twenty years after that, on August 2nd, 1990, they found themselves with this new religious Family of friars and sisters which had grown, so to speak, day by day without having planned or foreseen it; which had been led from ‘on high’ by an invisible but real hand, a very real hand: the motherly hand of the Immaculate.

A Council which knocks

Why did the two Founders initiate the experience of the Casa Mariana, or Marian House?

The response to this interrogation is very simple and beautiful: because the Ecumenical Council Vatican II shook them up and provoked them in a healthy way, impelling them not to be “forgetful hearers”, but “faithful executors” of the Word of life (Jm 1:25).

There is a decree of Vatican II which directly regards the need to renew “religious life” in its pristine purity and fresh fecundity. This decree is called Perfectae Charitatis. It is an admirable decree loaded with wisdom both ancient and new and capable of stirring up amazing revivals and uncommon enterprises in those who want to commit themselves to renewing religious life without half measures or compromises.

The decree is fundamentally based on the renewal of religious life by its “return to the sources”, sources to be relived today in the “changed conditions of the times”, in order to realize “a more exact observance of the rule and constitutions.”

The eyes and heart, the mind and will of the two founding friars were fixed upon these pivotal points. Through a long, personal meditation for a number of years there matured the request to be able to ‘put into practice’ (cf. Lk 11:28) what the Church norms expressed in the conciliar document. The Immaculate Mediatrix of every grace led them to this request which they sensed to be a duty laden with sacrifice and joy.

To obey the Church, to obey the Ecumenical Council: this is the duty of every child of the Church. It is the sole guarantee of fidelity. “He who obeys, buds forth,” to use a popular Italian expression. So it was for these two reserved and bashful friars who became, within two decades, a new Family of friars and sisters.