Soldiers scale the convent wall; St. Clare is carried to the door

SAN DAMIANO, Assisi, September 1240 AD — The sisters came to Saint Clare of Assisi in tears and their voices shook. A party of imperial soldiers had got over the enclosure at San Damiano this month and was inside the cloister. The sisters found her ill in bed. She is forty-six. She came here as a girl of eighteen and has not lived anywhere else since, and she has been abbess of the house for most of that time. She has been ill a long time.

The war between Pope Gregory IX and the Emperor Frederick II has been fought across Umbria for years, and this valley has had the worst of it. Bands of soldiers and Saracen archers are stationed here by the emperor’s command to lay waste castles and besiege cities. This month their fury turned on Assisi, and the army came up close to the gates. San Damiano stands outside those gates, about a quarter of a mile below the Porta Nuova, down through the olive terraces. It has no walls but its own enclosure, and it was the first thing the raiders came to. St. Clare put the names of fifty-one sisters into an instrument she executed two years ago, on June 8, 1238 AD.

The archers are the emperor’s Muslim troops from Lucera in Puglia. Frederick II deported them there from Sicily after he put down their revolts and they would not become Christians. They keep their religion and their customs, and in exchange they furnish him soldiers. Four years ago he massed seven thousand of them near Mantua. He has left twenty thousand Saracens settled in this country, at a place called Noura des Moros.

Inside the enclosure there is a small old church, with a low building against its side. On the ground floor are a refectory under a low arch, a little choir with wooden stalls, and a stair. At the top of the stair is a long bare dormitory where the women sleep on straw. St. Clare has spent a good part of these last years in that room, propped up in bed, spinning fine linen for altar cloths and sending them out to the churches of the plain and the hills around Assisi.

She did not get up. She gave an order instead. The sisters were to carry her to the door and set her down in front of the men. The Body of Christ was to go ahead of her, in the silver casket enclosed in ivory in which the Sacrament is kept here. They carried the casket out first, then brought her out behind it and put her down at the threshold.

St. Clare lay face down on the ground and prayed aloud, in tears. “Doth it please Thee, my Lord, to deliver Thy defenceless handmaids, whom I have nourished with Thy love, into the hands of the pagans? Defend, O Lord, I beseech Thee, these Thy servants whom I in this hour am unable to defend.”

A voice like a small child’s answered in her ears: “I will always defend thee.”

She asked a second time, and not for the house. “My Lord,” St. Clare said, “and if it please Thee protect the city, for it supporteth us for love of Thee.” The Lord answered that the city would be troubled, but that he would defend it.

St. Clare then lifted her head and spoke to the sisters. “Rest assured, I bid you, little daughters, that ye shall suffer no harm; only trust in Christ.”

It ended at once. The men turned and went back down the wall they had climbed up. Several of them were hurt getting away, and nobody had struck them.

St. Clare gave one more order that day, to the sisters who had been at the door and had heard the voice: “Be most careful in no way, dearest daughters, to reveal that voice to any one so long as I live.”