St. Clare of Assisi, eighteen, moves into San Damiano below Assisi

SAN DAMIANO, below the walls of Assisi, 1212 AD — The track out of the Porta Nuova drops through the olive terraces for about a quarter of a mile, and at the bottom of it stands a small old church with a low dwelling built against its side. Saint Clare of Assisi, who is eighteen, moved into that dwelling this year, and since she came she has not looked for anywhere else. It is the third house she has lived in since Holy Week, and the first she has stayed in.

St. Clare is the daughter of an Assisi knight, and of knightly families on both sides. Her family are wealthy and hold a good deal of land. Land is how wealth is held here. In Holy Week St. Clare left the town at night and went down to the church of the Porziuncola on the plain. Saint Francis of Assisi and his friars were keeping vigil there with torches, and they received her. In front of the altar her hair was cut off and she put on the habit of penance. Her relatives went after her together to the first house she was taken to, and could not get her back. St. Clare is living outside the walls now, in a building she does not own. Her younger sister and a few other women live there with her. The women keep themselves on what they earn with their hands.

The accounts do not agree on the year: some put her flight from home and her coming here in 1212 AD, others in 1211 AD.

What San Damiano is, first. The church is old — it goes back to the seventh or eighth century — and the documents that name it start in 1030 AD. It belongs to the bishops of Assisi, and a secular priest had charge of it at least as late as 1198 AD. By the time St. Francis found it, it was falling down. It is one of three ancient chapels around Assisi that he repaired by his own labour shortly after his conversion, and he offered the priest of this one money for the work.

It is also the church where the voice came to him. He was praying in front of the crucifix here — a cross already old then — when a voice came down from the wood of it: “Francis, go repair My house, which, as thou seest, is utterly destroyed.” The cross is still hanging in the church.

St. Clare got here in the space of a few weeks. St. Francis preached the Lent in the church of San Giorgio inside the walls, and she was eighteen and went to hear him. After that they met, and they set the times of their meetings so that people in the town would not hear of it and talk. She went out of her father’s house in secret to see him, with a single companion she trusted, whom the record does not name.

On Palm Sunday he told her to come to the blessing of the palms dressed as she always dressed, and to leave the town that night. When the others went up for their branches she stayed where she was, and Bishop Guido II came down out of the sanctuary and put a palm into her hand himself. He has governed Assisi since 1204 AD and has been St. Francis’s friend and protector all that time. That night she did not go out by the door of the house. She broke open another one that had been walled up with beams and stones — in Assisi a door is bricked up for a year after a body has been carried out through it — and went down the hill.

St. Francis had nowhere to put her. There was no house of women in his movement, and no rule for one. He took her straight from the Porziuncola to the Benedictine nuns of San Paolo, an hour’s walk further out on the plain near Bastia, to stay until somewhere else was found. Her relatives came after her to San Paolo. They tried force, then argument, then promises. They told St. Clare that what she had done was beneath her birth and that nothing like it had been heard of in these parts. She took hold of the altar cloths, showed them her shorn head, and said nothing would take her out of Christ’s service. They went away. After a few days she moved up the mountain to Sant’Angelo in Panzo, and she did not settle there either. It was St. Francis who advised her to come here.

Sixteen days after St. Clare left home, her sister Saint Agnes of Assisi walked out to her and said she wanted to give herself to God entirely. St. Agnes is about fifteen. Twelve of the family’s men came for St. Agnes the next day at Panzo. They had given up on St. Clare long before. The men dragged St. Agnes down the slope by the hair and beat her. The sisters’ uncle Monaldo raised his arm to strike her. At a small stream the men could not carry St. Agnes any further, and they gave it up. St. Francis cut off her hair with his own hands and has been teaching the two sisters together since. She came down here with St. Clare.

Other women have come to them since. St. Clare’s own account of the move is one sentence: “by the will of God and our most blessed father Francis, we went to dwell in the Church of San Damiano, where in a little while, the Lord, through His mercy and grace, made our number increase so that what the Lord had foretold through His saint would be fulfilled.”

St. Clare and the women with her have promised obedience to St. Francis. He has bound himself and the friars after him to care for the women exactly as he cares for his own brothers. He had examined them first. St. Clare’s words for what he found are these: “although we were physically weak and frail, we did not shirk deprivation, poverty, hard work, trial, or the shame or contempt of the world — rather, we considered them as great delights.”

They take no alms. They live on what they make with their hands. They own nothing: St. Clare had her share of the family inheritance sold and gave the whole price to the poor, keeping nothing back, and she will not let the women with her hold property either. She has taken no title: asked to be called abbess, she has refused, wanting to be under the others rather than over them, and to serve rather than be served.

This is what her life was before she came down the hill. Her family wanted a noble marriage for her and she would not have it, putting the thing off rather than refusing outright. She had worn a hair shirt under the soft clothes she was dressed in. She had no prayer beads and counted her Our Fathers out on a heap of pebbles. She fed the poor of the city out of her father’s stores, and sent food to hungry orphans by messenger so that no one would know. Between 1198 AD and 1210 AD her family were among the nobles of Assisi exiled to Perugia, so she has spent a good part of her life away from the house she left in Holy Week.

The dwelling is not one room but several. There is a low refectory and a little choir with wooden stalls. A stair goes up to the dormitory, with a dim oratory off it. There is also a sacristy, a room for the sick and a strip of terrace. The dormitory is the long room, about seventy feet by twenty-five, with nothing on the walls and nothing in it; the women sleep there on straw beds.

Six years ago this was a building site. St. Francis climbed up on the wall of the church, and poor people stood below him. He shouted down at them in French: “Come and help me in the work on the monastery of San Damiano, because there will as yet be ladies here who will glorify our Heavenly Father throughout His holy, universal Church by their celebrated and holy manner of life.”

The repairs were finished years ago. St. Clare and the women with her are living there now.