St. Clare, dying, asks a cardinal for the right to own nothing

SAN DAMIANO, near Assisi, September 8, 1252 AD — Word reached Perugia that Saint Clare of Assisi had grown worse, and Cardinal Rainaldo dei Conti di Segni rode down to San Damiano today. He gave her Communion at her bed and preached to the sisters standing round it. She wept, and asked him to keep her soul and the souls of the other sisters in mind. Then, above everything else, she asked him one thing: to have the Pope and the cardinals confirm the Privilege of Poverty, the paper that lets her house own nothing. He promised her he would.

St. Clare is fifty-eight, and she has been abbess of this community outside Assisi since 1215 AD. Cardinal Rainaldo has stood over the order almost as long. Pope Gregory IX named him Cardinal Protector of both the Franciscans and the Damianite communities in 1228 AD, a few months after his own election. He has been Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia since 1232 AD.

What she asked him for is a document. A papal privilege is a grant issued in the Pope’s own name that lifts its holder out of a rule binding everyone else. Hers lifts San Damiano out of the expectation that a house of nuns lives on an endowment: in 1228 AD Pope Gregory IX granted that no one may force possessions on St. Clare or her sisters. With other communities the same Pope went to great lengths to see them endowed, and sometimes insisted that they take gifts they wanted to refuse.

The document was hard enough to get the first time. In May or June of 1228 AD Pope Gregory IX came to Assisi for the canonization of St. Francis and visited San Damiano. He offered to provide possessions for the house himself and pressed St. Clare to take them, telling her the times were dangerous. She refused. He then offered to release her from her vow of poverty altogether. “Holy Father, never do I wish to be released in anywise from following Christ forever,” she answered him. That September, at Perugia, he issued the bull Sicut manifestum est (As it is manifest). It was the first document of its kind the Holy See had ever been asked for or ever issued.

Pope Gregory IX granted the same exemption to only a few houses besides this one, among them the monastery of St. Clare’s friend Saint Agnes of Prague, in 1238 AD. The sisters at San Damiano lived at the start on the work of their own hands and would take no alms; after enclosure was imposed on them about 1219 AD the friars supplied what they needed. Jacques de Vitry, a bishop who came across them near Perugia in 1216 AD, wrote that the women “receive nothing but live on the work of their own hands”.

Five years ago the law of the order moved the other way. In August 1247 AD Pope Innocent IV gave the Poor Ladies a new rule and cancelled every rule they had followed before. The new rule put their government in the hands of the Franciscan general and provincial. It permitted every convent to hold property, and told each house to find a procurator to manage it. In June 1250 AD Pope Innocent IV wrote to Cardinal Rainaldo that any monastery preferring the older rule might keep it. From about that time the cardinal took the direction of the order’s affairs back into his own hands.

Pope Innocent IV had been at Lyons since December 1244 AD. He came back to Italy last year, and after a short stay at Genoa settled his household at Perugia on November 5, 1251 AD. St. Clare had begun to fail while he was still in France. Cardinal Rainaldo was at Perugia with the court when the word came today that she was worse.