St. Clare of Assisi

Who they were

Clare was an eighteen year old noblewoman of Assisi who slipped out of her family's palazzo on the night of Palm Sunday 1212, walked to the chapel where Francis and his brothers waited, and traded her finery for a rough habit: the first woman of the movement. Her furious family came armed to drag her home. She gripped the altar and showed them her shorn head, and they left without her.

She spent the next forty one years at San Damiano leading the Poor Ladies, and fighting, politely and immovably, a forty year battle with popes who kept trying to soften her rule with property and endowments. Clare wanted the privilege of poverty, the legal right to own nothing at all, and she wrote her own rule to secure it: the first monastic rule written by a woman ever approved by the papacy. Innocent IV's approval reached San Damiano two days before she died, and she was seen kissing the document. The tradition of her repelling besieging soldiers by raising the Blessed Sacrament at the wall is told as tradition. The patronage of television is charmingly literal: bedridden one Christmas, she reported seeing and hearing the Mass on her cell wall, and in 1958 Pius XII drew the conclusion.

Why people turn to St. Clare of Assisi

Anyone holding out for the essential against a comfortable compromise, since hers is the patronage of the non negotiable. Screens and media used well, by the modern title, and eye trouble by the old one.

How to ask their intercession

Before the negotiation where you are being offered almost everything but the point. And her Christmas vision makes her the honest patron of praying the rosary by screen.