On August 11, the Church remembers Clare Offreduccio (1194-1253), the young noblewoman of Assisi who, on the night of Palm Sunday 1212, slipped through the Porta Mortaia of her father's house to meet Francis in the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels below the town. There she cut her hair, exchanged her silk for a rough tunic, and placed herself under his direction — the founding gesture of the Order of Poor Ladies, later called the Poor Clares. She would never leave the cloister again for forty-one years.
At San Damiano, the half-ruined chapel whose painted crucifix had first spoken to Francis, Clare established her community and wrote a Rule — the first known rule for women composed by a woman — which Innocent IV approved two days before her death in 1253. The famous episode of 1240, when Saracen mercenaries threatened the convent, finds her rising from her sickbed and holding the pyx before the invaders, who turned and fled; a later legend of 1241 has her repelling Frederick II's troops by displaying the Blessed Sacrament at the window. Both episodes are the source of her later iconography holding a monstrance.
Her incorrupt body rests in the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi, beneath the celebrated fresco cycle of her life. The San Damiano cross that spoke to Francis also survives there. Pilgrims who walk Assisi's steep lanes between the Basilica of St. Francis and Santa Chiara traverse, in a morning, the whole compass of the Franciscan founding — the friars' itinerant poverty and the enclosed contemplative poverty of Clare, two streams from the same Umbrian spring.
