St. Francis's warning to keep poverty survives because St. Clare copied it

ASSISI, Umbria, autumn 1220 AD — This autumn Saint Francis of Assisi, back at Assisi from the East, where he had gone last year, wrote out his last wish for the sisters at San Damiano. He asked them to keep to the poverty of Christ until the end, and to let no one’s teaching or advice move them from it. The note survives only because Saint Clare of Assisi later copied it into the Rule she wrote for her sisters. Eight years after he wrote it, a Pope came to San Damiano and offered to release her from her vow of poverty.

St. Clare had sold her inheritance and given the whole price to the poor, and she would let none of her sisters own anything. In 1212 AD, on St. Francis’s advice, the sisters moved to San Damiano, a small church on the slope below Assisi that he had repaired. St. Clare lived there for the rest of her life. St. Francis had bound himself and his brothers to give the sisters the same care as his own brothers, always.

The note St. Francis sent is two sentences long. He wrote it six years before he died in October 1226 AD, though St. Clare remembered it as written shortly before his death. St. Francis began with his own wish, not with the sisters: “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.” Only then did he turn to the sisters, and he gave no order; he asked and advised: “and I ask you my ladies, and I give you my advice that you live always in this most holy life and poverty.”

The second sentence is the warning: “And keep careful watch that you never depart from this by reason of the teaching or advice of anyone.” The word “advice” appears in both sentences. In the first it was St. Francis’s own, given to the women he called his ladies. In the second it was anyone else’s, and the sisters were to watch against it.

St. Francis had urged the sisters to keep to poverty many times before. In the Testament she left her sisters, St. Clare wrote that while he lived St. Francis “was not content to encourage us with many words and examples to love the holy poverty and its observance, but he gave us many writings that, after his death, we would in no way turn away from it.”

In May or June 1228 AD, Pope Gregory IX came to Assisi for the canonization of St. Francis. As a cardinal he had been the protector of the sisters’ order and had written a rule for them. Pope Gregory IX loved St. Clare like a father, and he went down to San Damiano to see her. He offered the monastery property of its own and urged her to accept it, because the times were unsettled and dangerous. St. Clare refused, and she would not be moved. Pope Gregory IX then told her: “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.”

St. Clare asked the Pope for a letter, and on September 17 of that year, at Perugia, Pope Gregory IX issued it. In it he confirmed the sisters’ resolve to live in the highest poverty and ruled that they “may not be constrained by anyone to receive possessions.” No one had asked a Pope for a document of that kind before, and none had been issued.

Near the end of her life St. Clare wrote her own Rule. She was the first woman in the Church’s history to write a rule and submit it for a Pope’s approval. Most of it reads like a law, but in the sixth chapter she wrote in the first person, in her own voice. There she explained why St. Francis had put his wish on paper: “In order that we as well as those who were to come after us would never turn aside from the holy poverty we had embraced, shortly before his death he repeated in writing his last wish for us.” Of the many writings St. Francis sent the sisters, only this note and one earlier text survive, and both survive because St. Clare copied them into that chapter.

Directly after the note, St. Clare wrote an obligation for her sisters and for every abbess who would succeed her. They were bound “inviolably to observe it to the end.” They were to receive and hold no property, directly or through anyone acting for them. The one exception was the land the monastery needed for its enclosure, and it was to be worked only as a garden for the sisters.

Pope Innocent IV confirmed the Rule on August 9, 1253 AD, and the bull reached St. Clare at San Damiano in the last days of her life. A writer of the time noted on the back of the parchment that St. Clare had touched it and kissed it out of devotion pluribus et pluribus vicibus (many times over). She died before dawn on August 11, two days after the confirmation.