St. Clare's sisters kiss St. Francis's wounded hands at their choir window

SAN DAMIANO, below Assisi, October 4, 1226 AD — The people and clergy of Assisi carried the body of Saint Francis up from the plain on Sunday morning. On the way to the town they stopped at San Damiano, the small church below the walls where Saint Clare of Assisi and her sisters live enclosed, so that the sisters could see him. In his last week, St. Francis had promised St. Clare that she and her sisters would see him.

St. Clare, about thirty-two, is the daughter of a knight of Assisi. As a young woman she left her father’s house to follow St. Francis into poverty. His friars received her at the Porziuncola, their little church on the plain. Afterwards, on St. Francis’s advice, she went to San Damiano, a church he had repaired after his conversion. She has not left it since. Since about 1219 AD the sisters have lived under strict enclosure: they do not go out, and the friars bring them what they need.

Late the year before, St. Francis, already ill, had stayed in a hut beside the sisters’ house. This week, as he lay dying at the Porziuncola, St. Clare was seriously ill too. She could not go down to him, and he could not come up to her. St. Clare wept and could not be comforted, because she feared she would die before St. Francis without seeing him again. She sent a friar down to the plain to tell St. Francis of her fear. St. Francis wrote a letter blessing St. Clare and her sisters, and he gave the friar a message to carry back to San Damiano. St. Francis told the friar: “Go and bid sister Clare put aside all sorrow and sadness on account of not being able to see me. But let her know in truth that before her death, she and her sisters shall see me, and shall be much consoled concerning me.”

St. Francis died on Saturday evening, October 3, at the Porziuncola. His friars and crowds from the nearby towns sang praises to God all night, with a great many lights burning around him.

Early in the morning the people of Assisi and all the clergy of the town came for him. They lifted the body from the place where he had died and set off for the town singing hymns, with trumpets sounding and many wax candles. Every one of them carried a branch of olive or some other tree. The procession climbed from the plain toward the walls and stopped on the way at San Damiano. The church stands on the slope about a quarter of a mile below the town.

The bearers carried the coffin into the church, set it down in the apse and opened it. A small window with an iron grating opens through the wall between the church and the sisters’ choir. The sisters receive Communion and hear the word of God through it. The friars moved the grating aside, lifted the body from the bier and held St. Francis in their arms at the window. His hands, feet and side bore the stigmata, the five wounds of the crucified Christ. The wounds had appeared on his body two years earlier, while St. Francis prayed on the mountain of La Verna.

St. Clare came to the window with her sisters and looked at him. The sisters sighed and wept, and cried out in choked voices: “Father, father, what shall we do? Why forsakest thou us in our misery, or to whom dost thou leave us in our desolation?” Then the sisters stopped weeping. They grieved to lose St. Francis and were glad that he had gone to God, and they kissed the stigmata on his hands. The friars held St. Francis at the window a long time, until St. Clare and her sisters were comforted. Then the friars carried the body out, and the door was shut.

The procession went on up into Assisi and laid St. Francis in the church of St. George, inside the walls, where he had learned to read and write as a boy and where he first preached.

Twenty-seven years later, near the end of her life in the same house, St. Clare wrote in the Testament she left her sisters of “the frailty that we feared in ourselves after the passing of our holy father Francis, who was our pillar, our only consolation after God, and our support.”