Saint Clare of Montefalco

Saint Clare of Montefalco, also called Clare of the Cross, was abbess of the monastery of the Holy Cross at Montefalco. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on August 17 as a virgin of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine who burned with love for the Passion of Christ.

She was born in 1268 at Montefalco in Umbria. Her older sister Joan led a life of prayer and penance in a hermitage that their father had built on family land. Clare was six years old when she decided to join her. Prayer, fasting, and mortification became for her the way of conforming herself to the suffering Christ.

As the number of candidates grew, Joan, with her father’s support, obtained permission from the bishop of Spoleto in 1290 to turn the hermitage into the monastery of the Holy Cross, and the sisters received the Rule of Saint Augustine. A year later Joan died, and the twenty-three-year-old Clare was appointed to succeed her. She accepted the office reluctantly, considering herself unworthy, but as abbess she put the life of the community in order, introduced manual work, and guided each of the sisters with care.

For eleven years, until 1299, she went through a severe trial of spiritual dryness and the silence of God. At the beginning of 1294 she saw Christ in the monastery garden as a suffering pilgrim carrying a cross. He said that he was looking for a firm place to plant the cross, and he found it in her heart. From then on she often repeated: “I have my Jesus within my heart.”

The poor came to the monastery grille, and she gave them food and a word of comfort, while learned men, priests, and high dignitaries of the Church sought her counsel. In 1307 she recognized the errors of the sect of the Free Spirit in the teaching of the Franciscan Bentivenga of Gubbio, who tried to win her over, and her testimony contributed to his condemnation.

She was ill for a long time, and from July 1308 she could no longer leave her bed. She died on August 17, 1308, at the age of forty, in the church that had been built beside the monastery at her wish. The sisters opened her body and found in her heart signs of the Lord’s Passion formed of tissue, among them a cross, nails, a scourge, and a crown. The vicar of the bishop of Spoleto, Berengar of Saint-Affrique, came to punish them for this, but after examining the matter with physicians, jurists, and theologians he changed his mind and became the chief promoter of her canonization.

As early as 1309 the bishop of Spoleto ordered an inquiry into her life, and in 1318 and 1319 an apostolic process was held in which many witnesses testified. Its acts are the main source of what we know about her. The process, however, was not completed at that time. In 1737 Clement XII confirmed her cult, which amounted to beatification, and on December 8, 1881, Leo XIII declared her a saint. Her body and relics, among them her heart, rest in the church of Saint Clare in Montefalco beside the monastery of Augustinian nuns, which Pope Leo XIV visited in November 2025.