A noblewoman of Assisi who renounced her inheritance to follow Francis of Assisi, Clare founded the Poor Clares and spent four decades modeling radical Gospel poverty and contemplative prayer.

Saint Clare of Assisi was born around 1194 into a noble Umbrian family and, at eighteen, left home in secret to embrace the poverty preached by Francis of Assisi. She founded the community that became the Poor Clares at the church of San Damiano, leading it for over forty years and insisting, against considerable Church pressure, on a rule of radical poverty she herself composed — the first monastic rule written by a woman, approved just days before her death in 1253. Canonized only two years later, Clare is remembered for her steadfast friendship with Francis, her defense of Assisi through prayer during a military siege, and her later designation as patron of television after reportedly seeing a distant Mass projected on her sickroom wall. Her feast is kept on August 11.

Quick Facts

• Born: c. 1194, Assisi, Italy
• Died: August 11, 1253, Assisi, Italy
• Feast Day: August 11
• Canonized: 1255 by Pope Alexander IV
• Patron of: television, eye ailments, embroiderers and goldsmiths

Who Was Saint Clare of Assisi?

Clare of Assisi was born around 1194 into a noble family of the Umbrian city of Assisi, the daughter of Favarone di Offreduccio, a knight of considerable standing. As a young woman she heard Francis of Assisi preach and was drawn to the radical simplicity of the life he and his early companions were pioneering. On the night of Palm Sunday in 1212, at about eighteen years old, Clare left her family home in secret, met Francis and his brothers at the Porziuncola chapel outside Assisi, and had her hair cut and her fine clothing exchanged for a plain habit, consecrating her life to Christ. Her family attempted to reclaim her by force within days, but she refused to leave, clinging to the altar of the church where she had taken refuge. She was soon joined by her younger sister Agnes and eventually by her own mother, and the community that gathered around her at the church of San Damiano became the nucleus of what would be called the Order of Poor Ladies, later known as the Poor Clares. For more than forty years she led that community, insisting — against considerable resistance from Church authorities who thought it impractical — on a rule of strict poverty that owned no property even in common. She was the first woman in history to write a monastic rule herself, which Pope Innocent IV approved only two days before her death in 1253.

Historical Setting

Clare’s life unfolded in the turbulent, rapidly urbanizing Italy of the early thirteenth century, a world of rival city-states, feuding noble families, and a merchant class whose growing wealth was beginning to reshape society and unsettle older assumptions about status and property. It was also an age of vigorous religious ferment: the mendicant movements associated with Francis of Assisi and, a little later, Dominic de Guzman were responding to widespread hunger for a more authentic, evangelical form of Christian life outside the walls of older, land-owning monasteries. Assisi itself, Clare’s home city, was the epicenter of this new Franciscan current. Her decision to abandon a comfortable noble household for a life of begging and manual labor alongside other women was a startling act within this setting, one that placed her at the very center of one of the most influential religious reform movements of the medieval Church.

Why the Church Venerates Saint Clare of Assisi

The Church venerates Clare above all as the co-founder, with Francis, of the feminine branch of the Franciscan movement, and as the first woman to compose her own religious rule, the Privilege of Poverty, which insisted the sisters could own nothing, not even collectively, and depend entirely on alms. This was a genuinely radical theological claim: that gospel poverty, and not the more common monastic endowment model, could sustain a stable community of women. She is honored, too, for her decades-long fidelity to that vision under real pressure from popes and cardinals who urged her to moderate it, and for the deep, mutual friendship and spiritual partnership she maintained with Francis until his death in 1226. Tradition also credits her with helping to repel an attacking army from Assisi in 1240 by processing to the city walls with the Blessed Sacrament.

Canonization and Feast Day

Clare’s canonization proceeded with unusual speed. She died on August 11, 1253, and Pope Alexander IV canonized her only two years later, in 1255, after testimony was gathered from sisters and townspeople who had known her directly — an unusually well-documented process for the period. Her feast is kept on August 11, the date of her death, in the General Roman Calendar. In 1958, Pope Pius XII named her the patron saint of television, reasoning from an episode late in her life when, too ill to attend Mass in the chapel, she reported seeing and hearing the liturgy on the wall of her room — an account later read as an early and unusual instance of remote transmission of an image.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

Clare’s life challenges the assumption that security depends on possessions, whether material wealth or institutional stability. She surrendered real social standing and material comfort not out of naivety about hardship but out of a settled conviction that dependence on God, lived out in community, was itself a form of freedom worth defending stubbornly for forty years. For readers today, her example speaks to anyone weighing a comfortable, expected path against a call that seems impractical to others — family, advisors, even Church authorities. Her insistence on the Privilege of Poverty against pressure to compromise also models a particular kind of persistence: not rigidity for its own sake, but fidelity to a discerned conviction, sustained gently and firmly over a long life rather than in a single dramatic gesture.

A Prayer to Saint Clare of Assisi

Saint Clare, who left behind comfort and title to follow Christ in poverty and light, teach me to trust that what I release in faith is never truly lost. You clung to the altar rather than to your family’s wealth; help me cling to what truly matters when the world tells me to hold on to lesser things. Pray for me in my uncertainties, that I may see clearly, choose bravely, and live simply in the presence of God. Amen.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• the Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent)
• Vatican.va
• the Order of Poor Clares’ own historical records