At Montefalco in Umbria, Saint Clare of the Cross, virgin of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine, who presided over the monastery of the Holy Cross, aflame with love for the Passion of Christ.
Lifespan: 1268–1308
Beatified: 13 April 1737 by Pope Clement XII
Canonized: 8 December 1881 by Pope Leo XIII, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 17 August
“I have my Jesus within my heart”
Clare was born in Umbria, at Montefalco, in 1268, and by the age of four she already showed a profound inclination toward prayer and contemplation. The second child of Damiano and Giacoma, she was only six when she decided to follow in the footsteps of her sister Giovanna, who had withdrawn to live a life of prayer and penance in a recluse dwelling built by their father on family land.
Clare immersed herself completely in the life of the hermitage, and prayer, penance, sacrifice, and mortification became for her the path by which to conform herself to the Passion of Christ. As the number of postulants grew after Clare’s arrival, Giovanna — superior of the small house — decided to establish a larger recluse dwelling. Their father again supported the undertaking, and in 1290 Giovanna obtained from Gerardo Artesino, Bishop of Spoleto, permission to erect it as a monastery. It was called the “Monastery of the Cross,” and the religious women were assigned the observance of the Rule of Saint Augustine. The following year Giovanna died, and Clare, then twenty-three, was appointed to succeed her.
Clare accepted the charge reluctantly, judging herself unworthy; yet as abbess she gave fresh impetus to the religious community. She organized common life more effectively, required manual labour of all the sisters, while allowing generous freedom to those more inclined to prayer; she cared for all of them with love, instructing and correcting them and attending to each one’s needs. She thus emerged as a woman of enlightened firmness.
At her grille the poor and the needy came to her, always ready to receive food or a word of comfort; to learned men, priests, and senior clergy she became a wise counsellor, gifted as she was with the ability to read the hearts of others and to foresee events. All this despite a severe trial of spiritual aridity that accompanied her for eleven years. Even before her sister’s death she had experienced an interior state of desolation and the silence of God — a suffering that would last until 1299.
At the beginning of 1294, in the monastery garden, Christ appeared to her as a pilgrim and sufferer bearing his cross, and addressed her with these words: “I seek a strong place in which to plant the cross, and here I find the fitting place to plant it.”
That place was Clare’s heart; from that moment she would often repeat: “I have my Jesus within my heart.” Tradition relates that the pilgrim Christ gave her his staff, and that when she planted it in the ground a tree sprang up which flourishes to this day. It is the Melia azedarach — native to the Himalayas and known as “Saint Clare’s tree” — whose hard berries have been used for centuries to make rosaries.
At the beginning of 1300 Clare fell ill, and in July 1308 she was confined to bed. She spent her days absorbed in contemplation. She urged the nuns to be humble, obedient, patient, and united in charity, and prepared herself for her meeting with God. On 17 August she asked to be carried into the church she had wanted for the monastery, and there she breathed her last. She was forty years old.
Her sisters decided to preserve her body; when her organs were removed, they discovered to their great astonishment the signs of the Passion of Christ within her heart. Clare’s biographer, Berengario di Donadio of Sant’Africano, records: “There were … within the heart … in the form of hard sinews of flesh, on one side the cross, three nails, the sponge, and the reed; and on the other side the column, the scourge … and the crown … In the gall-bladder … three round stones were found, all alike in size … representing, it seems, the Trinity.”
Clare’s fame for holiness spread quickly, and numerous miracles wrought through her intercession are recorded. Her incorrupt body and relics remain to this day at Montefalco, in the new church beside the Augustinian monastery. The splendid frescoes of the Chapel of the Holy Cross — the primitive little church of the religious community where Clare spent the final hours of her earthly life — preserve the memory of her story.