Poor Clares (Order of Saint Clare)

The Poor Clares are the enclosed contemplative women order of the Franciscan family, and their founding is marked by a struggle to be allowed the very poverty the men order was built on.

Clare and the Privilege of Poverty

The order was founded in 1212 when Clare of Assisi left her noble family to follow Francis, and it grew into an enclosed community of women living a life of prayer, penance and radical poverty. The distinctive point of Clare achievement was legal as well as spiritual: she fought to secure for her community the Privilege of Poverty, the right to own no property even in common, which the church was reluctant to grant to enclosed women who could not, like the friars, support themselves by begging in the world. That she obtained it, and defended it against pressure to accept endowments, is the founding drama of the order.

Contemplation behind the enclosure

Where the friars were mobile preachers, the Poor Clares were and remain strictly enclosed, giving themselves to a hidden life of contemplative prayer within the monastery, supported by the work of their hands and by alms. The order spread across medieval Europe and produced its own reforms and observances, and it continues as one of the principal contemplative orders of women in the church. The Poor Clares thus hold the contemplative pole of the Franciscan family, the enclosed counterpart to the preaching friars, and their history preserves the memory of a woman who insisted that the poverty of Francis be open to women as fully as to men.

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.