The Secular Franciscan Order of Sao Joao del-Rei - a lay brotherhood of white devotees - was canonically erected on March 8, 1749 by Friar Manoel da Cruz, the Bishop of Mariana. They used an earlier chapel for a generation. By 1772 that building had deteriorated, and the brotherhood decided to build something larger and finer. Aleijadinho had just completed the designs for Saint Francis of Assisi in Ouro Preto, the town where he lived, sixty kilometers away. He was hired for Sao Joao as well. His drawing arrived. Then construction began, and the building started to drift from the drawing.

In 1774 Francisco de Lima Cerqueira was commissioned to do the masonry work. Cerqueira was a Portuguese-trained mestre-de-obras who had worked at the Carmo church in Ouro Preto, and he had ideas of his own. He changed the towers. He changed the pilasters of the crossing. He changed the glass arrangement in the nave and the layout of the sacristy. Whether these were improvements or liberties was already controversial in his own time and has stayed controversial ever since. John Bury, the British art historian who wrote the definitive studies of colonial Brazilian architecture, argued that Cerqueira's modifications actually increased the church's originality - particularly his solution for the towers. The building finished at Sao Joao is distinctively itself, neither pure Aleijadinho nor standard colonial practice.

Colonial churches in Minas Gerais were almost never built by one generation. By 1804 the nave and the body of the church were done. In 1809 Aniceto de Souza Lopes completed the towers and the choir, and according to IPHAN also executed the reliefs on the pediment and the frontispiece of the main door. From start to substantial completion took about thirty-five years, spanning the end of Portuguese colonial rule and the first decade of independent Brazil. The plan itself is conventional - a single nave with side altars, a choir above the entrance, a deep apse separated from the nave by a monumental arch, and an attached sacristy. What is not conventional is the doorway, which IPHAN describes as having 'the rich composition of the doorway, with emphasis on the magnificent carvings that are organized in an elegant design.' This is the facade Burton praised.

Sao Joao del-Rei calls itself the city 'where the bells speak,' and at the Church of Saint Francis they are not exaggerating. A colonial-era tradition called the combate dos sinos - the battle of bells - still plays out every Lent. The city's churches compete to ring their bells more vigorously and for longer than their rivals, and Saint Francis fields a serious team. The bells have their own vocabulary: specific ringing patterns announce funerals, saints' days, specific mysteries of the liturgical year. When a bellringer dies in service, there is a tradition of temporarily removing the bell clapper and chaining it - a ritual that has generated local legends, including an implausible one about a bellringer arrested for a statue that miraculously appeared on the altar. The statue story has no historical basis. The clapper tradition does.

The church has been a musical institution from its beginning. An 18th-century musical group performed for its festivities, which later split and reorganized in the 19th century as the Lira Sanjoanense and the Orquestra Ribeiro Bastos. Both are among the oldest continuously active musical associations in Brazil. They still perform for the church's festivities: the patron saint's celebration around October 4 with a nine-day novena, and the Quinquenas of St. Francis between September 12 and 17 that mark his reception of the stigmata. Holy Week is the big season - Saint Francis receives the image of Our Lord of the Steps from the Cathedral in a torchlit Procession of the Deposits, then joins the Procession of the Meeting at the Largo da Camara, where it encounters the image of Our Lady of Sorrows coming out of the Carmo church. The pageantry has been happening this way for over two hundred years. The same orchestras play music composed specifically for this church, for this ceremony, in this town, continuing a practice older than the independence of Brazil.