August 30 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

profile · SAN DAMIANO, below the walls of Assisi, 1212 AD

St. Clare of Assisi, eighteen, moves into San Damiano below Assisi

Saint Clare of Assisi, eighteen and a few weeks out of her father's house, has settled at San Damiano, the church Saint Francis of Assisi repaired with his own hands.

A gold-ground panel painting of a small stone church with a tiled roof and a single bell in its bell-cote, standing among olive terraces below a walled hill town, with four barefoot women in plain grey-brown habits and veils standing before its open door, where an oil lamp burns. — St. Clare of Assisi, with her sister St. Agnes of Assisi and two companions, at the door of the church of San Damiano below the walls of Assisi, where she came to live in 1212 AD.
About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of an Umbrian panel painting in egg tempera on poplar over a burnished, tooled gold ground, from the paper's reference portrait based on Santa Chiara e otto storie della sua vita (Maestro di Santa Chiara, 1283 AD, Basilica di Santa Chiara, Assisi; photograph by Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0) View source artwork.

Saint Clare of Assisi, the eighteen-year-old daughter of an Assisi knight, has moved into the low dwelling beside the church of San Damiano, a quarter of a mile below the town walls. She left her father's house in secret in Holy Week, was received by St. Francis of Assisi and his friars at the Porziuncola, and has been moved twice since while somewhere permanent was found. She is living at San Damiano with her younger sister St. Agnes of Assisi and a few other women, on what they earn with their hands.

6 min read

A black-and-white photograph of a young Carmelite nun, gravely ill, propped up on pillows on a bed beneath a stone cloister arcade, her hands holding rose petals.

event · CARMEL OF LISIEUX, Calvados, 30 August 1897 AD

Céline photographs St. Thérèse under the infirmary cloister at Lisieux

Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face — Céline Martin, sister of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux — photographed her today under the cloister of the infirmary at the Carmel of Lisieux. St. Thérèse, twenty-four and dying of tuberculosis, was rolled out on a folding bed to the door of the choir and left there alone before the picture was taken. She is back in the infirmary tonight.

4 min read

More in this edition

A sepia-toned 1861 photographic portrait of a young Bernadette Soubirous, seated, wearing a plain dress and a headscarf tied under her chin, with a calm, direct expression.

interview · LOURDES, HAUTES-PYRÉNÉES, this year, 1859 AD

'As they might go to a menagerie': St. Bernadette Soubirous at fifteen

St. Bernadette Soubirous is fifteen, cannot read or write, and lives with her family in the disused gaol of Lourdes. Since Our Lady appeared to her eighteen times at the grotto of Massabielle last year, the carriages bound for the spa towns halt in the town and their passengers come to her door. She spoke to this paper about the shape of her days, the money and souvenirs she turns down, and the asthma she says she prefers to the visitors.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

On this day in the Church

1617 St. Rose of Lima died at Lima in the Viceroyalty of Peru, thirty-one years old; she was beatified in 1667 by Pope Clement IX and canonised in 1671 by Pope Clement X, and her feast was kept on this day.Source
1897 Céline Martin photographed her sister St. Thérèse of Lisieux under the infirmary cloister of the Carmel of Lisieux; it is the forty-fifth image in the house's catalogue and the last taken of her alive.Our report Source

Quote of the day

“Come and help me in the work on the monastery of San Damiano, because there will as yet be ladies here who will glorify our Heavenly Father throughout His holy, universal Church by their celebrated and holy manner of life.”

— St. Francis of Assisi, shouted in French from the wall of San Damiano while he was repairing it, as St. Clare of Assisi records it in her Testament, Clare of Assisi, Testament (1253), trans. Regis J. Armstrong OFM Cap.