St. Francis & St. Clare

A Love story of God, each other and Nature..

Saint Francis of Assisi (born Giovanni Francesco Bernardone) (1181 or 1182 – 3 October 1226) was a Roman Catholic friar and the founder of the Order of Friars Minor, more commonly known as the Franciscans.

He is known as the patron saint of animals, birds, the environment, and Italy, and it is customary for Catholic churches to hold ceremonies honoring animals around his feast day of October 4.
 

Many of the stories that surround the life of St Francis deal with his love for animals. Perhaps the most famous incident that illustrates the Saint’s humility towards nature is recounted in the 'Fioretti' (The "Little Flowers"), a collection of legends and folk-lore that sprang up after the Saint’s death. It is said that one day while Francis was traveling with some companions they happened upon a place in the road where birds filled the trees on either side. Francis told his companions to "wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters the birds".The birds surrounded him, drawn by the power of his voice, and not one of them flew away. Francis spoke to them:

My sister birds, you owe much to God, and you must always and in everyplace give praise to Him; for He has given you freedom to wing through the sky and He has clothed you…you neither sow nor reap, and God feeds you and gives you rivers and fountains for your thirst, and mountains and valleys for shelter, and tall trees for your nests. And although you neither know how to spin or weave, God dresses you and your children, for the Creator loves you greatly and He blesses you abundantly. Therefore… always seek to praise God.

Main article: Wolf of Gubbio
Another legend from the Fioretti tells that in the city of Gubbio, where Francis lived for some time, was a wolf “terrifying and ferocious, who devoured men as well as animals”. Francis had compassion upon the townsfolk, and went up into the hills to find the wolf. Soon, fear of the animal had caused all his companions to flee, though the saint pressed on. When he found the wolf, he made the sign of the cross and commanded the wolf to come to him and hurt no one. Miraculously the wolf closed his jaws and lay down at the feet of St. Francis. “Brother Wolf, you do much harm in these parts and you have done great evil…” said Francis. “All these people accuse you and curse you…But brother wolf, I would like to make peace between you and the people.” Then Francis led the wolf into the town, and surrounded by startled citizens made a pact between them and the wolf. Because the wolf had “done evil out of hunger”, the townsfolk were to feed the wolf regularly, and in return, the wolf would no longer prey upon them or their flocks. In this manner Gubbio was freed from the menace of the predator. Francis, ever the lover of animals, even made a pact on behalf of the town dogs, that they would not bother the wolf again.

These legends exemplify the Franciscan mode of charity and poverty as well as the saint's love of the natural world. Part of his appreciation of the environment is expressed in his Canticle of the Sun, a poem written in Umbrian Italian in perhaps 1224 which expresses a love and appreciation of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Mother Earth, Brother Fire, etc. and all of God's creations personified in their fundamental forms. In "Canticle of the Creatures," he wrote: "All praise to you, Oh Lord, for all these brother and sister creatures.

Francis's attitude towards the natural world, while poetically expressed, was conventionally Christian. He believed that the world was created good and beautiful by God
 

It was, after all, a snug and cosy world, the world in which these early Franciscans lived, a world personally supervised by its Creator, who walked the earth as a man among men, and who loved His creatures with a parent's love, assisted in His care of them by His Son and His Son's Mother. Thus warmly had Jesus thought of the world in His time - a projection, perhaps, as Renan suggests, of a verdant Galilee blossoming in the Syrian desert. This "naturalism" of the early Franciscans, so beautifully expressed in the lauds and in the "Canticle" of the Saint himself, finds surely in the Little Flowers its most complete and beautiful expression. It has been through them that the birds who stretched their throats and bowed their heads in approval of the Saint's exhortation to praise have ever since made their chirping voices heard above the noisy history of Europe. To savor this naturalism in its full freshness one need only turn to some expression of the naturalisms of a later day, that of the Rousseauians or of our own Emerson or Thoreau. These two were efforts to being God back into the world (from which He had been exiled by Cartesian logic). But how vain the effort! How unsatisfactory a God that is only Nature, and how literary and metaphorial a Nature which we must think of as God! It is a more real and understandable thing, this Nature of the early Franciscans, the "useful", "humble", "comfortable" invention of a God who could be used, if one treated Him right, for the humble commonplace needs of common everyday people.

