On the Road with Francis of Assisi (9 page)

6

Clare’s          Prison”

S
AN
D
AMIANO,
where Francis will install Clare; she will be cloistered here for forty-one years

F
ather Antonio is struggling to maintain his composure. The attractive, young, English-speaking friar is in charge of San Damiano, and his cell phone never stops ringing. There’s a tour bus about to arrive and a group of nuns from Africa and cars pulling into the parking lot and people arriving by foot along the walkway from Assisi. And there are Harvey and me, with our cameras and notebooks.

He sincerely wants to show us around San Damiano, and in between arrivals he hurries us along the covered entrance portico. “San Damiano was once a hospital for lepers, and because of that, no one ever came here,” he says, telling us a bit of information, albeit somewhat breathlessly, that we did not know before.

What we do know is that Francis’s prophecy for San Damiano came true. In 1212, four years after he finished the restoration, Francis installed Clare, his most recent and illustrious convert, in San Damiano, with the consent of the bishop of Assisi. We’ll get to the details of that story later, but it was here, inside San Damiano’s small cluster of old stone buildings, that Clare would be cloistered for an incredible forty-one years.

We hurtle along behind Father Antonio through the door leading toward the sisters’ dormitory. Some fifty women would join Clare at San Damiano in the Franciscan Order of Poor Ladies, the second order founded by Francis; among them were the daughters and sisters of Assisi’s noble families and Clare’s own mother and sister. They filled their days caring for the sick, growing their own vegetables and grains, doing chores around the convent, and engaging in contemplation and prayer, eight times a day. They ate very little, being in a state of constant fast, except for Christmas Day, when they were allowed two meals.

Conversation was forbidden in the dormitory, in the church, and during meals. Even the act of confession to a priest was tempered. “And they shall take care not to introduce other talk unless it pertains to the confession and the salvation of souls,” Clare wrote in her Rule for the Poor Ladies. The ensuing devotional silence was so profound that an early biographer of Francis and Clare claimed that several sisters had difficulty remembering “how to form words as they should.”

We are moving so fast in Father Antonio’s wake that it is difficult to contemplate what it must have been like to be a cloistered Poor Lady. But then again, it probably would have been just as difficult had our pace been more leisurely. Father Antonio leads us through the morgue or
sepolcreto,
where the early sisters, including Clare’s mother, Ortolana, and her sister, Agnes, were buried until their remains were moved to Clare’s basilica in Assisi. We look into the adjoining sisters’ choir, with its primitive, pitted wooden stalls and a fifteenth-century frescoed wall that had unfortunately replaced the grille, now in St. Clare’s basilica, through which the sisters, ever chaste, heard mass and received communion from a male priest. It was through that grille that Clare and the other Poor Ladies are thought to have viewed Francis’s body for the last time as it was being carried to Assisi by his friars. That final farewell, which Giotto portrayed with artistic license as being outside San Damiano, is part of his fresco cycle in St. Francis’s basilica in Assisi.

The full impact of Clare’s life within the walls becomes depressingly clear when we follow Father Antonio up a flight of old stairs, past her tiny, walled
giardinetto,
or garden, and into her dormitory. It was here, on the stone floor of the austere rectangular room and under a wood-beamed roof, that Clare lived with her sisters. The only sources of light are two small windows, which frame what must have been a tantalizing view of the spires of Assisi. There doesn’t appear to be any source of heat until Father Antonio tells us that there had been a fireplace but it had to be covered over “because of the tourists.”

This one, bleak room was for years Clare’s only world. “She had arthritis and had difficulty with the stairs,” Father Antonio explains. Here Clare lived, ate, slept, sewed and embroidered altar cloths for poor churches (an example of which is among the relics in her basilica in Assisi), and as abbess, ministered to the other Poor Ladies, later known as Poor Clares. She prayed in the small adjoining oratorio. The grille still there in the chapel floor provided access for communion to be passed up to her from below, Father Antonio tells us, and some say it was through this grille, not the one downstairs, that she looked at the dead body of Francis.

