St. Clare gives up her sisters' bread, and Pope Gregory IX backs down

SAN DAMIANO, Assisi, this week, 1230 AD — This week, on September 28, 1230 AD, Pope Gregory IX issued a letter at Anagni that barred the friars from going to the convents of the Poor Clares without his permission. Saint Clare of Assisi answered at San Damiano, her convent below the walls of Assisi, by sending every friar away. The men she sent back included the lay brothers who begged the bread and oil the sisters lived on. The Pope gave way.

St. Clare, thirty-six, leads the community of enclosed women that Saint Francis of Assisi settled in the small church of San Damiano, a quarter of a mile below the town gate called the Porta Nuova (the New Gate).

This spring the friars quarrelled at their general chapter over how strictly their Rule bound them. Their Minister General, Giovanni Parenti, who heads the whole order, took their questions to the Pope, and Pope Gregory took several months to answer. Chapter XI of the friars’ Rule, confirmed in 1223 AD, forbade them to enter “monasteries of nuns” without special permission from Rome. The Pope ruled that those words covered the houses of the Clares as well, so no friar could now go to San Damiano unless the Pope allowed it.

San Damiano owned nothing. In its first years the sisters worked with their hands and took no alms. Once they were enclosed, around 1219 AD, they could no longer go out, and the friars supplied what they needed. Two years ago St. Clare refused property from this same Pope, and in September 1228 AD he confirmed in writing that no one could force possessions on her sisters.

So the bread came in by begging. A few friars lived in a small house close by, as they did beside other convents of the Clares: a priest for the sisters’ souls, and one or two lay brothers for everything else. Those lay brothers were called questors, and their work was to collect bread, oil and other alms, as much as the sisters needed. St. Clare was glad of the broken pieces and scraps they brought back, happier with them than with whole loaves. Once, when the oil ran out, she washed a jar and set it out for the questor to take and fill. When he came for it, he found it already full of oil. God had filled it in answer to her prayer.

The preaching came through the same friars. St. Clare was not a learned woman, but she loved a learned sermon, and she could take what was good for the soul from any preacher.

When word of the Pope’s letter reached San Damiano, St. Clare grieved that her sisters would now hear sound teaching less often. She sighed and said: “He may as well take all the Friars from us now that he hath taken from us those who furnished us with the food of the soul.” Then she sent every friar back to their provincial minister, the friar who governed the order in their region. The questors went with them, though her sisters were enclosed and could not go out for their own food. She would not keep the friars who begged her sisters’ food when she could no longer have the friars who preached to them.

Pope Gregory heard what she had done and eased his ban at once. Whether friars could go to the sisters was no longer for the Pope to decide. He handed that decision to the Minister General, Giovanni Parenti, the man who had carried the friars’ questions to him in the spring.

Twenty-three years later, in the Rule she wrote for her sisters, St. Clare asked the Friars Minor for a chaplain, a companion for him, and “two lay brothers, lovers of a holy and upright way of life, in support of our poverty, as we have always mercifully had from that Order of Friars Minor.”

San Damiano still stands below the town. The wooden choir, rebuilt in its church in 1504 AD, has a small window through which the Poor Clares received Communion. Visitors can still see the dormitory where St. Clare lay ill for twenty-nine years, and the tiny terrace garden she kept between two walls.