The story of Clare is often told as an adjunct to St. Francis. She has a beautiful, courageous, contemplative gleaming light that deserves to be recognized as separate from, yet inspired by St. Francis. Before St. Clare’s birth, a mysterious voice told her mother she would bring a brilliant light into the world (Flinders, 1993). This mystical voice was prophetic of the future. Clare is called ‘bright,’ and ‘gleaming.’ Despite her enclosed life in a monastery, Clare’s radiance rose up from her place of prayer to illuminate the world. She was a spiritual teacher and mystic in her own right.

St. Claire was the founder of the Order of Poor Claires, a female order which followed the strict ideals of the Franciscans. Claire wears the plain gray habit of her order. St. Claire was an important supporter of St. Francis, and it was in an olive grove near her abbey that he composed his "Canticles of the Sun." The original of this work was part of a cycle that included St. Francis, St. Louis of Toulouse, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

The Lady Clare, was born in the town of Assisi about the year 1193. Her mother was to become Blessed Ortolana di Fiumi. Her father is said to have been Favorino Scifi, Count of Sasso-Rosso. There is little information about Clare's immediate family or her childhood.

She was eighteen years old when she heard Saint Francis preaching the Lenten sermons at the church of Saint George in Assisi, an experience which influenced her to change the whole course of her life. Perhaps to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal, she went secretly to see Friar Francis and asked him to help her to live "after the manner of the Holy Gospel." They became friends through these conversations, though neither had any idea of how to carry out Clare's wish.

On Palm Sunday of 1212, she went to the cathedral of Assisi for the blessing of palms. When the others went up to the altar-rails to receive their branch of green, a sudden shyness kept Clare back. The bishop saw it and came down from the altar to give her a branch. She took this as a sign of God's mission for her.

The following evening she slipped away from her home and went to the chapel of the Portiuncula, where Francis and his small community were living. He and his brethren had been at prayers before the altar and met her at the door. Before the Blessed Virgin's altar Francis sheared her hair, and gave her his own penitential habit, a tunic of coarse cloth tied with a cord. Then, since he had no nunnery, he took her at once for safety to the Benedictine convent of Saint Paul, where she was affectionately welcomed.

When relatives and friends found out what Clare had done they came to rescue her. When they tried to drag her away, she clung to the convent altar. Before the struggles pulled the altar cloths completely off, she bared her shorn head, declared that Christ had called her to His service, she would have no other spouse, and the more they continued their persecutions the more steadfast she would become. Finally, they left her, but the struggle was not yet over.

Francisthen moved her to the nunnery of Sant' Angelo di Panzo, where her sister Agnes, a child of fourteen, joined her. This meant more difficulty for them both, and the protest and obstacles from the family renewed. Eventually but Agnes' determination won out and in spite of her youth Francis also gave her the habit.

Once Clare got permission  from Saint Francis to organise an order of women to live in the way Saint Francis and his order did, it still took a few years to begin. She was eventually joined by her sister Agnes and other young women who wanted to be brides of Jesus, and live in this way. Saint Clare and her sisters wore no shoes, ate no meat, lived in a poor simple house and kept silent most of the time. Yet they were very happy.

He placed them both in a small and humble house, next to the church of Saint Damian, on the outskirts of Assisi where he had his Order housed. In 1215, three years after Clare had taken the habit, when she was about twenty-two, he appointed her superior of her Order and gave her his rule to live by. She was soon joined by her mother and several other women, making a total of sixteen. They all felt the strong call of poverty, and without regret gave up their titles and estates to join Clare's humble disciples. Within a few years similar convents were founded in the Italian cities of Perugia, Padua, Rome, Venice, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Siena, and Pisa, and also in various parts of France and Germany. Agnes, daughter of the King of Bohemia, established a nunnery of this order in Prague, and took the habit herself.

The "Poor Clares," went barefoot, slept on the ground, observed a perpetual abstinence from meat, and spoke only when obliged to do so by necessity or charity. Clare herself considered this silence desirable to avoid the innumerable sins of the tongue, and to keep the mind steadily fixed on God.

