A town hid its saint so well it lost her

ASSISI, Umbria, September 23, 1850 AD — Men digging under the high altar of the church of Santa Chiara in Assisi reached a coffin today. It lay deep in the earth below the floor. Inside it was Saint Clare of Assisi. She had been lying somewhere under that floor for very nearly six hundred years, and for most of that time nobody in the town could say where.

St. Clare started the group of sisters that now carries her name, the Order of St. Clare. She lived for forty-two years at San Damiano, a small church on a slope below the Porta Nuova.

Twice while she was there, armies came into the valley. One of those times, soldiers with bows broke into San Damiano. They were in the pay of the Emperor Frederick II, and the sisters came to St. Clare in tears.

She was ill, but she asked to be carried to the door. She was set down there in front of the men, with the Blessed Sacrament carried ahead of her in a silver box covered with ivory. The men climbed back down the wall they had come up. Both times the armies came, the town said her prayers had saved it.

She died before dawn on August 11, 1253 AD. When people heard, so many men and women went down the hill to San Damiano that the town behind them was left almost empty. They called her a saint as they went.

That evening the Podestà, the town’s chief magistrate, came down to San Damiano with a troop of knights and a crowd of armed men. They watched the place all night so that nobody could carry the body off.

Her sisters asked to keep her where she had lived. The town’s leaders refused. San Damiano stood outside the walls, and they said a lonely spot out there was not safe for her body. St. Clare was to have a church of her own inside the city. The next day her body was carried up the hill into Assisi.

Deep in the earth

Two years later Pope Alexander IV declared her a saint, and Assisi began building the church. Her sisters asked to come up from San Damiano and live beside the grave. It took them years to get the Pope’s permission. They walked up the road into the city in 1260 AD.

On October 3, 1260 AD three bishops carried her out in a procession. They buried her in the earth under the high altar of the new church, sunk so deep that nobody could get at her.

After that day not one person in Assisi could point to the grave. The grave of St. Francis, under his own great church across the town, had been lost the same way.

Today, after much searching under the church, the diggers found the coffin. It was deep in the earth where the three bishops had left her. It was lifted out of the ground and opened. The clothes and the flesh had crumbled to dust, and the skeleton was whole. The people of Assisi were overjoyed.