Clare’s life, too, was documented by Thomas of Celano, in
The Life of St. Clare Virgin,
begun in 1255, soon after her canonization. Numerous other books have been written about her, some in English or in English translations, including a comic book for children we bought in Assisi titled
Clare of Assisi, The Little Flowers of Saint Clare
by the contemporary Italian author Piero Bargellini and a narrative written by the prodigious Franciscan author and friar Murray Bodo titled
Clare: A Light in the Garden.

All of Clare’s biographers stress her devotion to “Blessed Francis” and her ardent embrace of poverty, but Celano supplies excruciating details. Clare reportedly went barefoot year-round on those cold, stone floors and during Lent fasted completely three days a week and lived on bread and water alone the other days. Francis and the bishop of Assisi intervened when they were alerted to her self-imposed food deprivation and ordered Clare “not to let a day go by without eating at least an ounce and a half of bread.”

She “mortified” her body in penance, according to Celano, by wearing a hair shirt, and not just any hair shirt; Clare chose secretly to wear the skin of a pig with the bristle side inward under her already patched and inadequate clothing. As if that weren’t excruciating enough, she is said to have alternated the bristly pig hide with “a stiff hair shirt woven with horsehair with knots all over it,” which she cinched tightly to her body with rough cords. A comfortable bed was out of the question. Clare slept on vine branches with her head on a piece of wood until her health began to give out. She moved to a mat on the floor with straw for a pillow until finally, at Francis’s order during the onset of her “prolonged illness” with arthritis at the age of thirty-one, she began sleeping on a bag stuffed with straw.

And she cried, a lot, for Christ’s suffering, though it’s hard to believe it didn’t include her own. Celano writes about the “rivers of tears” bursting from her eyes after the last prayer of the night, setting off similar tears among the other women in the dormitory. Clare’s weeping even brought the devil to her one night in the form of a dark child. “Don’t weep so much or you’ll go blind,” the devil-child said to her, to which Clare replied, “Anyone who shall see God will not be blinded.” The devil-child tried another tack. “Don’t cry so much or your brain will dissolve and run down your nostrils and then your nose will be crooked.” But Clare drove him off for good by retorting, “No crookedness is suffered by those who serve the Lord.”

Clare performed a multitude of miracles at San Damiano, several of which had to do with food. At one point, when the larder was almost bare, she multiplied a single loaf of bread into enough to amply feed both the fifty Poor Ladies and the friars assigned to look after them. Another time, during a visit by Pope Innocent IV, crosses miraculously appeared on loaves of bread after Clare blessed them.

Others of Clare’s miracles at San Damiano would change the course of history. The best known is her stand against the mercenary army of Saracens and Tartars raised by Emperor Frederick II against Rome. In the ongoing battle between Church and State, the emperor unleashed his forces on the Christian towns of the Spoleto Valley. On a Friday in September 1240, the mercenary hordes arrived at the gates of San Damiano, scaled the walls, and streamed into the cloister. The Poor Ladies, quite naturally, were terrified, but the bedridden Clare saved the day. Ordering her sisters to carry her to the front door of the convent, or into the refectory as some claim, she prostrated herself in prayer before the ciborium, the box that held the bread for communion, and called on Jesus to save San Damiano and Assisi. He evidently answered her call. The marauders inexplicably withdrew from San Damiano as quickly as they had entered, and Assisi, though damaged, was not overrun.

But it is a miraculous event that occurred toward the end of her life that lives on to this day. Clare was very ill and unable to attend a Christmas service being celebrated in the church of St. Francis five miles away in Assisi, yet she both heard the music and the prayers and saw the crèche of Jesus. That miracle would move Pope Pius XII, in 1958, to bestow the title of Patron Saint of Television on Clare for having seen the first live broadcast on the thirteenth-century wall of her cell. As a reminder, the late ABC News anchor, Peter Jennings, kept a statue of St. Clare on his desk.

For all of Clare’s poor health, she would outlive Francis by twenty-seven years. Her final illness culminated in a personal victory. For years she had been pleading with the various cardinals and Popes in Rome to approve the Privilege of Poverty that she and her order resolutely followed, but one after another had refused. The sticking point was her absolute refusal for the order, or any sister within the order, to own any property, an unheard-of concept then for nuns or sisters. The Popes felt that women of the Church should be financially protected and, like the Benedictines, at least own communal property so they would not have to depend completely on alms for food and housing.

