Saint Clare

Clare was born in Assisi on July 16, 1194, into a noble family. On the night of Palm Sunday in 1212 she left home through the side door, the door of the dead, and went to the Portiuncula, where Francis and his friars were waiting for her. They cut her hair. Her father and uncles came with weapons to take her back; she clung to the altar and showed them her shorn head, and they had to give up. Soon afterward her sister Agnes joined her, and later her other sister and even her mother. She settled at San Damiano and stayed there forty-two years without ever leaving. From there she fought the battle of her life, and it wasn’t against her family but against the Church: she wanted absolute poverty for her nuns, with no property or income, just like the friars. The popes, one after another, tried to impose a milder rule on her — a community of women with no income seemed madness to everyone. She held out for forty years, and her Rule was approved two days before she died. It is the first religious rule written by a woman. She died on August 11, 1253, and was proclaimed a saint two years later. In 1958 Pius XII declared her patron saint of television, because of an episode told in her canonization process: sick in bed on Christmas night, she is said to have seen and heard the Mass being celebrated in the basilica, on the other side of town. If your name is Clare, today is your name day.