Saint Clare of Assisi

Clare Offreduccio was born in 1194 into a noble family of Assisi. As a girl she was known for her prayer and her kindness to the poor, and she refused the marriages her family planned for her. She heard Francis of Assisi preach and was set on fire by his love for Christ poor and crucified.

On the night after Palm Sunday 1212, when she was eighteen, she slipped out of her father’s house and went down to the little church of the Portiuncula. There Francis and his brothers received her by torchlight, cut off her hair and clothed her in a rough habit. Her family tried to drag her back, but she held fast to the altar. Her sister Agnes soon joined her, and later their mother. Francis settled them at San Damiano, the church he had rebuilt with his own hands, and there Clare lived for the remaining forty-one years of her life.

The Poor Ladies, as they were first called, lived enclosed, in prayer and in the strictest poverty, owning nothing at all, not even in common. Clare fought for years to keep this “privilege of poverty” against popes and cardinals who wanted to soften it. Two days before she died, Pope Innocent IV approved her Rule, the first rule for religious women written by a woman.

In 1240 soldiers of the Emperor Frederick II, many of them Saracen mercenaries, scaled the walls of San Damiano. Clare, who was ill, had herself carried to the door with the Blessed Sacrament and prayed, and the soldiers fled. She died on 11 August 1253 and was canonized two years later. Because, too ill to go to Mass, she once saw and heard it on the wall of her cell, Pius XII named her patroness of television.