Saint Clare of Assisi

Saint Clare of Assisi was a disciple of Saint Francis and the foundress of the Order of Poor Ladies, known today as the Poor Clares. She spent more than forty years in poverty and prayer in the small monastery of San Damiano near Assisi. She was the first woman in the history of the Church to write a religious rule and submit it to the pope for approval. The Church commemorates her on August 11.

She was born in Assisi in 1193 or 1194 into a wealthy noble family. She received her faith above all from her mother, Ortolana. Her relatives intended to arrange an advantageous marriage for her, but Clare was drawn to the life according to the Gospel that Francis and his companions led in poverty.

On the night between Palm Sunday and the Monday of Holy Week in 1211 or 1212, at about the age of eighteen, she secretly left her home and went to the little church of the Portiuncula. There, before the altar of the Mother of God, in the presence of Francis and the friars holding lighted torches, she renounced everything: Francis cut her hair, and she put on a poor habit of penance. For several months she stayed in other religious communities, resisting the pressure of her relatives, who wanted to bring her back home. Then she settled at the church of San Damiano. Her younger sister Agnes soon joined her, and in time so did her mother, another sister, and many other women.

At San Damiano Clare led the community as its superior until her death. She herself served the sick sisters and did not shrink from the humblest tasks. Above all she guarded poverty. She obtained from the pope the so-called privilege of poverty, by which the sisters of San Damiano owned no property at all, not even in common, an exception in the Church law of the time. The rule she had written, which included this privilege, was approved by Pope Innocent IV with the bull Solet annuere on August 9, 1253, two days before her death.

Clare had a living faith in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. According to the accounts of her contemporaries, when Saracen mercenaries were about to attack San Damiano and lay waste to Assisi, she drove them back by holding up the Blessed Sacrament. For many years she was seriously ill. To Saint Agnes of Prague, daughter of the King of Bohemia, who followed in her footsteps, she sent four letters full of love for Christ. It was also told that one Christmas night, confined to her bed by illness in the monastery, she heard the singing and saw the crib in the friars’ church as if she were present there. For this reason, in 1958, Pius XII proclaimed her the patroness of television.

She died at San Damiano on August 11, 1253. According to the testimony handed down, her last words were a thanksgiving: “Blessed are you, Lord, who created me.” Huge crowds came to her funeral. As early as 1255, two years after her death, Pope Alexander IV enrolled her among the saints. Her body rests in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Clare in Assisi.