But Clare was determined, especially after Francis died and some of his friars began to bend his strict rules against owning property in order to live more comfortably. In defiance, she wrote her own Rule of Life as a legacy for her order; it states emphatically that no sister can receive or have “possession or ownership either of themselves or through an intermediary, or even anything that might reasonably be called property.” The only exception she allowed was the land “as necessity” around a convent for the sisters’ “proper seclusion” and its cultivated use as a garden “for the needs of the sisters.”

As Clare lay dying, one church official after another came from Rome to visit her, including Pope Innocent IV—twice. Her influence had spread far beyond the walls of San Damiano. By then some 150 convents were associated with the Poor Ladies, not only in Italy but in France, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, Moravia, and the most famous, Prague, established by Princess Agnes, daughter of the king of Bohemia. (Agnes of Prague forswore marriage to the Emperor Frederick II as well as to King Henry III of England to become a Poor Clare. And Isabelle, sister of Louis IX of France, founded her own Poor Clare convent at Longchamp rather than marry Frederick II’s son.) But Clare still did not have what she wanted most. Though one cardinal had approved her Rule, she wanted the ultimate guarantee: a Papal bull on parchment with all its attendant seals and ribbons ensuring the right of her sisters everywhere to live in extreme, communal poverty.

In his book
The Little Flowers of St. Clare,
Piero Bargellini paints a moving portrait of Clare’s yearning for the Papal guarantee on her deathbed: “For this reason, she gazed lovingly at the hands of the Cardinals and Bishops who came to visit her; then, not seeing this roll of parchment with the leaden bull, the seal hanging from it, she would sigh again, turn her head away, close her eyes and repeat her silent prayer.” She entreated Francis’s original companions who visited her to pray “that she would not die before that Papal Bull arrived at San Damiano.”

She succeeded—but just. On August 10, 1253, the sealed bull arrived, just one day after the Pope had signed it in Assisi. It reads, in part: “No one is permitted to destroy this page of our confirmation or to oppose it recklessly. If anyone shall have presumed to attempt this, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of his holy Apostles, Peter and Paul.”

Clare died the next day, at the age of sixty. The spot is roped off on the stone floor at the end of the dormitory, lit by two naked lightbulbs, and identified by a wooden cross on the wall and the inevitable fresh flowers.

It is with some relief, on my part anyway, that we leave Clare’s dormitory and follow Father Antonio down a passage to the courtyard outside. He apologizes that he cannot show us the sisters’ second-floor infirmary; the small building, formerly the residence of San Damiano’s priest, had been structurally damaged in the 1997 earthquake and is closed to visitors. So is the ground-floor refectory where the Poor Ladies ate their meager meals in silence, listening to the Bible. Clearly visible through the open door, however, are the smoke-blackened walls and frescoes, the jumbled stone floor, and the sisters’ original dark, heavy wood tables and benches. The scene is so authentic that we fully expect to see Clare take her place under the wooden cross that marked the abbess’s place. Further enhancing the medieval mood is the sound of psalms being sung quite beautifully by a group of German pilgrims at San Damiano’s entrance.

Father Antonio has to leave us in the courtyard to hurry back to his post, and we thank him profusely for his time. “Please take these as a gift,” he says, thrusting several prayer and history cards of San Damiano into our hands. “God bless you.”

I am happy to linger in front of the refectory, with all its memories of Clare. What an extraordinary woman she was. Though her legend may very well have been exaggerated, she was a person of steadfast determination and dedication. When she heard of the martyrdom of five Franciscan friars in Morocco in 1220, she chafed at being unable to go to the Muslim country herself to emulate their sacrifice. She stood up to Popes and cardinals, looked after her sisters, and not only embraced what I would consider a horrible cloistered life but shared her passion for it with other Poor Clares.

“What you do, may you always do and never abandon,” she wrote to Agnes of Prague, whom she addressed as the “daughter of the King of Kings,” in 1235. “But with swift pace, light step and unswerving feet, so that even your steps stir up no dust, go forward securely, joyfully and swiftly, on the path of prudent happiness.”