Clare was born in Assisi in 1193 (or 1194), into the Offreduccio family, one of the most prominent families in the Umbrian town. “Her father was a knight, as were all her relatives on both sides of the knightly [class]. [Her] home was well-endowed and had abundant means following the same fashion of her native place” (LCl 1).
The sisters who testified at her Process of canonization, as well as Celano, present the young Clare as moved by love for God and for the poor, a love that grew as she grew older and, according to her possibilities, became ever more concrete: “God, she would deprive her own body of delicate foods and, sending them secretly through intermediaries, she would nourish the bodies of the poor. (…) Thus from her infancy, as mercy was growing with her, she bore a compassionate attitude, merciful toward the miseries of the destitute. She held the pursuit of holy prayer as a friend [and] after she was frequently sprinkled with its holy fragrance, she gradually entered a celibate life. When she did not have a chaplet with which to count the Our Father, she would count her little prayers to the Lord with a pile of pebbles” (LCl 3-4). “she was considered by all those who knew her [to be a person] of great honesty and of very good life; and that she was intent upon and occupied with works of piety” (PC I, 1).
The premature death of her father, the exile in Perugia following the struggles between the maiores and the minores of Assisi, together perhaps with some economic difficulties, were factors that probably contributed to forming in Clare a determined and tempered character, a first manifestation of which can be recognized in her refusal, against her family’s wishes, to contract marriage.
Hearing about Francis, already a follower of the poor Jesus Christ, she wanted to meet him, attracted by his evangelical way of life and that of the small group of young men that had already gathered around him. Her repeated conversations with Francis confirmed her intuition: that was the form she wished to give to her relationship of faith with the Lord. “Then she committed herself thoroughly to the counsel of Francis, placing him, after God, as the guide of her journey” (LCl 6).
Leaving her father’s house on the night following Palm Sunday of 1211 or 1212, she was received by Francis and his companions gathered at the little church of Saint Mary of the Angels. There Clare handed over to the Lord, through the hands of Francis, her intention of a penitential life. In the Testament, Clare recounts that decisive time in this way: “After the most high and heavenly Father saw fit in mercy and grace to enlighten my heart that I might do penance according to the example and teaching of our most blessed father Francis” (TestCl 24).
Then accompanied to the Benedictine monastery of San Paolo in Bastia, she was reached by her relatives, who wanted to bring her back home; but the tonsure shown by Clare and the place subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction convinced them to desist from their intention. Shortly afterward, however, we find Clare elsewhere, at the church of Sant’Angelo di Panzo, on the slopes of Subasio, where a group of women lived devoted to prayer and charity, following the example of the emerging religious forms linked to pauperistic movements or comparable to the beguines of Flanders. Joined by her younger sister Catherine, she endured with her the repeated, and this time violent, hostility of their relatives. The young Catherine’s resistance was such that Francis changed her name to Agnes, in memory of the young martyr whose Passio was well known and whose liturgical Office would find an echo in Clare’s Writings, especially in the Letters.
Let us listen again to Clare’s account in the Testament: “When the blessed Francis saw, however, that although we were physically weak and frail, we did not shirk deprivation, poverty, hard work, trial, or the shame or contempt of the world—rather, we considered them as great delights, as he had frequently examined us according to the example of the saints and his brothers, he greatly rejoiced in the Lord. And moved by pity for us, he bound himself, both personally and through his religion, always to have the same loving care and special solicitude for us as for his own brothers. (…) And thus, by the will of God and our most blessed father Francis, we went to dwell in the Church of San Damiano” (TestCl 27-32).
San Damiano was a small church, the first of the three previously restored by Francis, and it was precisely there that he had experienced a decisive “encounter” with the Crucified, by whom he had felt sent to repair the Church, as well as an experience of prophecy, reported by Clare in the Testament: “Come and help me in the work on the monastery of San Damiano, because there will as yet be ladies here who will glorify our Heavenly Father throughout His holy, universal Church by their celebrated and holy manner of life” (TestCl 14).
