Chapter of Mats 2025

About us

From the 2nd to 8th June 2025, the International Chapter of Mats of the Order of Friars Minor will be held in Assisi.
The path that led to this appointment starts from the last General Chapter, celebrated in Rome in 2021, which in mandate no. 4 indicated to involve the Ministers, the Custodes and their respective councils to promote authentic fraternal life and to listen to each person, especially young people, at several levels. 

Subsequently, the Minister General and his Definitory considered it enriching to undertake a synodal journey involving the friars of the first Order, but also the sisters and brothers of the second and third Orders, religious and laity, in order to succeed in prophetically renewing the identity of Friars Minor. 

The Entities of the Order were therefore asked to celebrate first of all at the local level their own Chapter of Mats, always with the modality of listening to lay men and women religious, proposing to turn attention to three fundamental nuclei: Charism, Communion and Mission.

The next step was to summarize the results of the local Chapters at the level of Conferences, which in turn sent their contributions to the General Curia. From those texts, an Instrumentum Laboris was drawn up that will provide material for discussion and comparison to the International Chapter of Assisi, which will be attended by 150 friars, Franciscan religious, lay men and women from all the Conferences of the Order.

The first Chapter of Mats

The term takes its name from the great General Chapter of May 30, 1221: we read in chapter XVIII of the Little Flowers of St. Francis that more than 5000 friars flocked to Our Lady of the Angels. They gathered in groups, in prayer or in dialogue, in an orderly and devout manner: "In that field there were roofs of trellises and mats, and distinguished by crowds, according to the friars of different provinces; and therefore that Chapter was called, the Chapter of trellises or mats" (FF 1848).