Italian
There are souls that God calls to leave many things; and there are others that He calls to leave everything, so that they may understand that when one possesses Christ, nothing is lacking. Saint Clare of Assisi belongs to the latter. Her life is one of the clearest pages of Christian holiness: a young woman who, having wealth, nobility, security, and a future ahead of her, voluntarily chose poverty to be completely free to belong to God.
It was the night of Palm Sunday in 1212. Chiara had just turned eighteen. In the house of her noble family in Assisi, everything seemed prepared for her to follow the destiny that society had set for a young woman of her rank. But in the girl’s heart, an irrevocable decision had already matured. For years, she had listened to the preaching of Francesco and had seen in that young man, who had abandoned his father’s riches to follow Christ, a freedom that no wealth could buy.
That night she left home. She was not simply fleeing from a family or a social condition: she was fleeing towards Christ. At the Porziuncola, Francis was waiting for her. He cut her hair, made her wear the poor habit, and entrusted the first steps of her consecration to the protection of the Church. Her family tried to bring her back, but Clare stood firm. She had found a wealth that could not be confiscated: the Gospel.
From that night a new form of consecrated life was born. The women who gathered around her were called by Francis “Poor Ladies,” and the small monastery of San Damiano, restored by him, became the place where Clare would spend almost her entire life. There, poverty was not misery, but freedom; silence was not isolation, but listening; enclosure was not a closing off from the world, but intercession for the world.
Chiara considered herself Francesco’s “little plant,” but that small plant would become a huge tree in the Church. While the friars traveled the roads of Europe proclaiming the Gospel, Chiara and her sisters supported the mission with incessant prayer. Francesco preached in the squares; Chiara preached through the silence of enclosure. He brought Christ to the streets; she kept Him before the altar. Two different vocations, one flame: the absolute love for the Gospel.
Her determination reached one of the highest peaks in the history of women’s religious life. Clare wanted for herself and her sisters the right to live without owning property, relying solely on Providence. She was the first woman in the Church to draft her own Rule, ultimately obtaining papal approval. Her desire was simple and radical: “to observe the Gospel”.
His poverty thus had a deeply theological face. It was not simply a matter of not possessing: it was about possessing only God. Chiara understood that Christian freedom is born when the heart is no longer a slave to what it possesses. For this reason, she defended with extraordinary firmness the privilege of poverty, so that no earthly good could become the master of the soul.
The illness accompanied the last decades of her life. She spent long years unwell, often immobilized, but her suffering body could not imprison her soul. Her monastery became a place of worship, intercession, and contemplation. Before the Eucharist, Chiara learned to see the world with the eyes of Christ.
Tradition tells that when Assisi was threatened by the Saracens, the saint had herself brought before the enemies with the Blessed Sacrament. Her faith became a fortress more powerful than the walls. She had no armies, no weapons, no riches: she had Christ. And that presence was enough.
One Christmas night, while she was too ill to go to the Porziuncola, Clare ardently wished to participate in the celebration. According to tradition, she was able to contemplate in her cell what was happening in the friars’ church, as if the distance had mysteriously been erased. For this reason, Pius XII would proclaim her the patroness of television: a unique modern memory of a woman who had made contemplation her way of inhabiting the world.
On August 11, 1253, in the monastery of San Damiano, Clare felt her last hour approaching. She died poor as she had wished, possessing nothing but Christ. Her last words were a thanksgiving: “You, Lord, who created me, be blessed.”
Two years later, Pope Alexander IV proclaimed her a saint. But the true canonization of Clare had already been written long before, in the silence of San Damiano: it had been written in her poverty, in her vigils, in her Eucharist, in her fidelity to Christ.
Chiara continues to see the Church as a lamp lit before the Sacrament. She teaches that Christian poverty is not a disdain for created things, but freedom from everything that prevents one from loving God; that enclosure does not separate from the world when the heart prays for the world; that a seemingly hidden woman can become one of the most powerful presences in the history of the Church.
Chiara chose not to own anything, because she had discovered that the heart of man is not made to be filled with things, but with God. And when God becomes the only wealth, even a small cell can become as large as the world.
