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September 16 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

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event · PERUGIA, September 16, 1252 AD

Cardinal approves the rule St. Clare wrote for her own sisters

St. Clare is fifty-eight, ill and unable to leave her convent, and she is already pressing the Pope to confirm what the cardinal approved today.

A panel painting of a thin, veiled woman in a coarse grey-brown habit sitting on a low bed in a bare stone cell, written leaves on a board across her knees, an oil lamp burning on a stool beside her, and two barefoot sisters standing at the foot of the bed, one bending to take a leaf from her.
St. Clare of Assisi, ill in her cell at San Damiano below the walls of Assisi, in 1252 AD. She ran the house from her bed. Across her knees are the leaves of the form of life she wrote for the Poor Sisters.
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 Saint Clare (Lippo Memmi, ca. 1330 AD, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) View source artwork.

Cardinal Rainaldo dei Conti di Segni, Bishop of Ostia and protector of the order, approved at Perugia today the rule of life Saint Clare of Assisi wrote for her own community at San Damiano. It is the first rule in the history of the Church that a woman wrote and submitted for a pope's approval. Rome has wanted these communities of women endowed with land to live on; the rule she wrote lets her sisters own nothing at all.

5 min read

A painted interior: a woman in a black gown stands at a tall leaded window with her back to the room, an opened letter and a second sheet with a broken red seal lie on a carpet-covered table, and a servant waits by the door with a cup on a tray.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French oil painting of the middle of the seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Vincent de Paul ramene des galeriens a la foi (Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy, 1876, Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, eglise de la Sainte-Trinite, Paris) View source artwork.

The letter reached Madame de Gondi in Paris on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It told her that Saint Vincent de Paul, tutor to her three sons and her own spiritual director for four years, had taken a village parish in the Bresse and did not mean to come back. She has since asked his own spiritual director for permission to fight it, and has written to St. Vincent de Paul.

4 min read

More in this edition

A half-length portrait of a mixed-race Dominican lay brother in a white habit and black rosary, with short dark hair and a calm, direct gaze against a dark background.
place · LIMA, Viceroyalty of Peru, 1634 AD

St. Martin de Porres walks down to the flooding Rímac at Lima

The Rímac has broken through the wall built to hold it along Lima's northern edge and ruined much of the church of las Cabezas, a short distance from the bank. The water came out on San Lázaro, the quarter of lepers, slaves and free black families where St. Martin de Porres was born and raised. He is the barber-surgeon of the Dominican convent of the Rosary across the river, and according to longstanding Catholic Tradition he went down to the water and it returned to its bed.

3 min read

In a small bare room with a shuttered window and a tiled floor, an elderly bald, grey-bearded priest in a black cassock stands at the end of a table with one hand resting on an open book, while three younger priests in black sit and stand over papers, a quill and an inkstand.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of mid-sixteenth-century Roman oil portraiture, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of Ignatius of Loyola (Jacopino del Conte, 1556 AD, Curia Generalizia of the Society of Jesus, Rome) View source artwork.

feature · ROME, Papal States, September 1555 AD

St. Ignatius sends more than a hundred men out of Rome

St. Ignatius of Loyola has sent more than a hundred of his men out of Rome this month and cut the food of the brothers who remain at the college he founded there. The price of corn has risen, and the college has no income of its own: the papal grant he won for it in February died with two popes this spring. He then called in three of his closest men and told them he was most certain the college would be provided for within the year.

4 min read

A gold-ground panel painting of St. Vincent Ferrer, a haloed Dominican friar in a black cape over a white habit, right hand raised with one finger pointing up and left hand holding an open book, a rosary hanging from his wrist, standing before a walled city with a small vision of Christ in judgment above him.

King Martin of Aragon, fifty-one and without an heir since his only son died at Cagliari in July, married Margaret of Prades this month in the tower of Bellesguard above Barcelona. The Avignon pope, deposed this year by an assembly at Pisa and still recognised by four realms, performed the marriage, and the Dominican Saint Vincent Ferrer sang the wedding Mass. The marriage produced no child, and the king was dead within nine months.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Saints Cornelius, pope, and Cyprian, bishop, martyrs (Memorial)

  • Saints Cornelius, pope, and Cyprian, bishop, martyrsMemorial

Saint of the day

Saints Cornelius

Saint Cornelius was Bishop of Rome from 251 AD and died in exile at Centumcellae in 253 AD. The Church keeps his memorial today together with Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who was martyred in 258 AD.

On this day in the Church

  • 230 The oldest list of the Church's martyr days, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, names St. Cecilia alone under September 16, on the Appian Way, the day she was buried in the Catacomb of Callistus.Source
  • 1252 Cardinal Rainaldo, Bishop of Ostia and protector of the order, approved at Perugia the form of life St. Clare of Assisi had written for the Poor Sisters of San Damiano.Our reportSource

Quote of the day

“Let the sisters not appropriate anything to themselves, neither a house nor a place nor anything at all; instead, as pilgrims and strangers in this world who serve the Lord in poverty and humility, let them confidently send for alms. Nor should they be ashamed, since the Lord made Himself poor in this world for us.”
— St. Clare of Assisi, in the rule she wrote for the Poor Sisters, The Rule of Saint Clare, ch. VIII, trans. Regis J. Armstrong OFM Cap.