The saints

Saint Clare of Assisi

Founder and Virgin · Feast day August 11 · 1194 to 1253 · Assisi, Italy · Also known as Chiara Offreduccio, Clare

Saint Clare of Assisi was a young noblewoman who heard Francis preach, fled her family's wealth to follow Christ in total poverty, and founded the order of women called the Poor Clares. For forty years she led her sisters in a hidden life of prayer, and she fought so fiercely for the right to own nothing at all that the pope granted her the unheard-of privilege of poverty.

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:Matthew 6:20 (KJV)

The noble daughter of Assisi

Clare was born in 1194 into one of the noble families of Assisi, a wealthy and well-connected household, and she was raised as a girl of her rank was expected to be, in comfort and piety, and pointed toward a suitable marriage. But from childhood she was drawn far more to prayer and to the poor than to the future her family planned for her. She is said to have set aside food from her own table to send to the hungry, and to have spent long hours in prayer, keeping count of them with a heap of little stones. She was known in the town for her gentleness and her beauty, and her family had good marriages in view for her by the time she was a teenager.

But Assisi in those years was being turned upside down by a young man named Francis, the son of a rich cloth merchant, who had scandalized the whole town by stripping off his fine clothes in the public square, renouncing his inheritance, and giving himself to Christ in total poverty, begging his bread and serving lepers. Where the respectable people of Assisi saw a madman throwing his life away, Clare, some twelve years younger, saw the gospel itself lived out in front of her, and her heart was captured by the vision of following Christ with nothing held back. She began to seek Francis out in secret, meeting with him and his brothers, and telling him that she wanted the same life he had found.

The night she left everything

On the night of Palm Sunday in the year 1212, the eighteen-year-old Clare made her decision irrevocable. While the town slept she slipped out of her father's house by a side door and went out beyond the walls to the little chapel of the Portiuncula, where Francis and his brothers were waiting for her by torchlight. There, before the altar, she gave up everything her world valued in a single act: Francis cut off her long hair, the pride and ornament of a noblewoman, and clothed her in a rough gray habit and a veil, and she exchanged her name, her rank, and her inheritance to belong from that hour to Christ alone.

Her family was furious, and they came for her, determined to drag her back by force and restore her to the marriage and the station she had thrown away. But when they found her and tried to seize her, Clare clung to the altar and bared her shorn head to show them that she was already consecrated and beyond their power to reclaim, and they could not move her. Within days her younger sister Agnes followed her out of the same house and into the same life, braving the same family fury, and then other young women of Assisi came, one after another, until Francis settled the growing community in the small church of San Damiano, and the order that would be called the Poor Clares was born.

A life hidden in God at San Damiano

Francis placed Clare and her sisters at San Damiano, the very chapel he had first repaired with his own hands at the beginning of his conversion, and there Clare lived in strict enclosure for the rest of her life, some forty years, most of them without ever once passing beyond its walls. The sisters kept a life of deep and constant prayer, hard manual work, silence, and a poverty so severe that they slept on the bare ground or on twigs, went barefoot, ate no meat, kept long fasts, and owned nothing whatever, neither as individuals nor as a community. Clare led them not from a throne but from below, as the first among servants, washing the feet of the sisters when they returned from begging, waiting on the sick with her own hands, and taking the hardest and lowest tasks for herself.

Yet the hidden life at San Damiano was anything but grim or cold. Those who knew Clare spoke again and again of her radiant joy and of her gift for making the hardest poverty feel like freedom and gladness rather than deprivation. She was a woman of great tenderness and equally great steel, endlessly gentle with her sisters and utterly immovable on the one thing she would never surrender. Her name, Clare, means bright or clear, and those who met her felt they had encountered a kind of light. Even in illness, which confined her for many of her later years, she worked with her hands, spinning fine cloth for the altars of the churches around Assisi, and directed her community with a wisdom that drew the respect of popes.

The privilege of poverty

Clare's great lifelong battle was fought not with armies but with the church itself, and it was fought over the right to be poor. It was simply assumed by everyone that a community of enclosed women could not survive without owning property and drawing a steady income, and successive popes, out of genuine care for the sisters and worry for their security, pressed Clare over the years to accept endowments, lands, and revenues that would protect them against want. Clare steadfastly refused. She was certain that following Christ in the way Francis had shown meant depending on God alone for each day's bread and owning nothing at all, and she would not allow that radical vision to be softened, even for the good motive of the sisters' safety.

She fought for it for decades, and she won what no one else had ever obtained, a formal papal privilege of poverty, the recognized right to possess nothing whatsoever, which she guarded like the treasure it was. At the very end of her life, on her deathbed, she at last received papal approval of her own rule for her order, the first rule for religious women known to have been written by a woman herself, sealing into the law of the church the poverty she had defended for forty years. She died two days later, in 1253, holding in her hands the parchment she had waited so long to see, her life's one great argument finally and forever won.

The woman who turned back an army

One episode from Clare's life became famous across Europe and is remembered in her images to this day. When soldiers in the service of the emperor, some of them Saracen mercenaries, attacked Assisi and scaled the very walls of San Damiano, the sisters were seized with terror, for they were defenseless. Clare, though gravely ill and barely able to rise, had herself carried to the threshold facing the attackers, holding before her the vessel that contained the Blessed Sacrament, and she prayed aloud that God would defend the sisters he had gathered there, whom she herself could no longer protect. By the account of her companions the attackers were seized with a sudden fear and fell back, and Assisi was delivered.

Because of that scene she is often shown in art holding up the sacrament, and centuries later, in 1958, for reasons connected to a story that she had once seen and heard a distant Christmas Mass upon the wall of her cell when she was too ill to attend, she was named the patron saint of television. Beneath the legend, the meaning of her forty years at San Damiano is clear. Francis was the spark that lit the whole Franciscan movement in a blaze; Clare was the steady flame that kept its purest form burning, guarding the vision of holy poverty for a lifetime when it might so easily have been watered down. Her friendship with Francis, entirely chaste and wholly ordered to Christ, is one of the great friendships in the history of the church, and she outlived him by nearly thirty years, faithful to the end to everything they had begun together.

Why Clare still matters

Clare shows that the most radical form of the gospel is not only for preachers out on the open road but also for the enclosed and the hidden, and that a life spent within four narrow walls in prayer can send its light across the whole world. She is a living witness that owning nothing can be a form of the deepest freedom, and that a gentle and tender woman can be utterly immovable when she is standing on Christ. Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, Jesus said, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal, and Clare of Assisi took him so completely at his word that she fought the popes themselves for the right to keep no other treasure at all.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Francis of Assisi · How to pray · Saints for August 11 · Saint of the day