Pope bars anyone from forcing property on St. Clare's sisters

PERUGIA, Umbria, September 17, 1228 AD — The letter Pope Gregory IX issued at Perugia this week gives the sisters of San Damiano no land, no income and no house. It grants them one thing, in a single clause near the end: that no one may compel them to receive possessions.

Saint Clare of Assisi has lived at San Damiano, in the buildings beside a small church a quarter of a mile below the walls of Assisi, since 1212 AD. Lay brothers called questors are attached to the house to collect bread, oil and other alms for the sisters, as the community needs them.

Pope Gregory IX has pushed to get convents land and an income of their own, and he has been unwilling to let a house hold nothing at all. The Catholic Encyclopedia counts this Privilege of Poverty the first document of its kind ever asked of the Holy See, or ever issued by it. The Pope wanted these sisters provided for, St. Clare wanted the right to own nothing, and the Pope was the one with the power to command.

In May or June this year Pope Gregory IX came to Assisi for the canonization of Saint Francis, and while he was there he went down to San Damiano to put the request to St. Clare in person. He was not a stranger at that door: as Cardinal Ugolino, Bishop of Ostia, he had been protector of the order since about 1219 AD, the year he wrote a rule for the sisters. He asked St. Clare to let the monastery hold possessions, because the times were dangerous, and the property was his to give. She refused. The Pope took her refusal for fear of breaking her vow of poverty, and offered to release her from the vow: “If thou fearest thy vow, we release thee from the vow.” St. Clare answered him: “Holy Father, never do I wish to be released in anywise from following Christ forever.”

The letter is addressed to “our beloved daughters in Christ Clare and the other handmaids of Christ dwelling together at the Church of San Damiano in the Diocese of Assisi”. It begins Sicut manifestum est (As it is evident), and most of what follows is not law but consolation. Pope Gregory IX writes that a desire to belong to God alone has led the sisters to give up every wish for worldly things, and that “after having sold all your goods and having distributed them among the poor, you propose to have absolutely no possessions, in order to follow in all things the example of Him Who became poor and Who is the way, the truth, and the life”. That sentence records what St. Clare did at the very beginning of her conversion, in 1212 AD: she had her inheritance sold and gave the whole price to the poor, keeping nothing of it.

The letter also takes up what the sisters will go without. “Neither does the want of necessary things deter you from such a proposal,” Pope Gregory IX writes, and then he names who will provide for them: “He who feeds the birds of the air and who gives the lilies of the field their raiment and their nourishment, will not leave you in want of clothing or of food until He shall come Himself to minister to you in eternity.”

The grant is one sentence. It comes near the end of the letter, after the consolation, and Pope Gregory IX writes it as a direct answer to what the sisters asked for: “Sicut igitur supplicastis, altissimae paupertatis propositum vestrum favore apostolico roboramus, auctoritate vobis praesentium indulgentes ut recipere possessiones a nullo compelli possitis” — Since, therefore, you have asked for it, we confirm by Apostolic favour your resolution of the loftiest poverty and by the authority of these present letters grant that you may not be constrained by anyone to receive possessions.

The clause does not command the sisters to own nothing. It takes away everyone else’s power to make them own something. The words a nullo (by no one) name no exceptions, so the Pope who offered the property in the spring has signed away his own power to impose it.

Pope Gregory IX ends with a warning to anyone who might try to undo the grant: “To no one, therefore, be it allowed to infringe upon this page of our concession or to oppose it with rash temerity. But if anyone shall presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he shall incur the wrath of Almighty God and his Blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul.”