Cardinal approves the rule St. Clare wrote for her own sisters

PERUGIA, September 16, 1252 AD — At Perugia today Cardinal Rainaldo dei Conti di Segni, Bishop of Ostia and protector of the order, approved the form of life Saint Clare has written for the Poor Sisters of San Damiano. It is the first rule in the history of the Church that a woman wrote and submitted for a pope’s approval. She was not there. She is fifty-eight and has been ill for more than twenty-five years. She came to the small church below the walls of Assisi as a girl and has lived nowhere else since.

The whole argument is about property. Rome has wanted these communities of women endowed, with land to live on and a man of business to run it, and she has wanted them to own nothing and beg. The rule other men wrote for her sisters was imposed on them by papal bull; what she has today is a protector’s approval of a text she wrote.

Eight days ago the cardinal heard that she was worse and hurried down from Perugia to her sickbed. He gave her Communion and spoke to the sisters. St. Clare asked Cardinal Rainaldo to remember her soul and the souls of her sisters. Above everything else, she begged him to get her privilege of poverty confirmed by the Pope and the cardinals. The privilege is the letter Pope Gregory IX wrote out for her in 1228 AD, and it forbids anyone to compel her sisters to accept possessions. Cardinal Rainaldo promised her he would, and eight days later he has done what a protector can do. He did not send her a pope’s letter of exemption. He approved the whole form of life she has written, which puts the same poverty into the law her sisters live by.

Her own rule fixes the post he holds: the sisters must always have as their “Governor, Protector, and Corrector” whichever cardinal of the Roman Church the Pope has appointed over the Friars Minor. The rule he approved binds no house but hers.

The rules it displaces go back to the beginning. When St. Clare and her first companions came to San Damiano, St. Francis wrote them a few lines of a form of life and promised that he and his brothers would care for them exactly as the friars cared for one another. About 1219 AD, while St. Francis was away in the East, the protector’s office was held by Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, later Pope Gregory IX. He wrote a rule for the sisters and built it out of the Rule of St. Benedict. He used St. Benedict’s because the Lateran Council of 1215 AD had forbidden the founding of new orders, so a new community had to be given a rule the Church had already approved. The sisters at San Damiano never took it up, and kept to what St. Francis had given them.

Nine years later Cardinal Ugolino, by then Pope Gregory IX, came to San Damiano and offered to release her from her vow of poverty. “If thou fearest thy vow, we release thee from the vow,” Pope Gregory IX told her. She answered: “Holy Father, never do I wish to be released in anywise from following Christ forever.” He gave way, and at Perugia on September 17, 1228 AD, he wrote out the privilege she is still trying to get confirmed. Nothing of the kind had ever been asked of the Holy See before.

That privilege protected San Damiano and almost nowhere else. Five years ago Pope Innocent IV decided the opposite way for the order as a whole. He gave the sisters a new form of life that put St. Francis where St. Benedict had stood and handed their direction to the general and the provincials of the Friars Minor. It also let every convent hold possessions, with a steward in each house to manage them. That permission pained her. Three years later he wrote to Cardinal Rainaldo that any monastery preferring the older rule might keep it. Two rules now stood in the order at once.

The text approved today is hers, and in places it stops sounding like a legislator and starts sounding like her. Chapter II breaks into the first person in the middle of a clause about clothing: “Out of love of the Most Holy and Beloved Christ wrapped in poor and swaddling clothes and placed in a manger and of His Most Holy Mother, I admonish, beg, and encourage my sisters always to wear poor garments.” Chapter VI opens with her own account of her beginning: “After the Most High Heavenly Father saw fit by His grace to enlighten my heart to do penance according to the example and teaching of our most beloved father Saint Francis, shortly after his own conversion, I, together with my sisters, willingly promised him obedience.”

Where it is legislation it is exact. The sisters may own nothing, in their own name or through anyone else, except as much ground as the enclosure itself requires — and that ground may not be cultivated except as a kitchen garden. Her text lets them claim nothing as their own, “neither a house nor a place nor anything at all”, and tells them to send confidently for alms: “Nor should they be ashamed, since the Lord made Himself poor in this world for us.”

It settles the government of the house as well. The abbess is elected by the sisters, and if the whole body judges her unfit for the work they are bound to elect another. She must call them together at least once a week and consult them all, “for the Lord frequently reveals what is better to the youngest”. And she must be so familiar with the sisters that they can speak to her as ladies speak to their maid. St. Clare wrote it plainly: “For this is the way it must be; the abbess should be the handmaid of all the sisters.”

The text carries its date at the foot: “Given at Perugia, the sixteenth kalends of October, in the tenth year of the Pontificate of Lord Pope Innocent IV” — that is, today. The Pope whose confirmation she wants is in that same city, holding his court there. She is pressing him for it.

What she could settle without him, she has settled while she waits. Chapter VI of her rule carries the last thing St. Francis wrote for her sisters, dictated shortly before he died; she has kept the words safe ever since, and they are now part of the law her sisters live under. “I, little Brother Francis, wish to follow the life and poverty of our Most High Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Mother and to persevere in this until the end; and I ask you my ladies, and I give you my advice that you live always in this most holy life and poverty. And keep careful watch that you never depart from this by reason of the teaching or advice of anyone.”