Saint Clare of Assisi: the first Rule written by a woman

Today, 11 August, the Church keeps Saint Clare of Assisi (1194–1253). History tends to present her as Francis's female shadow, and that is unfair to her. Clare was the woman who spent forty years all but confined to a poor monastery, ill for most of them, and still prised out of three popes what no other foundress obtained — and who wrote the first religious Rule ever composed by a woman in the history of the Church. Here is her life, what she defended so stubbornly, and the prayer of her Mass in Latin and English.

The Palm Sunday escape

She was born at Assisi in 1194 into the Offreduccio family — nobility, land, and an arranged marriage waiting. She was eighteen when she heard Francis preach in Lent 1212, and made up her mind.

On the night of Palm Sunday 1212 she left the house by the door of the dead — the small opening that in noble houses was used only to carry coffins out — and crossed the fields to the Portiuncula. Francis and the friars were waiting with torches. There she exchanged her dress for a rough tunic and Francis cut off her hair.

Her family came to drag her back. Clare clung to the altar and uncovered her shorn head. No marriage was possible now: she was already consecrated. Days later her sister Agnes followed her, and their widowed mother Ortolana eventually entered too.

San Damiano: forty years without leaving

Francis settled her at San Damiano, the ruined chapel he had rebuilt with his own hands. Clare entered at nineteen and never left — forty-one years in one place, much of it in bed.

Around her formed the community of the Poor Ladies, whom history would call the Poor Clares. It was no ordinary monastery: an enclosed convent living on alms, with no fixed income, no land, none of the economic security every women's monastery of the age thought indispensable — and which canon law all but required.

The Privilege of Poverty

Here is the nerve of Clare's life, and the reason she is far more than a disciple.

The Church of her time did not permit enclosed women to live without income, and for a sensible reason: cloistered nuns cannot beg in the streets as friars do. The standard solution was to endow the monastery with land. Clare refused. She wanted for her sisters the same absolute poverty Francis wanted for the friars.

• 1216 — she obtains from Innocent III the so-called Privilege of Poverty: the right to own nothing. It is a very strange document, a papal privilege not to have.
• 1228 — Gregory IX, who was fond of her, tries to dispense her from the vow of extreme poverty. She answers that if he can absolve her from her sins, from this vow she does not wish to be absolved. He confirms the privilege.
• 1253 — Innocent IV approves the Rule she wrote herself. It is the first religious Rule composed by a woman in the history of the Church.

The bull reached San Damiano on 9 August 1253. They say Clare kissed the document. She died two days later, on 11 August. She fought forty years for that piece of paper and had forty-eight hours to see it signed.

The Saracens at the wall

In 1240 troops in the service of Frederick II — Saracen mercenaries — scaled the monastery wall. Clare was ill and had herself carried to the door with the ciborium, the vessel holding the Blessed Sacrament.

She prayed aloud, asking God not to hand over those defenceless women. The soldiers came down off the wall and left. The following year a siege of Assisi likewise broke up after she and her sisters fasted and prayed.

That is why she appears in art holding a monstrance or a ciborium: the woman who faced armed soldiers with the only thing she had in the house.

The patroness of television

Near the end, unable to leave her bed on Christmas night, Clare saw and heard the Mass being celebrated in the basilica of Saint Francis on the other side of Assisi, cast on the wall of her cell. She reported it plainly, without dramatising.

Because of that night, Pius XII declared her patroness of television in 1958. It is the designation that usually raises a smile, and it deserves to be taken seriously: for the patroness of the image transmitted at a distance, the Church chose a woman who spent her whole life without leaving one room.

The prayer of her Mass

The Collect is short and asks the essential: that the joy of the feast should not stay in the feast but turn into the affection of devotion — that is, that the example should change something in whoever keeps it.

And this is the blessing Clare left her sisters on her deathbed — the priestly blessing from the book of Numbers, which she asked them to repeat over all who came after:

Sancta Clara, ora pro nobis. Saint Clare, pray for us — and win us something of your stubbornness, which was not stubbornness of temper but of fidelity.