12 August — III Class
Foundress of the Poor Ladies of San Damiano, first woman to give the Church a monastic rule of her own composition, and luminous mirror of evangelical poverty.
I. Identitas et Origines
Clare was born at Assisi in 1193 or 1194, the eldest daughter of the knightly house of Offreduccio. Her father, Favarone di Offreduccio, belonged to the urban nobility of Assisi; her mother, Ortolana, was a woman of notable piety who had made pilgrimages to Rome, to Sant’Angelo on Monte Gargano, and even to the Holy Land — a devotional inheritance that would mark all three of her daughters, for Agnes and Beatrice would both follow Clare into the cloister, and Ortolana herself, widowed, would end her days in her daughter’s monastery.
The decisive turn of Clare’s life came through the preaching of St. Francis. Having heard him preach the Lenten course at San Giorgio and having sought him out in private conference, the eighteen-year-old resolved to abandon rank, inheritance, and an advantageous marriage already being arranged for her. On the night following Palm Sunday of 1212, she left her father’s house secretly — tradition holds that she departed by the small side door reserved for the dead — and came to St. Mary of the Angels, the Portiuncula, where Francis and his brethren awaited her with torches. There, before the altar of the Virgin, she put off her fine garments, and Francis cut her hair, clothing her in the penitential habit. Placed first with the Benedictine nuns of San Paolo delle Abbadesse at Bastia, and then at Sant’Angelo di Panzo, she withstood the armed attempts of her kinsmen to drag her home, clinging to the altar cloths and baring her shorn head as the sign of a consecration already accomplished. Within weeks her sister Agnes joined her, and Francis established the two at the small church of San Damiano, which he himself had rebuilt with his own hands — the church where the crucifix had spoken to him. Clare would not leave its enclosure for the remaining forty-one years of her life.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The life Clare established at San Damiano was of a poverty more absolute than any women’s community had yet been permitted to profess. Where the great monastic houses rested upon endowments of land and rents, Clare insisted that her community own nothing at all — neither individually nor in common — living solely from the labor of their hands and the alms of the faithful. This privilegium paupertatis, the privilege of possessing no possessions, she sought and defended before successive Roman Pontiffs with a tenacity that constitutes one of the most remarkable sustained acts of will in the history of religious life. When Gregory IX, solicitous for the sisters’ security, offered to absolve her from the vow of absolute poverty, she answered: “Holy Father, absolve me from my sins, but I desire no absolution from following Christ.”
Her personal austerities exceeded even her rule: she wore a rough hair shirt, kept perpetual abstinence, fasted on bread and water throughout Lent and the Lent of St. Martin, and for years took no food at all on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — until Francis and the Bishop of Assisi together commanded her to eat at least an ounce and a half of bread daily. Named abbess in 1215, and accepting the office only under obedience, she governed less by command than by precedence in service: washing the feet of the serving sisters, tending the sick with her own hands, rising in the night to cover those who slept uncovered. In her the Franciscan paradox stood complete: the most inflexible will in Italy joined to the gentlest of governments.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
From San Damiano, Clare became mother to a religious family that spread across Europe within her own lifetime. The Poor Ladies — the Second Order of St. Francis, known after her death as the Poor Clares — were established at Perugia, Florence, Siena, and beyond the Alps in France, Germany, and Bohemia, where Agnes, daughter of the King of Bohemia, refused imperial marriage to enter the monastery she had founded at Prague. Clare’s four surviving letters to Agnes of Prague form the most precious deposit of her spiritual teaching: in them Christ is the mirror into which the consecrated virgin gazes daily, finding at the mirror’s border His poverty in the manger, at its surface His labors, and at its depths His Passion.
Her crowning ecclesiastical achievement came at the very end. Dissatisfied with the rules imposed upon her community by Cardinal Hugolino and later by Innocent IV — rules that admitted possessions and diluted the Franciscan form of life — Clare composed her own, the first monastic rule written by a woman to receive papal approbation. Innocent IV confirmed it by the bull Solet annuere on 9 August 1253, and the document was brought to San Damiano and placed in the dying foundress’s hands two days before her death. She kissed the seal, it is related, many times.
Nor was her enclosure a retreat from the Church’s battles. In September of 1240, when Saracen mercenaries in the imperial service of Frederick II scaled the walls of San Damiano, the sick abbess had herself carried to the refectory door bearing the silver and ivory pyx containing the Blessed Sacrament, and prostrating herself before her Eucharistic Lord, prayed aloud for the defense of her daughters. The attackers withdrew without harm to the community — a deliverance to which the sisters themselves testified under oath in the canonization process. The following year, when the imperial captain Vitalis d’Aversa besieged Assisi itself, Clare and her community gave themselves to prayer and penance with ashes upon their heads, and the siege was lifted. Assisi has honored her as its protectress ever since.
