St Clare of Assisi

Clare was born at Assisi into a noble family, but she appears noble still more by grace than by birth. When St Francis preached the Lenten sermons at San Giorgio, the young Clare heard in them the call she had been waiting for. She sought him out secretly and asked to live after the manner of the holy Gospel. On Palm Sunday of 1212, after receiving her palm in the cathedral, she fled her home that night and went to the Portiuncula, where Francis and the brethren received her with lighted candles before the altar of Our Lady of the Angels. There her hair was cut, she laid aside her fine clothes, and she took the rough penitential habit. The romance of that beginning remains, but the cost appears at once. Family pressure followed immediately, especially when her sister Agnes joined her, and the young women had to withstand intense efforts to bring them back. In time Clare was established at San Damiano, where Francis placed her as superior, and there the true shape of her life emerged. She was the feminine counterpart to the Franciscan spirit, but never an ornament to it. She governed, prayed, endured, corrected, served, and defended.

The most striking issue in her life was poverty. Clare wanted not simply a convent life, but the poverty of Christ lived with consistency. She resisted efforts, even papal ones, to soften that principle by endowing the community. When offered dispensation from strict poverty she answered that she wanted absolution from sins, not release from following Jesus Christ. That answer reveals her whole soul. This life also recounts the severe austerities of San Damiano, Clare’s long illness, her service to the sisters even while sick, and her extraordinary devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. The famous story of her repelling the attackers at San Damiano by prayer before the Eucharist is included as part of the convent’s living memory. During her last years she suffered greatly in body, yet remained peaceful, lucid, and grateful for the grace first given through Francis. She died in 1253, after securing approval for the rule that guarded the poverty she loved. Clare is gentle, affectionate, and hidden, but also immovable when the Gospel itself seems to be at stake.