St. Clare sends away the friars who bring the bread

SAN DAMIANO, Assisi, this week, 1230 AD — In September 1230 AD, Saint Clare of Assisi was thirty-six. She led a group of women at San Damiano, a small church below the walls of Assisi. Saint Francis of Assisi had settled them there. San Damiano owned nothing. The sisters were enclosed. Since around 1219 AD they had not gone out of the convent, and friars brought in what they needed.

Scraps, not loaves

A few friars lived in a small house close by. One was a priest who cared for the sisters’ souls, and one or two others did everything else. Those others were called questors. Their job was to collect bread, oil and other gifts from people, as much as the sisters needed. St. Clare was happier with the broken pieces and scraps they brought back than with whole loaves.

Once the oil ran out. St. Clare washed a jar and set it out for the questor to take and fill. When he came for it, he found it already full of oil. God had filled it in answer to her prayer.

The same friars preached to the sisters. St. Clare had not studied much, but she loved a sermon from a learned preacher. She could find something good for her soul in any preacher’s words.

A letter that stopped the sermons

That spring, the friars had argued about what their Rule allowed them to do. Giovanni Parenti, the head of the whole order, took their questions to Pope Gregory IX. Their Rule said that friars could not go into convents of nuns without special permission from Rome.

On September 28, 1230 AD, Pope Gregory gave his answer in a letter. He ruled that those words covered St. Clare’s sisters too. Now no friar could go to San Damiano unless the Pope allowed it.

The Pope’s ban did not cover the questors, the friars who brought in the food. St. Clare could have kept them.

When the letter reached San Damiano, St. Clare was sad that her sisters would now hear good teaching less often. To her, good teaching was food too, the kind that feeds the soul. She sighed and said: “He may as well take all the Friars from us now that he hath taken from us those who furnished us with the food of the soul.”

Then she sent every friar back to their provincial minister, the friar who governed the order in their region. The questors went too, even though the sisters could not go out for their own food. St. Clare had lost the friars who preached to her sisters, so she would not keep the ones who brought their bread.

Pope Gregory heard what she had done, and he gave way at once. He no longer decided by himself whether friars could go to the sisters. He handed that decision to Giovanni Parenti, the head of the friars. Giovanni Parenti was the man who had brought him the friars’ questions in the spring.

Twenty-three years later, St. Clare wrote a Rule for her sisters. In it she asked the friars for a chaplain, a companion for him, and “two lay brothers, lovers of a holy and upright way of life, in support of our poverty, as we have always mercifully had from that Order of Friars Minor.”