IV. Mors et Cultus
Clare died at San Damiano on 11 August 1253, having endured nearly three decades of continual illness with unbroken serenity. Her last audible words, addressed to her own soul, were a summation of her whole life: “Go forth in peace, for thou hast followed the good road. Go forth without fear, for He that created thee hath sanctified thee, hath ever protected thee, and loveth thee as a mother her child. And Thou, O Lord, be blessed, for having created me.” Pope Innocent IV, then at Assisi, attended her funeral and wished to have the Office of Virgins replaced with that of a saint already glorified — being dissuaded only by the counsel that canonization ought not to precede its process.
That process was in the event among the swiftest in the Church’s history. Alexander IV canonized her at Anagni in 1255, scarcely two years after her death, in the bull Clara claris praeclara, whose opening wordplay on her name — clear, brilliant, resplendent — set the theme of all subsequent devotion: Clara claris praeclara meritis, Clare, bright with bright merits. Her feast was assigned to 12 August, the day following her death, since 11 August was already held by the ancient Roman martyrs Tiburtius and Susanna. Her body was translated in 1260 to the newly built Basilica of Santa Clara in Assisi, where it was rediscovered beneath the high altar in 1850 and now rests in the crypt. In 1958 Pope Pius XII declared her heavenly patroness of television, in memory of the Christmas night when, too ill to leave her bed, she beheld and heard the Mass being celebrated in the distant basilica of St. Francis as though present there — seeing, as the ancient testimony has it, the very crib of the Infant of Bethlehem.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Clare’s authentic writings are few and concentrated: her Rule, her four Letters to Agnes of Prague, and the Testament and Blessing transmitted under her name. Their doctrine is single: Christ poor and crucified is the treasure hidden in the field, and the exchange of earthly goods for that treasure is not loss but the shrewdest of commerce. To Agnes she writes that the Kingdom of Heaven is promised and given by the Lord only to the poor, “for so long as a person loves temporal things, he loses the fruit of charity”; and again, in the language of the mirror: “Place your mind before the mirror of eternity; place your soul in the brilliance of glory; place your heart in the figure of the divine substance; and transform your entire being into the image of the Godhead Itself through contemplation.”
Her Testament enjoins upon her daughters, as the last will of their mother, the perpetual observance of most holy poverty, binding them to the Lady Poverty whom Francis had espoused. In her the Church beholds the contemplative counterpart of the Franciscan mission: as Francis went forth to preach Christ poor, Clare remained enclosed to be poor with Christ — and the Church has never judged the second vocation the lesser.
VI. Oratio
Collecta (12 Augusti, in festo S. Clarae Virginis):
Exáudi nos, Deus, salutáris noster: ut, sicut de beátæ Claræ Vírginis tuæ festivitáte gaudémus; ita piæ devotiónis erudiámur afféctu. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
Graciously hear us, O God our Saviour: that as we rejoice in the festival of blessed Clare Thy Virgin, so we may be instructed in the affection of loving devotion. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
VII. Aspiratio
O Lord Jesus Christ, mirror of eternity, Who didst so enkindle the heart of Thy virgin Clare that she counted all things loss beside the treasure of Thy poverty: grant me grace to gaze upon Thee daily, to love what she loved, and to hold nothing — not even myself — as my own. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Lives of the Saints path. Read St. Clare alongside St. Francis (4 October) as the double foundation of the Franciscan family; her letters to Agnes of Prague reward slow, meditative reading and are brief enough for a single sitting each. The canonization bull Clara claris praeclara of Alexander IV is itself a masterpiece of medieval papal rhetoric on sanctity.
Sacred Liturgy path. The Mass Dilexisti from the Common of Virgins, which the Church sings for St. Clare, sets the pattern for all virgin-martyrs and virgins: consider how the Epistle (2 Cor. 10:17–18; 11:1–2) frames consecrated virginity as espousal — despondi enim vos uni viro virginem castam exhibere Christo.
Theology and Doctrine path. Clare’s defense of the privilege of poverty opens directly onto the Scholastic treatment of the evangelical counsels: St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae II-II, on poverty and the state of perfection, gives the doctrinal architecture beneath her lived insistence.
Spiritual Practices path. The “mirror meditation” of the letters to Agnes — beholding Christ in crib, in labor, on Cross — is a complete school of mental prayer in three movements, and may be practiced before the tabernacle in a quarter of an hour.
Church History path. Clare’s dealings with Hugolino (Gregory IX), Innocent IV, and the imperial wars of Frederick II place San Damiano at the center of the thirteenth-century contest between papacy and empire — enclosure, it emerges, was never isolation.