1193 – 1253
Saint and mystic
Clare of Assisi was one of the great mystics of the Middle Ages and the female counterpart to Francis of Assisi. She was a trailblazer and a reformer of monastic life for women. She was born into a wealthy noble family in Assisi, but refused to follow her parents’ wish for her to enter into a rich marriage. At the age of eighteen, she gave her vast fortune to the poor, after which she fled to Francis of Assisi, who consecrated her to God.
She found her own path: to live in silence, prayer and meditation, and in complete poverty, with unconditional trust in divine providence. Other women who wanted the same way of life as Clare of Assisi soon followed, and her order spread to large parts of Europe—also to Denmark, where the street Klareboderne in central Copenhagen still bears witness to the fact that a convent of her order once stood there. To this day, the order exists in many places around the world.
Clare of Assisi is the first woman in the Church’s history to have written a monastic rule for women (regulating life in the order’s convents), and she received the Pope’s approval of her rule a few days before her death in 1253.
