Clare of Assisi

Chiara Offreduccio was born in Assisi, a hill town in the Umbrian region of central Italy, in 1194. Her father, Favarone di Offreduccio, belonged to a noble family of knights, and her mother, Ortolana, was a devout woman who had made pilgrimages to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and the Holy Land ^[1]. The household was wealthy, maintaining a palace in Assisi and a castle on the slope of Mount Subasio.

Witnesses at her canonization process, questioned in 1253, recalled that even as a girl Clare set aside food for the poor and wore a rough garment under her fine clothes ^[2]. Political violence shaped her childhood. When fighting broke out between Assisi's merchant class and its nobility around 1200, the Offreduccio family fled to the neighboring city of Perugia, returning only after several years of exile ^[1].

By her late teens Clare had already refused at least one proposal of marriage, resisting family expectations that a woman of her rank would form a useful alliance. During these same years a merchant's son named Francesco di Bernardone was preaching in and around Assisi, having renounced his own inheritance to live in poverty. His example reached Clare, and around 1211 she began meeting him secretly, accompanied by a kinswoman, to discuss abandoning her old life ^[3].

On the night of Palm Sunday in 1212, the eighteen-year-old Clare slipped out of her family home, reportedly through a small side door normally kept blocked, and walked to the chapel of the Portiuncula outside the town walls. There Francis and his brothers received her. She exchanged her gown for a plain tunic, and Francis cut off her hair, the traditional sign of entry into religious life ^[2].

Because the small community of friars could not house a woman, Francis placed her temporarily with Benedictine nuns at San Paolo delle Abbadesse near Bastia. Her family pursued her there. According to the canonization testimony, armed relatives attempted to drag her home, and she clung to the altar cloths and uncovered her shorn head to show that the decision could not be undone ^[2]. Her uncle Monaldo led a second attempt weeks later when her younger sister Caterina, later called Agnes, joined her at another convent. That effort also failed.

Francis soon settled Clare at the small church of San Damiano, a building he had repaired with his own hands in the first years of his conversion. Other women joined her there, including, in time, her sister Beatrice and her widowed mother Ortolana. San Damiano remained Clare's home for the rest of her life; she is not known to have ever left it for more than short distances ^[1].

The community at San Damiano became the first house of what contemporaries called the Order of Poor Ladies, or the Damianites, and what the church after Clare's canonization renamed the Order of Saint Clare ^[4]. Francis gave the women a brief form of life, and around 1215, when church law required enclosed women's communities to adopt an established rule, Clare accepted the title of abbess, reportedly with reluctance, and the community was placed under a version of the Rule of Saint Benedict ^[3].

What set the Poor Ladies apart was their insistence on corporate poverty. Most monasteries survived on endowments of land and rents. Clare wanted her sisters to own nothing at all, individually or collectively, living instead on alms and the work of their hands. Between 1215 and 1216 she obtained from Pope Innocent III an unusual concession known as the Privilege of Poverty, a papal guarantee that no one could compel the community to accept possessions ^[4].

Defending that privilege occupied much of her adult life. Successive popes and cardinals, concerned that enclosed women without endowments would starve, pressed her to accept property. Gregory IX offered to absolve her from her vow of poverty; the sources record her reply that she wished to be absolved from her sins, not from following Christ ^[2]. He confirmed the Privilege of Poverty in writing in 1228. When Innocent IV issued a new rule for the order in 1247 that permitted common ownership, Clare declined to implement it at San Damiano ^[5].

Daily existence at San Damiano combined manual work, prayer, and strict enclosure. Clare spun thread and embroidered altar linens and corporals, which were distributed to churches around Assisi. The canonization witnesses describe her serving the sisters at table, washing the feet of the lay sisters who begged alms outside, and caring personally for the sick ^[2].

Her austerities were severe even by thirteenth-century standards. For long periods she ate nothing at all on three days of the week until Francis and the local bishop ordered her to take at least some bread daily. She slept on vine branches or bare boards. From around 1224 onward she was chronically ill, and for the last twenty-seven years or so of her life she was frequently confined to bed, governing the community from her sickbed and continuing her needlework there ^[1].

Two episodes from the 1240s entered her legend early. In September 1240 mercenary troops in the service of Emperor Frederick II, described in the sources as Saracen archers, scaled the walls of San Damiano during the emperor's campaign against the papacy. Clare, though ill, had herself carried to the entrance with the silver and ivory pyx containing the Eucharist, and the attackers withdrew ^[2]. The following year, when the imperial commander Vitale d'Aversa besieged Assisi itself, Clare and her sisters prayed through the night and the siege was abandoned. These stories, attested at the canonization process, are the reason artists usually depict Clare of Assisi holding a monstrance ^[4].

Clare left a small but historically significant body of writing. Four letters survive that she sent between 1234 and 1253 to Agnes of Prague, a daughter of the king of Bohemia who refused an imperial marriage to found a Poor Ladies monastery in Prague. The letters encourage Agnes to hold to absolute poverty and develop an image of contemplative prayer as gazing into a mirror, with the poor and crucified Christ as the mirror in which the soul studies itself ^[5].

Her most consequential text was her Form of Life, composed in the early 1250s when it became clear that no existing rule would protect her community's poverty after her death. Drawing on the writings of Francis, on the earlier papal rules, and on four decades of lived experience, she produced the first monastic rule in the history of the Western church known to have been written by a woman ^[4]. Where earlier rules imposed on the sisters stressed penance and strict enclosure, Clare's text also emphasized mutual care among the sisters and required the abbess to consult the whole community on important matters.

Approval came slowly. Cardinal Rainaldo, protector of the order, confirmed the rule in September 1252, but Clare wanted the pope's own name on the document. Innocent IV visited her at San Damiano as she lay dying and issued the bull Solet annuere approving her rule on 9 August 1253 ^[5]. Tradition holds that the document reached her hands the following day. She died on 11 August 1253, aged fifty-nine.

Recognition came almost immediately. Pope Innocent IV, present at her funeral, proposed singing the office of virgin saints rather than the office of the dead, an extraordinary gesture that his cardinals talked him out of on procedural grounds. The formal inquiry into her life opened within months, and Pope Alexander IV canonized her at Anagni in 1255, barely two years after her death ^[1]. Her remains were moved into the new Basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi in 1260, where they remain; the crypt and her relics still draw pilgrims, as does the painted crucifix of San Damiano now kept in the basilica ^[6].

The order she founded spread rapidly in her own lifetime, with dozens of monasteries across Italy, France, Bohemia, and Spain by 1253. Today the Poor Clares number tens of thousands of contemplative nuns on every inhabited continent, making Clare one of the most influential founders of women's religious life in Christian history ^[4]. Later reformers within the order, notably Colette of Corbie in the fifteenth century, returned explicitly to Clare's own rule.

In 1958 Pope Pius XII declared her patron saint of television, citing the account in her canonization sources that, on a Christmas when illness kept her from the liturgy, she saw and heard the Mass taking place in the distant basilica as though present ^[6]. Among the most cited Clare of Assisi facts, this modern patronage sits alongside a more substantial claim on historians' attention: she was a woman who negotiated with five popes, won, and codified the result. Any Clare of Assisi biography ultimately turns on that achievement, and modern scholarship has increasingly treated her not as a follower of Francis but as a theologian and legislator in her own right ^[5].