The poor lady of Assisi
Clare follows Francis
Clare is eighteen years old, the daughter of a noble family in Assisi, and she has been listening to Francis preach. What she hears changes everything.
On the night of Palm Sunday 1212, she slips out of her family's house, walks through the olive groves outside the city walls, and meets Francis at the Portiuncula chapel. He cuts her hair. He gives her a rough habit. She becomes the first woman to join the Franciscan movement.
Her family comes after her. They find her at a Benedictine convent where Francis has placed her for safety. They argue with her, plead with her, try physically to drag her away. She holds onto the altar and pulls back the veil that covers her shorn head.
They leave without her.
She establishes the community of San Damiano — the same church whose repair Francis had begun years before — and lives there for forty-two years without ever leaving its walls. Absolute poverty. The Poor Ladies, as they are called, live from alms alone, owning nothing individually or communally.
The institutional church is uncomfortable with this. Popes repeatedly try to give Clare's community a rule that includes the right to own property. Clare repeatedly refuses. She spends decades of her life fighting for what she calls the Privilege of Poverty.
She receives it, finally, in a papal document on her deathbed.
She dies holding it.
“Our lofty vocation is to follow the footprints of poverty and humility of God's own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.”
— Clare of Assisi, Rule of Saint Clare, c. 1253 AD
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that you through his poverty might become rich.”
Clare spent decades fighting for the right to own nothing. The institutional church kept offering her property — kept trying to give her the security that would make her community more manageable and less dependent.
She refused every offer. Not because she was stubborn but because she understood that the poverty was the point — that the community's dependence on God's provision, mediated through the generosity of strangers, was itself the witness. A community that owned nothing and was still joyful was saying something about God that a comfortable community could not say.
She received the final approval of her rule on her deathbed and died holding it.
What security is the institution trying to give you that you suspect is actually covering over something God is trying to teach you through dependence?