1517
Ordo Fratrum Minorum /  The Order of Friars Minor

Due to the important mission of pastoral care carried out by the Franciscans, in the 14th to 15th century, the strict poverty requirements that had been prescribed by their founder where officially lifted. Brothers who were following the orders of St Francis unconditionally found this to be unacceptable. One of the key reform movements in the 1st part of the 15th century was initiated by St Bernard of Siena and St John Capistrano. Their followers, the Observant Franciscans (known as “Bernardines” in Lithuania) where given the right of autonomy within the Franciscan Order in 1446, and in 1517 a new independent order was founded.

The first Franciscan Observants (Bernardines) in Poland settled in Krakow in 1453, on the initiative of St John of Capestrano and with support from King Casimir Jagiellon. In 1469, the ruler invited the Bernardines to Vilnius. A complex of Gothic buildings that rose at the Vilnia River at the turn of the 16th century comprising the Church of St Francis and St Bernardino, a convent and the Chapel of St Anne is one of the most spectacular late medieval ensembles of architecture and art in Lithuania. For almost four centuries, the Vilnius Bernardine convent was the most significant in Lithuania: it was the seat of the provincial, had a novitiate and a house of studies. The Vilnius Bernardines boasted one of the richest libraries in the entire province. In 1864, the Vilnius Bernardine Convent was suppressed. The convent’s buildings at first housed a garrison of the Russian army, and after World War I, the Art Faculty of Stephen Báthory University. The State Art Institute (today, the Vilnius Academy of Arts) has occupied the buildings since the end of the Second World War. The real owners returned to the neglected church in 1994.