Fifty sisters, one loaf of bread, and enough for everyone

SAN DAMIANO, near Assisi, 1228 AD — One day at San Damiano there was a single loaf of bread left in the house. It was the hour to eat, and fifty women were waiting. Saint Clare sent for the sister in charge of the dining room. Cut the loaf in half, she told her, and send one half to the friars. The other half was to be broken into fifty pieces, one for every woman in the house.

The sister said it could not be done. A piece of bread that small would never make fifty portions. It would take one of the miracles Christ worked in the Gospel. St. Clare told her: “Do what I tell thee, daughter, and trust what I say.” The bread grew in the hands of the sister who was breaking it. There was a full share for every one of the fifty.

San Damiano was a small house built onto an old church. It stood on the slope a quarter of a mile below the walls of Assisi. St. Clare moved there in 1212 AD, when she was eighteen. From about 1215 AD she was the abbess, and she held that job until she died in 1253 AD.

About fifty sisters lived there with her. The house owned nothing at all, no land and no money, and no sister owned anything of her own either. Someone still had to feed fifty women every day of the year.

In the first years the sisters fed themselves. They took nothing from anybody and lived on the work of their own hands. Then, from about 1219 AD, they stayed inside for good. The monastery was the walled house where they lived and prayed. They did not go out to a market or out to a field. So the food had to come to them.

The men who begged their bread

It came from the friars. A few of St. Francis’s brothers lived in a small house right next to the monastery. One was a priest, who said Mass and heard the sisters’ confessions. One or two were lay brothers. Their whole job was to go out and collect bread, oil and other alms for the sisters inside.

The brothers who did the collecting were called questors, and what they carried home was usually not loaves. It was fragments — broken bits of bread and odds and ends out of other people’s kitchens. St. Clare was happier to be given the broken pieces than whole ones. So dinner at San Damiano on a normal day was bread, with a little oil to put on it.

Then one day the oil ran out. There was nothing to put on the food, not even for the sisters who were sick. St. Clare took a jar and washed it out with her own hands. She set it outside empty for the questor to carry away and fill.

By the time he came for it, the jar was already full of oil. He had been sent out to fill an empty jar. He thought the sisters had played a joke on him. He said: “These women have called me in jest, for behold the vessel is full!”

The one who ate least

St. Clare ate less than anyone else in the house. The Church kept two long fasts then, and both were called Lent. One ran from Ash Wednesday to Easter, and the other from November 11 to Christmas. Through both of them she lived on bread and water. She drank wine only on Sundays, and only if there was any. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she ate nothing at all.

She kept that up for years, and it made her ill and used up her strength. The other sisters wept over what was happening to her. So St. Francis and Guido II, the Bishop of Assisi, stopped the three empty days. They told her she had to eat something every single day. It had to be at least an ounce and a half of bread, about as much as one slice.