Saint Francis had forbidden his order ever to possess revenues or lands or other property, even when held in common. He had seen the excesses and abuses that could arise from these kinds of possesions. The brothers were to subsist on daily contributions from the people about them. In following the rule that he gave her, Clare also followed this way of life. When she left home she had given what she had to the poor, retaining nothing for her own needs or those of the convent.

"He who feeds the birds of the air and gives raiment and nourishment to the lilies of the field will not leave you in want of clothing or of food until He come Himself to minister to you for eternity."

She was in charge of her order, called the 'Poor Clares' for 40 years.Everywhere that the Franciscans went in Europe, the Poor Clares followed, so that by the time of her death, there were convents all over Germany, Italy and Bohemia. Even before her death, many people were convinced she was a saint.
 

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Francis of Assisi was, in his early life, a ladies' man, a carouser, a fierce warrior, and a P.O.W. Yes, that Francis of Assisi, who is also one of Catholicism's most beloved saints, known for his vow of poverty and prayer for peace.
 

Francis's life is a story of a complicated man, a true Italian among Italians, a poet, a warrior, a knight, a lover, a madman, and a saint," says the author. "It is a story about human love by lovers of God."

And then there is Clare, a long-haired beauty floating through the sun-drenched fields of Italy, a sort of one-girl counterpart to the new Franciscan Order.

Yet they, too, like Jesus, visioned a love so great that willingly they would have accepted damnation so only the other might have been saved. If one seek the moral theme in this early Franciscanism, one finds at least a morality that is made always for oneself and not for other people. Here again on earth were men who judged not, who loved the lost even more than the virtuous, and the bandit as much as the cavalier.
 

If we like to put it so, he helped her to elope into the cloister, defying her parents as he had defied his father. Indeed the scene had many of the elements of a regular romantic elopement; for she escaped through a hole in the wall, fled through a wood and was received at midnight by the light of torches.

So there may have been a great deal to be said for the Montagues or the Capulets; but the modern world does not want it said; and does not say it. The fact is that as soon as we assume for a moment as a hypothesis, what St. Francis and St. Clare assumed all the time as an absolute, that there is a direct divine absolute love relation more glorious than just any earthly romance, the story of St. Francis and St. Clare's development is a Romeo and Juliet romance with a happy ending; and St. Francis is the St. George or knight-errant who gave it a happy ending. And seeing that some millions of men and women have lived and died treating this relation as a reality, a man is not much of a philosopher if he cannot even treat it as a hypothesis.

For the rest, we may at least assume that no friend of what is called the emancipation of women will regret the revolt of St. Clare. She did most truly, in the modern jargon, live her own life, the life that she herself wanted to lead, as distinct from the life into which parental commands and conventional arrangements would have forced her. She became the foundress of a great feminine movement which still profoundly affects the world; and her place is with the powerful women of history. If a man may well doubt whether he is worthy to write a word about St. Francis, he will certainly want words better than his own to speak of the friendship of St. Francis and St. Clare. I have often remarked that the mysteries of this story are best expressed symbolically in certain silent attitudes and actions. And I know no better symbol than that found by the felicity of popular legend, which says that one night the people of Assisi thought the trees and the holy house were on fire, and rushed up to extinguish the conflagration. But they found all quiet within, where St. Francis broke bread with St. Clare at one of their rare meetings, and talked of the god of Love. and how a marvelous light radiated from the room where they sat together.  It would be hard to find a more imaginative image, for some sort of utterly pure and disembodied passion, than that red halo round the unconscious figures on the hill; a flame feeding on nothing and setting the very air on fire.

On his deathbed in 1226, St Francis of Assisi extolled his followers not to 'be too quick to canonise me. I'm perfectly capable of fathering a child'.

Pope Gregory IX ignored the warning and, largely for political reasons, rushed through Francis's canonisation.

At dawn on 11 August, 1253, the holy foundress of the Poor Ladies passed peacefully away. The pope, with his court, came to San Damiano for the saint's funeral, which partook rather of the nature of a triumphal procession. Two years later, 26 September, 1255, Clare was solemnly canonized by Alexander IV, and not long afterwards the building of the church of Santa Chiara, was erected in honour of the beloved saint.