St. Clare of Assisi

St. Clare of Assisi was the founder of the Poor Clares, born Chiara Offreduccio into a noble Assisi family in 1194 and dead at the monastery of San Damiano on 11 August 1253. She left her father's house on the night of Palm Sunday in 1212, at eighteen, to follow the way of life Francis of Assisi was preaching, and she spent the next forty years as abbess of San Damiano without leaving it. Her rule was approved by Pope Innocent IV two days before she died, the first rule written by a woman for women to receive papal approval.

The thing she fought for across four decades and three popes was the right of her sisters to own nothing at all, not even in common. She won it, in writing, from a dying pope's chancery, and she was canonised two years later.

The Little Plant of Francis

St. Clare of Assisi was the first woman to write a monastic rule for women. Moved by Francis's preaching, she ran away from home at 18 on Palm Sunday night. She traded her jewels for a rough tunic and cut her hair. It was the original "minimalist" makeover.

She called herself the "little plant" of St. Francis, but she grew into a mighty oak. She founded the Poor Clares, creating a powerhouse of prayer to back up the Franciscan friars.

The precise claim is that her rule was the first written by a woman for women to be approved by a pope. Women had written for religious communities before her, and what was new in 1253 was papal approval of a text composed by the abbess herself for her own order. The hair was cut by Francis at the Porziuncola, the little chapel below the town, on the night she arrived.

The Privilege of Poverty

Like Francis, Clare was in love with "Lady Poverty." She fought fiercely for the "Privilege of Poverty": the right for her sisters to own nothing, neither individually nor communally, relying entirely on God's providence and alms. Popes tried to force property upon her order for their security, but Clare steadfastly refused, trusting that God would care for His brides.

She lived a life of extreme austerity within the cloister of San Damiano, yet her joy was radiant. She wrote to St. Agnes of Prague, "Place your mind before the mirror of eternity! Place your soul in the brightness of glory!"

The phrase privilege of poverty is exact, and it is worth pausing on the strangeness of it. Every other religious house in Europe sought privileges that secured its property. Clare petitioned for the privilege of having none. She is said to have obtained a first grant from Innocent III, and Gregory IX confirmed a privilege of poverty to San Damiano in 1228. Church authorities regarded a community of enclosed women with no endowment as irresponsible, because a monastery without land depends entirely on the alms of a town that may stop giving. Clare's answer was that this was the point.

Miracle of the Eucharist

One of the most famous incidents in her life occurred in 1240, when Saracen mercenaries attacked Assisi and scaled the walls of the convent. Sick and bedridden, Clare asked to be carried to the door with the monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament.

She raised the Host and prayed, "O Lord, protect these Sisters whom I cannot protect now." A voice like a child's answered, "I will keep them always in My care." The attackers fled in terror. Don't mess with a nun and the Eucharist.

One detail should be corrected, because it appears in almost every retelling. The earliest accounts speak of a pyx or a small silver casket holding the Blessed Sacrament, which is what a thirteenth-century convent would have had. The monstrance in the paintings is an anachronism: monstrances for public exposition came into general use later. The troops were mercenaries in imperial service during the wars between Frederick II and the papacy, and Assisi was attacked again the following year, when the besieging force withdrew after the sisters' prayers, which is a second and separate episode.

Patron Saint of Television

In a surprising modern twist, Pope Pius XII declared St. Clare the patron saint of television in 1958. The reason? One Christmas Eve, when she was too ill to attend Mass, she miraculously saw and heard the entire liturgy projected on the wall of her cell, as if she were present in the basilica.

The declaration was made on 14 February 1958. The episode behind it is dated to Christmas 1252, months before her death, when she was too ill to be carried to the basilica of San Francesco for the night office and Mass, and testified afterwards that she had seen and heard it. The witnesses to that account are the sisters who gave evidence at the process for her canonisation, which began within two years of her death, so the testimony is unusually close to the event.

Quotable Wisdom

"Go forth without fear, for He who created you has made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother."

These were Clare's dying words to her own soul, a beautiful summary of her life of trust.

The sisters who were with her recorded them, and the second half of what she said that day is quoted less often: blessed be you, my God, for having created me. A woman dying after decades of illness and deliberate hardship thanked God for having made her at all.

Assisi in 1212 and the Family She Left

Clare was born in Assisi in 1194 into the Offreduccio family, minor nobility with a fortified house near the cathedral of San Rufino. Her mother, Ortolana, was a woman of unusual piety who had made pilgrimages to Rome, to Santiago and to the Holy Land, and who later joined her daughter in religious life.

