Feast day: August 11
St. Clare of Assisi
Noblewoman who ran away at 18 to follow Francis of Assisi, founding the Poor Clares and out-stubborning popes to keep radical poverty.
Clare was born at Assisi in 1194 to a noble family, a beautiful and devout girl expected to make a good marriage. But she had heard Francis of Assisi preach, and his vision of holy poverty captured her completely. On the night of Palm Sunday in 1212, at about eighteen, she slipped out of her father's house, met Francis and his friars at the little chapel of the Porziuncola, and there had her hair shorn and exchanged her fine clothes for a rough habit, giving herself irrevocably to God.
Her outraged family tried to drag her back by force, but she clung to the altar and would not be moved; soon her sister and later her widowed mother joined her. Francis placed them at the church of San Damiano, and around Clare grew the order of women that would be called, after her, the Poor Clares — an enclosed community living the Franciscan life of prayer and radical poverty.
The heart of her vision was that absolute poverty: she insisted, against popes who wished to soften it, that her sisters own nothing at all, neither individually nor as a community, trusting wholly to God and the labor of their hands. She fought for this 'privilege of poverty' for forty years, and on her deathbed at last held in her hands the papal document confirming her Rule — the first rule for women ever written by a woman.
Twice, by tradition, she saved Assisi from attacking armies by going out to meet them holding the Blessed Sacrament — which is why she is often pictured with a monstrance, and why, because she once saw a distant Mass on the wall of her cell when too ill to attend, she was named the patron of television. She died in 1253 and was canonized just two years later.
She's the patron of television because, too ill for Christmas Mass, she saw and heard it on her cell wall — a vision, centuries before screens.
“Love that cannot suffer is not worthy of that name.”
— St. Clare of Assisi
Image: Simone Martini (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/04004a.htm
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