Mas far as we’re talking about Francis of Assisi. Not only for the two books that Aldo Cazzullo dedicated to him (Francesco, the first Italian) and Alessandro Barbero (Saint Francis), released at the same time in view of the 800th anniversary of his death (in 2026), but also because the famous saint is one of the most loved and popular.
And when we talk about him we can’t help but remember her, Chiara. Who has in mind the light sequences of Brother Sun, sister Moon of Zeffirelli struggles to take note that the sweet saint, always depicted very blonde and beautiful, was, like Saint Francis, a mystic, and is extremely difficult to tell a mystique to the men and women of the twenty-first century.
He explains it very well Cristina Siccardi in hers Santa Chiara without filters, published by SugarCo. «Saint Francis and Saint Clare are two exquisitely mystical figures» who shared «a spiritual attitude tending towards union with the divine by overcoming natural limits (…) for which the individual’s aspiration is that of an existence (…) totally detached from the earthly worldsolely projected towards the transcendent”. And Chiara will really do everything to achieve this.
Saint Clare in a painting by Carlo Crivelli in the church of Saint Lucia, Montefiore dell’Aso (Ascoli Piceno) – © Wikipedia.
The medieval Assisi in which she was born, a dozen years after Francis, is a city at war: first the civil one, between the knights and the non-noble population of the city, and then against Perugia. A climate of violence, fear, oppression, hatred. Chiara is the daughter of the noble Favarone degli Scifi and Ortolana Fiumi. When describing his life, biographers and hagiographers play on his mother’s name, saying that she knew how to grow a holy little plant.
A more than restless teenager
What is certain is that Chiara was beautiful, blonde, kind, rich and noble, but certainly not happy. She doesn’t like what she sees and hears around her: violence, pride, caste, spite, arrogance. He begins to create problems by rejecting more than one marriage that they would like to impose on them. Imagine how her family reacts when she, now eighteen, runs away from home to join that furious madman Francesco who stripped naked in front of his rich but plebeian merchant father to dedicate himself to an ascetic ideal of evangelical poverty.
It’s what she likes, the extreme alternative to the life they would like to force her into. And she wants, as Siccardi explains, “an existence free from passions, from attachment to material goods and from bonds with people from a carnal point of view”.
“Saint Clare without filters. Her words, her actions, her gaze” by Cristina Siccardi (SugarCo Edizioni).
A true leader
They chase her, reach her, try to take her home, but she, in the famous scene immortalized by so much iconography, she clings to the altar cloth of the little church that offers her the right of asylum and shows her shaved head. According to the rules of the time, his team had to give up. As if that wasn’t enough, shortly afterwards her younger sister Agnese joins her, and here the family goes crazy: one passes, but not two lost daughters. Too bad that when they try to drag fugitive number two away by grabbing her by her not yet tonsured hair, she becomes a ton heavy, and not even the beefiest of knights can move her anymore. First miracle of the future saint and inglorious retreat of the wicked.
Thus began the adventure of Clare of Assisi. A story of great victories. And of great defeats. The beautiful noblewoman who had her braids cut by Francis is convinced that she can share the way of life of the Franciscan community with her sisters who soon join her. In absolute poverty, without owning anything, preaching the gospel, helping those in need, counting on alms and small jobs done in exchange for a crust of bread. Free as air.
In that little world, there is also Rufino, one of Francesco’s companions, Chiara’s cousin. But there is a but. Francesco, Rufino and the others are men. Chiara, her sister Agnese, her mother Ortolana who joins her and the others are women. Poverty is dangerous, it exposes you to the risks of the world, in the thirteenth century if a woman wanted to live her faith outside the family she could only do so inside a cloister: for centuries there was no other form of female monasticism other than seclusion.
The sisters share part of the Franciscan rules, barefoot and dressed in sackcloththey fast and pray, but they stay inside the bare walls of the convent of San Damiano. It is still an achievement. «For the noble Chiara, mindful of a proud and arrogant parentage, the renunciation of the exercise of power, of social affirmation, of love and the possession of things is synonymous with freedom» writes the great and late historian Frugoni who bears Chiara’s name.
Chiara is a mystic. Exaggerate. In a paroxysm of humility, not only does she wash the dirty feet of her sisters and kisses them, but she really wants to take care of the comforts of the elderly incontinent nuns, “heedless of the stench of excrement, even tingling with worms”. Complete fasting is imposed on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and on other days bread and water. He wears a sackcloth made of horsehair which painfully injures the skin, he sleeps on a bed of vine shoots, that is, hard vine shoots, resting his head on a wooden plankaccording to others even on a stone. In short, it is massacred.
When Francis leaves for Egypt to seek martyrdom among the infidels, she wants to join him, but naturally they don’t let her goAnd. Fortunately, Francis will not be martyred at all, on the contrary he will be welcomed with open arms by Sultan al Malik-al-Kamil, nephew of Saladin: an open-minded guy, if it had been up to him the fifth crusade would never have happened, because he was ready to negotiate on Jerusalem without going to war.
“Francesco, the first Italian” by Aldo Cazzullo (HarperCollins).
The bull of Innocent IV
And Chiara, who will not leave for the Holy Land, falls ill. As if, by realizing that he physically cannot go anywhere, his body had made the impalpable impediment of seclusion physical and evident. A pathology that affects her legs, but does not prevent her from working with her hands, somehow perched on her uncomfortable bed, and from leading the convent with a very clear mind and great strength. And it doesn’t even kill her, because Chiara will live quite a long time, for the time, around sixty yearsmuch more than Francesco who died practically blind around the age of forty-four.
Not that immobility weakens its principles: when the pope will try to question the “privilege of extreme poverty” by forcing the nuns to have material possessions so as not to jeopardize their safetythe reaction of the “abbess in spite of herself” will be very strong. She will be the first woman to draw up a convent rule, all the others were adaptations of texts written by men for male convents and adapted as needed.
And when she closes her eyes she smiles forever, because just two days earlier the Pope approved what she wrote, faithful to the principles of Francis. The sisters buried her with the long-awaited bull of Pope Innocent IV. Written in small print, however, there is a clause: that rule written by a woman applies only to the monastery of Assisi and that of Clare’s friend, Agnes of Bohemia in Prague, recalls the historian Frugonthe. In the bull of canonization of Chiara, who would have been made a saint just two years after her death, the Pope was careful not to write that his rule had been approved. The following popes confirmed the enclosure and revoked forever the privilege of the highest poverty. Here, poverty as a privilege is truly a subtle concept, worthy of a mystic like Chiara.