Clare of Assisi

Clare was born in 1194 to a noble family of Assisi and was already known locally for private acts of asceticism and charity as a teenager. She had heard Francis preach in the city's piazzas and streets, and around Palm Sunday of 1211 or 1212 she left her family's house secretly at night, met Francis and his companions at the small church of the Porziuncola outside the walls, and had her hair cut and her fine clothes exchanged for a plain habit in a ceremony that amounted to Francis receiving her into his way of life, though no formal women's order yet existed to receive her into. Her family attempted to physically remove her within days; she resisted by clinging to the altar of the church where Francis had placed her and displaying her newly shorn head, and they gave up.

Francis placed her first at a Benedictine convent and then established her, joined within weeks by her younger sister Agnes and later by other women including, eventually, her own mother, at the church of San Damiano just outside Assisi, the same building Francis had personally repaired early in his own conversion. Clare remained there as abbess for the rest of her life, some forty-two years, mostly confined by illness for the second half of it.

Clare's community became known as the Poor Ladies of San Damiano, later the Poor Clares, and its defining struggle was over one point: whether the sisters could hold property at all, even in common, or had to depend entirely on begging and gifts as the friars did. Successive popes, worried that a community of enclosed women could not reliably support itself by alms the way traveling friars could, pressed Clare to accept an endowment or at least a modified rule permitting corporate ownership.

Clare refused for decades, securing from Pope Innocent III, reportedly by personal petition, a Privilegium Paupertatis, a formal privilege guaranteeing San Damiano the right to own nothing, and spent the rest of her life defending it against later pressure to soften it. She wrote her own rule for the order, the first monastic rule known to have been composed by a woman, and secured its papal approval from Innocent IV only two days before she died in 1253, the goal of a campaign that had occupied most of her adult life.

During the siege of Assisi by imperial troops in 1240, tradition holds that Clare, too ill to stand, had herself carried to the convent wall with the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance, and that the attacking soldiers withdrew, an episode behind her later designation as patron of television for what medieval writers already read as a kind of vision carried across distance. She was canonized in 1255, two years after her death, by Pope Alexander IV.