A Nun Who Fought the Church for the Right to Own Nothing

Clare of Assisi spent much of her religious life defending a single point against pressure from the church's own hierarchy: that her community should be allowed to own no property at all, individually or collectively, relying entirely on alms exactly as the male Franciscans did, at a time when canon law and many senior churchmen assumed that an enclosed womens community needed guaranteed income to survive and function responsibly. Successive popes granted her only partial or provisional recognition of this Privilege of Poverty over several decades, and it was confirmed in the form Clare wanted only in 1253, days before her death, when Innocent IV approved a rule allowing the sisters to hold no fixed possessions, the culmination of a fight that had occupied essentially her entire adult religious life.

The order she left behind underwent its own reform two centuries later when Colette of Corbie, in the fifteenth century, restored stricter observance to houses she judged had relaxed from Clare's original austerity, producing the Colettine branch alongside communities following a more moderate version of the rule, a division that echoed the same reform and counter reform pattern found across the wider Franciscan family in the same period.