Assisi digs under its own high altar and finds St. Clare's coffin

ASSISI, Umbria, September 23, 1850 AD — Men digging under the high altar of the church of Santa Chiara reached the coffin of Saint Clare of Assisi today. She had lain somewhere beneath that floor for very nearly six hundred years, and for most of that time no one in the town could say where. The church stands inside the walls of Assisi, up the hill from San Damiano, where she died.

St. Clare founded the community of women that now bears her name, the Order of St. Clare. She lived for forty-two years at San Damiano, a small church on a slope a quarter of a mile below the Porta Nuova.

Twice in those years imperial armies came into the valley of Spoleto. Saracen archers in the pay of the Emperor Frederick II broke into the cloister at San Damiano, and the sisters came to St. Clare in tears. She was ill, but she had herself carried to the door and set in front of the men, with the Blessed Sacrament borne before her in a silver casket cased in ivory; the men climbed back down the walls they had come up. Later Vitalis d’Aversa brought a siege up to the walls of Assisi, and St. Clare put ashes on her own bare head and on the heads of her sisters and told them to beg God for the city. The next morning the army broke up and its commander left, against the oath he had sworn. Both times the town credited its escape to her prayers.

She died before dawn on August 11, 1253 AD, the feast of St. Rufino, the patron of Assisi. When word got out, men and women went down the hill to San Damiano in such numbers that the town behind them was left almost empty, and they called her a saint as they went. That evening the Podestà (the town’s chief magistrate) came down with a troop of knights and a crowd of armed men, and they watched the place all night so that nobody could carry the body off.

Her sisters asked to keep her where she had lived. The magistrates of Assisi refused. San Damiano stood outside the walls, and the magistrates said a lonely spot out there was not safe for her body; St. Clare was to have a church of her own inside the city. The next day the body was carried up the hill and into Assisi, and laid in the chapel of San Giorgio, where the body of St. Francis had first been laid before it was moved to his own basilica.

Two years later Pope Alexander IV declared her a saint, and Assisi began building this church for her, under the direction of Filippo Campello, one of the foremost architects of the time. Her sisters asked to come up from San Damiano and live beside the grave, and it took them years to get the Pope’s permission. When they walked up the road into the city in 1260 AD they carried with them the crucifix from which a voice had spoken to St. Francis at San Damiano. A monastery went up for them alongside the church, built around the old chapel of San Giorgio. The chapel became the sisters’ choir.

Pope Alexander IV summoned the bishops of Perugia, Spoleto and Assisi that September and granted an indulgence to everyone who came. On October 3, 1260 AD the three bishops carried her out of San Giorgio in procession and buried her in the earth under the high altar of the new church, sunk so deep that nobody could get at her.

Nobody in Assisi could point to the grave after that. The grave of St. Francis under his own basilica across the town had been lost the same way.

Today, after much searching under the church, the diggers uncovered the coffin, deep in the earth beneath the high altar where the three bishops had left her. It was lifted out of the ground and opened. The clothing and the flesh had crumbled to dust. The skeleton was whole. The people of Assisi were overjoyed.