Saint Clare of Assisi

St. Clare learned the rudiments of the faith from her mother, Ortolana. Her family was among the nobles of Assisi exiled to Perugia in the years 1198–1210 AD. From the abundance of her father's house she sent food out secretly to hungry orphans.

Having no prayer-beads, she counted her Our Fathers on a heap of pebbles. Under her soft and costly clothes she wore a little hair shirt. When her family pressed a noble marriage on her, she refused and commended her virginity to God.

St. Francis told her to come adorned to the blessing of the palms, and to leave that night. When the rest pressed forward for their branches, she stayed in her place without moving. Bishop Guido II came down from the steps and put a palm into her hands.

That night St. Clare broke open a door walled up with a mass of beams and stones. Friars keeping vigil with lighted torches received her at the Porziuncola. There her hair was shorn and she received the habit of penance.

St. Francis led her to the Benedictine nuns of San Paolo, near Bastia. Her kinsfolk ran there in a body, using force, harsh counsels and bland promises. She laid hold of the altar cloths, bared her shorn head, and refused to leave the service of Christ.

Sixteen days later her younger sister, St. Agnes of Assisi, came to join her. The next day twelve of the family's men hauled St. Agnes down the slope by her hair. St. Clare prayed, and several men together could not carry the girl across a little brook.

By the advice of St. Francis she moved to San Damiano, the church he had repaired. She had her paternal inheritance sold and gave the whole price to the poor. Thomas of Celano writes that she spent forty-two years in that narrow retreat.

St. Francis wrote a short form of life for the sisters, which she later copied into her own Rule. Women came from every side, and houses of the same life rose across Italy and Germany. For three years she declined the office of abbess, and took it only when St. Francis urged her.

Pope Gregory IX pressed her in 1228 AD to accept possessions for the monastery. He offered to release her from her vow of poverty, and she refused. On September 17, 1228 AD he granted that no one might constrain the sisters to receive possessions.

Two years later the same pope barred the friars from her monastery without his leave. St. Clare sent back the questing brothers who fetched the sisters' food as well. Pope Gregory IX at once mitigated the prohibition.

St. Agnes of Prague, daughter of the king of Bohemia, refused marriage to the Emperor Frederick II. She founded a monastery at Prague and asked for the form of life of San Damiano. St. Clare wrote to her four times, and the four letters survive.

Pope Gregory IX conceded an endowed hospital and all its revenues to the Prague house. St. Clare told her to stand by the vocation she had begun, whoever advised otherwise. In 1238 AD the pope granted the Prague sisters their own privilege of poverty.

Saracen archers and imperial soldiers under the Emperor Frederick II laid waste the valley of Spoleto. They broke into the cloister at San Damiano. St. Clare was ill, and had herself carried to the door with the Blessed Sacrament before her.

She prayed for the handmaids she could not defend, and the attackers went back down the walls. When Vitalis d'Aversa afterwards besieged Assisi, she put ashes on her own bare head and on her sisters'. By the next morning the besieging army had broken up.

On Christmas night the sisters went to Matins and left St. Clare alone, weighed down with illness. She heard the friars chanting the psalter in San Francesco, two kilometres away, and the organ with them.

Pope Innocent IV confirmed the Rule she had written on August 9, 1253 AD. A contemporary hand wrote on the back of the parchment that she touched and kissed it many times. She died toward dawn at San Damiano on August 11, 1253 AD.