Discovering the Poor Clares
Monday Ministerial Musings
By Rev. Mark William Ennis
2026 Blog #30
August 31, 2026
Discovering the Poor Clares
I was born and raised as a Protestant Christian from a long line of Protestant Christians. Of course, this left me as a minority in my Jersey City neighborhood where every other person my age identified as Roman Catholic, whether or not they were active participants in the faith. Despite being Protestant, my parents sent me and my sister to Catholic High Schools because of the racial tension at the local public high school. It was staffed by Franciscan Nuns. Because I did not know what a Franciscan was, I did research and learned who St. Francis was and was generally impressed with St. Francis.
In Assisi, Italy I saw many Franciscans. This did not surprise me as I was in the town where the Franciscans, both Male and Female, were founded. During our tour there, I learned of a new name that I had not known, Saint Clare. I found her story to be as intriguing as that of St. Francis. I will blog more on him next week.
Saint Clare, known in Italian as Saint Chiara, was a young protégé of St. Francis. She was born in 1194 and lived in Assisi her entire life. She was approximately ten years younger than St. Francis. Clare came from a middle-class family and was influenced by the preaching and good works of St. Francis as a young lady. Something stirred within her, perhaps it was the Holy Spirit, and she found herself drawn to him and the message that he preached; peace and good for all, poverty, humility, and care for creation.
These are attributes that are quite easily embraced by people who possess little, but my experience is that people who have prospered economically are more reluctant to embrace these principals. People can easily get content with wealth and ignore spiritual things. These are less tangible and frequently in humans, we only pay attention to what is seen.
Something, I assume that it was the Holy Spirit, awoke her to the message that Francis was preaching. It is unclear whether Clare and Francis knew each other before he received his calling and began to preach. She, like Francis, were of middle-class backgrounds and we cannot rule out that they met prior to his renouncing the middle-class life and become a poor monk. We don’t know for sure if they had met, but being ten years apart in age and from the same small town. The population of Assisi at that time is estimated to be between two and three thousand people.
Clare was among the first disciples of St. Francis and quickly, much to the chagrin of her family, renounced her comfortable life and began to live a life of poverty and prayer. She was accepted by Francis into his order on Palm Sunday in 1212 when she was eighteen years old. As Francis’ order was exclusively for men, she founded her own order under the leadership of Francis. She founded the Order of the Poor Clares. The members of this order pledged themselves to a life of solitude, poverty and prayer. They are a cloistered order. By contrast, the Franciscan nuns lead lives that bring them into the world for service by education and social work. This is the distinction between the Franciscan Nuns and the Poor Clares.
Later in life, when Francis was ailing, she cared for him medically. I’ll explain more about that in next week’s blog. She ultimately outlived Francis by about 25 years. She died in the convent that she established.
During her life, she and the sisters of her order are credited with defending her town and convent from attacking mercenaries. It is said that her prayers, and those of her sisters, filled these combatants with fear and they left before an attack began. She is said to have cured members of her order from illness simply by making the sign of the cross over them. Based on these incidents, and other similar ones, she was granted sainthood.
She was declared the patron saint of television by Pope Pius XII in 1958 because of an incident in 1252. That year, when she was too ill to attend a Christmas Eve mass, she claimed to have been given a projected image of it on the wall of her room and could see and hear it perfectly. Not only is she the patron saint of television but she is also the patron saint of eye diseases, crafts and work, as well as daily life.
Saint Clare is an example for us all. She felt that God was more important that wealth or prosperity. She knew the power of prayer. She risked her life to stop two invasions. She cared for the ill and those in need. How many of us live such dedicated lives? I wonder how much better our communities would be if more of us followed the example of Saint Clare. She is a role model for all of us.
I am jealous of people like Clare. I have prayed with many ill people but have not brought them a cure. I have no power to end armed conflicts. Maybe it is because I think more of worldly things and do not have the prayer life that she does. Maybe this is the lesson that I need to learn from Clare. Is this a lesson that many of us need to learn?
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