Assisi at that moment was a town in the middle of a social revolution. The merchant class had risen against the nobility, and Clare's family had spent time in exile in Perugia during the fighting. Francis Bernardone, the son of a cloth merchant, had renounced his inheritance in the public square a few years before, stripping in front of the bishop and handing his clothes back to his father. Clare heard him preach during Lent in 1212 and arranged to meet him.

On the night of Palm Sunday she left the house by a side door and walked down to the Porziuncola, where Francis and the brothers cut her hair and clothed her in a rough tunic. Her family came after her. She had taken refuge with Benedictine nuns at San Paolo, and the accounts describe her holding the altar cloth and showing her shorn head to force them to leave her. Her younger sister Agnes joined her days later, and the family came for Agnes too, violently. Eventually her other sister Beatrice and her widowed mother Ortolana also entered.

An eighteen-year-old noblewoman refusing an arranged marriage in 1212 was destroying a family's plan for an alliance and refusing to be the asset she had been raised as. The decision was public, and it cost her family a great deal.

Forty Years at San Damiano

Francis settled Clare and her companions at San Damiano, the small church outside the walls that he had repaired with his own hands after hearing the crucifix there tell him to rebuild the Church. She arrived in 1212 or shortly after, became abbess around 1216, and remained there until her death in 1253. She did not leave.

The life was strictly enclosed, silent for most of the day, and physically hard: fasting, no meat, the ground or a board to sleep on, and manual work, which for the sisters at San Damiano included spinning and sewing altar linens that were sent out to churches. Clare imposed the austerity on herself more severely than on her community, and Francis and the bishop at one point ordered her to eat more.

She was ill for the last twenty-eight years of her life, largely bedridden, and she governed the community from her sickbed, wrote her letters and her rule from it, and outlived Francis by twenty-seven years.

The Fight for the Rule

The forty years at San Damiano were a long argument with Rome about a legal document, and Clare won it on her deathbed.

The problem was structural. Church law expected enclosed women to live under an existing approved rule, normally the Rule of St. Benedict, with an endowment to support them, because enclosed women cannot go out to beg. Cardinal Hugolino, later Pope Gregory IX, drew up a rule for the communities associated with Clare in 1219 that followed that model. It was workable and it was not what she had promised Francis.

Clare kept pressing for a text that guaranteed the absence of property. Gregory IX confirmed a privilege of poverty to San Damiano in 1228, and later attempts were made to bring her houses under other rules, including one issued by Innocent IV in 1247 that assumed common ownership. She refused to accept it.

In the last years of her life she wrote her own rule, taking Francis's Rule as its base and building the renunciation of all possessions into the text. Pope Innocent IV approved it by the bull Solet annuere on 9 August 1253. She died on 11 August. The tradition is that the document was brought to her bed and that she kissed it.

What is impressive here is forty years of patient, documented, legally literate persistence by a woman who never left one building.

What She Wrote

Clare's surviving writings are short and there are not many of them, and they are among the earliest spiritual writings by a woman in the Western Church that we possess in her own words.

The Rule. Approved in 1253, the legal and spiritual charter of the order.

Four letters to St. Agnes of Prague. Agnes was a Bohemian princess who refused a marriage to the emperor and founded a Poor Clare monastery in Prague. The letters, written over about twenty years between two women who never met, are Clare's best writing. They contain the image she is known for: to place the mind before the mirror of eternity, to place the soul in the brightness of glory, and to gaze on that mirror daily, in which the poverty, humility and charity of Christ can be seen.

Her Testament and her Blessing. Written near the end, addressed to her sisters, repeating the promise of poverty and blessing those who would come after her.

Clare and Francis

The relationship between Clare and Francis has been sentimentalised for eight centuries, and the sources are more restrained than the paintings. They met rarely after she entered San Damiano, because the enclosure and Francis's own caution about the friars' contact with women both limited it. He appointed her, encouraged her, wrote her a short form of life and a canticle for her sisters, and sent her word during his final illness.

When Francis died in 1226 his body was carried from the Porziuncola to Assisi by way of San Damiano so that Clare and the sisters could see him through the grille. She lived another twenty-seven years and spent them defending what he had begun against the pressure to make it sustainable.

Calling her the little plant of Francis was her own phrase and it was accurate about the origin and misleading about the outcome. Our page on St. Francis of Assisi covers the man whose preaching she heard in Lent 1212.

Death, Canonisation and Where She Rests

Clare died on 11 August 1253 at San Damiano. Pope Innocent IV attended her funeral. The process for her canonisation opened almost immediately and collected sworn testimony from the sisters who had lived with her, which is why so much detail about her daily life survives. Pope Alexander IV canonised her in 1255, two years after her death.

