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The history of Saint Clare, who was born in Assisi in 1194, does not really begin until she was about 15 years old, when she first saw and heard the future saint, Francis Bernardone, after his conversion. Clare was a beautiful blond girl, a member of the wealthy and aristocratic Offreduccio family, and her relatives seem to have been arranging a marriage for her at the time. Whatever attention she might have been giving to this project vanished, for she decided to serve God under the direction of Francis. This young man, formerly one of the town's gayest blades, now a ragged, unshaven beggar-monk, spoke with such joy to the people of Assisi about his new love, "Lady Poverty," that many, like Clare, resolved to join him in his way of life.
She met Francis privately, was encouraged in her decision by him, and on Palm Sunday of the year 1212 took the decisive step. In the evening she slipped out of her home and hurried by torchlight to the small chapel of the Portiuncula, where Francis and his men lived. There, after Francis cut off her long, golden hair and gave her a rough woolen gown to wear, she took the vows of religious life and put herself under his direction. He first placed her in a convent of Benedictine nuns; then when the family uproar over her action died down, placed her, together with a few other women who had chosen the same life, in their own convent near the Church of San Damiano. This was the beginning of the Second Order of Saint Francis, the Order of Poor Ladies or "Poor Clares" as they came to be called. In 1215 Francis made Clare abbess of the convent, a position she retained until her death nearly forty years later.
Her years in the convent were strictly cloistered, and we have little information about them; there are stories about her saving both the convent and Assisi itself from pillaging soldiers, by praying with her nuns and displaying a monstrance with the sacred host in it at the convent gates (in pictures she is often shown holding a monstrance); but such events, if they did happen, had little significance in her life. More important to her than anything else was an inflexible adherence to the ideal of evangelical poverty that she had learned from Francis.
"Evangelical poverty" was a dignified label for a hard, humiliating way of life. To own nothing, to depend on the charity of others for the necessities of life-this was either madness or shameful laziness according to the popular viewpoint. Despite the impact made by Saint Francis on his time, poverty as a way of life seemed no more attractive to most men than it does now. The pressure of public opinion forced his own order into compromises with ownership that he never entirely approved, and after his death in 1226, Clare faced similar demands for more "reasonable" standards in her religious life.
In 1219 Cardinal Ugolino, a friend of Francis, had drawn up the first rule for the Order of Poor Ladies (Francis himself never gave the order a rule) and in it had said nothing about the ideal of absolute poverty. When Ugolino later became Pope Gregory IX, and rather pointedly offered to dispense Clare from her vow of strict poverty, she replied, "I need to be absolved from my sins, but I do not wish to be absolved from the obligation of following Jesus Christ. " In 1228 she obtained a concession from the same pope: the right not to be forced by anyone to accept possessions! Common ownership of property was accepted by other convents of the growing order, however, and the principle was even embodied in a revision of the rule approved by Innocent IV in 1247. Clare still kept fighting for a rule that would prohibit all ownership of property, and finally, two days before her death, obtained such a rule for San Damiano from Innocent IV. This difference of opinion on the question of property ownership has kept the Poor Clares, just as it has the other Franciscans, divided into different groups throughout their history.
Clare's constant effort was to remain faithful to the example of "her holy father, Francis." All her life she lived the Franciscan spirit with a devotion unmatched by anyone except the Poverello himself. With her nuns at San Damiano she carried on an obscure, dedicated, and profoundly humble existence; they wore nothing on their feet, slept on the ground, never ate meat, talked only when necessity demanded it. The physical suffering that filled the last twenty-seven years of Clare's life she accepted joyfully as another means to unite herself more closely to God. Before she died in 1253, after a long and agonizing illness, among the last things she said was, "God be blessed for having created me! " Her funeral was presided over by Pope Innocent IV, who had to be dissuaded from declaring her a saint on the spot! Canonization was not long in coming, however, taking place two years later under Pope Alexander IV. Clare's body was buried in a basilica dedicated to her at Assisi, and her bones are still venerated there.
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