In the small building beside the church of San Damiano, for more than forty years Clare lived the Gospel, together with the sisters she had received as a gift, according to the form of life communicated by Francis. Although placed within the traditional monastic stream, they stood in discontinuity with it. It was not easy for them to obtain juridical recognition for a life in which permission was requested, indeed the privilege, of possessing no property that would provide income, the usual way in which monasteries provided for their sustenance. In a time of significant and, in some respects, radical change, the time in which Clare and the sisters found themselves living, history records the long travail she sustained with faith and determination. Her dialogue with the successive popes was continuous, and they, moreover, showed great esteem for Clare, Gregory IX in particular. The “Privilege of Poverty,” granted by him in 1228, sanctioned the possibility for the Dominæ Pauperes of San Damiano to have and receive no possession, living totally entrusted to the provident love of the Father of mercies.
Clare’s daily existence was humble and poor, woven with gestures of love that she learned by looking at Jesus Christ, at his becoming flesh and living human existence to the point of giving himself on the cross. The sisters’ accounts open glimpses of daily life: “The witness said from the time the mother Saint Clare entered religion, she was so humble she washed the feet of the sisters. One time, while washing the feet of one of the serving sisters, she bent over, wishing to kiss her feet. (…) More than this, the blessed Clare used to hand water to the sisters and, at night, covered them from the cold” (PC II, 3).
Clare’s compassion was unconditional. She knew how to draw near to the sick or troubled sisters, helping them as she was able, and she would recommend the same in particular to the one who would succeed her in the service of mother: “Let her console those who are afflicted. Let her also be the last refuge for those who are troubled, lest, should they fail to find in her the remedies for health, the sickness of despair might overcome the weak” (FLCl IV, 12). She had at heart the fate of her fellow citizens, so much so that, during a moment of grave danger for Assisi, whose freedom was threatened, she invited all the sisters to invoke the gift of peace: “Dearest children, every day we receive many good things from that city. It would be terrible if, at a proper time, we did not help it, as we now can. (…) ‘Go to our Lord,’ she said, ‘and with all your heart beg for the liberation of the city’” (LCl 23).
The “divine inspiration” that had moved Clare also enlightened the hearts of other women, even from places far from Assisi, such as Agnes of Prague, daughter of the king of Bohemia. We know of the profound friendship woven between them through their consonance in the Spirit. Four letters from Clare to Agnes are preserved, manifesting the depth of her relationship with the Lord and the intensity of her love as mother and sister.
In the long and difficult path that led to the ecclesial recognition of the authenticity of the form of life of the Poor Sisters, as they would be called by Clare in the Rule, the story of the community of San Damiano is intertwined with that of the Order of Friars Minor and was affected by the trials it faced immediately after Francis’ death. The “little plant” of blessed father Francis, as she liked to call herself, Clare preserved, by living it, the inheritance of the charism received from him and, in the years following his death, became a point of reference for many Friars Minor, especially those of the first generation. Juniper, Angelo, Rufino, and Leo were present beside Clare in the final days of her earthly existence, lived for the most part in a condition of infirmity. Only two days before her death, Clare received the bull with the papal confirmation of the Rule approved by the Cardinal Protector, Rainaldo of Jenne, the previous year. It is the mature fruit of the evangelical experience she lived with the sisters, the first rule in the history of the Church written by a woman for a women’s community. Its founding nucleus is to live the Gospel, in holy unity and highest poverty, in obedient listening to the Spirit of the Lord, in an attitude of continual conversion in the ordinary circumstances of existence. The fraternal and maternal welcome of the other and of every “other” becomes a place where relationships grow, and is expressed with particular intensity in mutual forgiveness and in care for the sick sisters.
Clare died on 11 August 1253, praising the Father, giver of every good: “Blessed are you, who created me.”
Two years later, in 1255, Pope Alexander IV solemnly proclaimed her holiness.
Some Writings of Clare are preserved: the four Letters to Agnes of Bohemia, a letter to Ermentrude of Bruges (of uncertain attribution), the Rule, the Testament, and the Blessing.