Review: Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church

My guess is that the name Francis of Assisi [1181-1226] is recognizable to a fair segment of the reading public, if for no other reason than the legend that he preached Jesus to birds and fishes. What is known with confidence is that he collected a band of faithful followers who traveled central Italy in the thirteenth century, living absolute poverty, chastity, and obedience that they might imitate Christ, who famously preached that “the Son of Man hath nowhere upon to rest his head.” The struggle to reconcile this seemingly impossible way of life with contemporary prudence continues to the present day. I lived under the Franciscan roof for 27 years and never missed a meal.
 
But Francis and his followers who sought to live Christ’s poverty to the letter were determined to receive stronger legal approbation in writing to go beyond the customary practice of most monasteries derived from the Rule of St. Benedict [480-547 A.D.], which counseled prudence and the avoidance of possibly injurious extremes. Francis wrote the first of two rules in 1209, and the definitive Franciscan Rule in 1223. One feature of the Franciscan Rule: the friars were not bound to a cloistered life within the confines of a monastery. Francis and the brothers preached and labored in the fashion of an itinerant Catholic revival.
 
Had Francis thought about women who might want to join him, doing the kind of public service the friars were doing while observing absolute Gospel poverty? When the teenaged Clare Sciffi [1194-1253], inspired by Francis’s preaching, sought to join his community--with her younger sister in tow, no less—the friars, with the Bishop of Assisi’s approval, accepted the young ladies’ promise to live the Gospel but immediately escorted them to an existing monastery of women living the Benedictine Rule. Here is where the author, Catherine Mooney, breaks from the story tellers to look closely at the legal standing of the new communities which erupted in the mid-medieval era, as seen by the rules put forward by Francis, eventually Clare, and at least four popes in the process.
 
This burst of local fervor across Europe was a major concern to the papacy, particularly but not exclusively the matters of male and female religious community governance. Heresy, of course, was always a worry. Pope Innocent III [r. 1198-1216], possibly the most significant papal leader of the medieval era, summoned the Council IV Lateran in 1215 which ruled that no new religious orders should be founded, but that those individuals seeking a common vowed life should seek admission to an existing order, and particularly a monastery of the Benedictine Rule.
 
Francis, on good terms with Innocent’s Rome, was able to receive papal approval for his “lesser brothers” and their public lifestyle, including Francis’s simple rule on 1209. Clare, on the other hand, was shuffled off to two Benedictine communities by Francis as noted above before the friars constructed a convent/monastery at the church of San Damiano, where Francis had experienced his vision of the crucified Christ some years before. Because intimate sources are rare, we are left to wonder about Clare’s reaction to the unfolding of events. Having been attracted to Francis’s way of life, the young woman found herself inured in a traditional structure, where she would live till her death in 1253. Soon after the completion of the San Damiano convent, Clare would become abbess under the guidance of the friars of Francis who in fact, wrote a simple first rule for her community.
 
It is obvious from both contemporary reports and the author’s analyses of documents that Rome assessed the “lesser brothers” of Francis and the “Poor Ladies of San Damiano” by different lights. Rome generally allowed the male Franciscans a much greater freedom of self-maintenance and governance. By contrast, the Poor Ladies were contained within their walls, their sacramental and governmental needs met by friars. That Francis and his successors allowed this, and the Poor Ladies accepted this [publicly] is testimony to several factors. First, the times themselves were dangerous. In Clare’s 1253 rule, the descriptions of physical security are detailed; the author comments on the plight of the sisters should a fire break out.
 
Second, Rome fretted about the financial security of Clare’s community. Clare herself, something of an introvert, seemed throughout the book to be engaged with the Vatican about estates and bequests—specifically that the sisters did not accept any. Clare, throughout her adult life, disputed with Rome for a grant of the “Privilege of Poverty,” a strict exemption in which, among other denials, the sisters ate one meal per day. [See the final rule of 1253 here.] A papal issue of the Privilege was granted the year of Clare’s death in 1253.
 
This work is a fine introduction to historiography, the painstaking art of getting the story right. Mooney does the work; we gain access to an intriguing narrative that lives today, an integration of the religious idealism of Clare on Gospel poverty to the theology and preaching of Pope Leo XIV on the hungry and homeless in our day. I should note here that this volume was written by a Professor of History at Boston College and published by Brown University Press. The increasing numbers of women teaching and researching Catholic theology, Scripture, History, and the other sacred sciences is a trend that bodes well for Catholic life, identity, and equality.