Her feast day is 11 August. It was kept on 12 August for centuries and was returned to the day of her death in the calendar revision of 1969.

The basilica of Santa Chiara was built in Assisi from 1260 and her body was moved there. It was rediscovered beneath the high altar in the nineteenth century and now lies in the crypt. The San Damiano crucifix, the painted cross before which Francis heard the words that began everything, hangs in the same basilica.

She is invoked as a patron of television, of eye disease and of embroiderers, and she is a patron of Assisi.

The Poor Clares Today

The order Clare founded, the Order of St. Clare, continues as one of the Church's principal contemplative orders for women, with monasteries on every continent. Poor Clares are enclosed and contemplative, supporting themselves by their work and by alms, and their day is built around the Divine Office and the Eucharist.

Different branches follow different observances of the rule, some the rule Clare herself wrote and others later adaptations, including the Colettines, reformed by St. Colette of Corbie in the fifteenth century, and the Capuchin Poor Clares. Most monasteries will accept prayer requests from anyone who writes to them, which is the ordinary way people encounter them.

Why the Church Holds Her Up

The Church holds up Clare for choosing to be poor and then holding that choice against everyone who wanted to help her out of it.

Voluntary poverty is a strand of Christian life that runs directly from the Gospel. The Lord tells the rich young man to sell what he has, give to the poor, and come and follow (Mark 10:21), and he tells the disciples that the poor in spirit are blessed and the kingdom of heaven is theirs (Matthew 5:3). The Catechism treats poverty of heart as required of every Christian and the evangelical counsel of poverty as a particular form of that (CCC 2544 to 2547). Clare's contribution was insisting that this could be lived by a community of women with the same rigour as by a community of men, and getting it written into canon law.

She is also held up for stability. She stayed in one place for forty years, sick for most of them, and built something that has lasted eight centuries out of a small building outside a town wall.

And she is held up for the Eucharist. Whatever happened at the wall of San Damiano in 1240, the picture the Church kept is a bedridden woman with nothing at all holding up the Blessed Sacrament, which is a fair summary of her whole position.

What to Take From St. Clare

Own less on purpose. Clare's poverty was chosen, specific and legally defended. The domestic version is deciding what you will not acquire and holding to it.

Persist through the paperwork. She won her argument with Rome by outlasting three popes and writing the document herself. Patience of that kind is a form of courage that gets no paintings.

Stay put. Forty years in one house is the opposite of every modern instinct, and it is what produced her.

Write to somebody who is doing the same thing. The letters to Agnes of Prague went to a woman she never met, and they are the best of her.

Keep the Eucharist at the centre when you can do nothing else. Sick, enclosed and powerless, that is what she reached for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Clare of Assisi?

St. Clare was the founder of the Poor Clares, born Chiara Offreduccio into a noble family of Assisi in 1194 and dead at San Damiano on 11 August 1253. She left home on the night of Palm Sunday in 1212 to follow the way of life Francis of Assisi was preaching, became abbess of San Damiano around 1216, and remained there for the rest of her life.

What was the Privilege of Poverty?

It was a papal grant allowing Clare's community to own no property at all, individually or in common, and to live entirely on alms. Church authorities regarded an enclosed community of women without an endowment as unsafe and repeatedly pressed her to accept property. She refused for four decades and wrote the renunciation into her own rule, which Pope Innocent IV approved on 9 August 1253, two days before her death.

Why is St. Clare the patron saint of television?

Pope Pius XII declared her patron of television on 14 February 1958. The reason is an episode dated to Christmas 1252, when she was too ill to be carried to the basilica of San Francesco and afterwards testified that she had seen and heard the whole liturgy on the wall of her cell. The sisters who gave evidence at her canonisation process reported it.

Did St. Clare drive off an army with the Eucharist?

The accounts describe an attack on San Damiano in 1240 by mercenaries in imperial service, during which Clare, who was ill, had the Blessed Sacrament brought to the door and prayed, and the attackers withdrew. One detail is usually got wrong: the earliest accounts speak of a pyx or small silver casket rather than a monstrance, which came into general use later. Assisi was threatened again the following year, which is a separate episode.

When is St. Clare's feast day?

Her feast day is 11 August, the day she died in 1253. It was kept on 12 August for centuries and was moved back to the day of her death in the calendar revision of 1969. She was canonised by Pope Alexander IV in 1255, and her body lies in the crypt of the basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi.

What did St. Clare write?

Her surviving writings are her Rule, approved in 1253, four letters to St. Agnes of Prague, a Testament and a Blessing. The letters to Agnes, a Bohemian princess who founded a Poor Clare monastery in Prague and whom Clare never met, are her best known work and contain the image of placing the mind before the mirror of eternity.