Clare was born about the year 1193. Her mother was Ortolana di Fiumi and her father Faverone Offreduccio, and she had a younger sister, Agnes, and another, Beatrice, but of her childhood, adolescence and home-life there are no certain facts. When she was eighteen St. Francis came to preach the Lenten sermons at the church of San Giorgio in Assisi; his words fired her, she sought him out secretly, and he strengthened her nascent desire to leave all things for Christ. On Palm Sunday in the year 1212 Clare attended at the cathedral of Assisi for the blessing of palms; when all the rest went up to the altar-rials to receive their branch of olive a sudden shyness kept her in her place, which the bishop seeing, he went from the altar down to her and gave her the branch. In the evening she ran away from home and went a mile out of the town to the Portiuncula, where St. Francis lived with his little community. he and his brethren met her at the door of the chapel of our Lady of the Angels with lighted tapers in their hands, and before the altar she put off her fine clothes, and St. Francis cut off her hair, and gave her his penitential habit, which was a tunic of sackcloth tied about her with a cord. The holy father not having yet any nunnery of his own, placed her for the present in the Benedictine convent of St. Paul near Bastia, where she was affectionately received.
No sooner was her action made public but her friends and relations came in a body to draw her out of her retreat. St. Francis soon after removed her to another nunnery, that of Sant' Angelo di Panzo. There her sister Agnes joined her, which drew on them both a fresh persecution. Agnes's constancy proved at last victorious, and St. Francis gave her also the habit, though she was only fifteen years of age. Eventually St. Francis placed them in a poor house contiguous to the church of San Damiano, on the outskirts of Assisi, and appointed Clare the superior. She was later joined by her mother and others, among whom three were of the illustrious family of the Ubaldini in Florence.
St. Clare saw founded within a few years monasteries of her nuns at several places in Italy, France and Germany. Bd Agnes, daughter to the King of Bohemia, founded a nunnery of the order in Prague, in which she took the habit. St. Clare and her community had neither stockings, shoes, sandals nor any other covering on their feet; they slept on the ground, observed perpetual abstinence from meat, and never spoke but when they were obliged by necessity and charity. St. Francis wished that his order should never possess any rents or other property even in common, subsisting on daily contributions, and St. Clare possessed this spirit in perfection. Pope Gregory IX desired to mitigate this part of her rule, and offered to settle a yearly revenue on the Poor Ladies of San Damiano; but she persuaded him to leave her order in its first rigorous establishment. Gregory accordingly granted in 1228 the Privilegium paupertatis, that they might not be constrained by anyone to accept possessions. The convents of Perugia and Florence also received this privilege, but others thought it more prudent to accept a mitigation. After the death of Gregory IX (who as Cardinal Ugolino had drawn up the first written rule for the Poor Ladies of San Damiano), Innocent IV in 1247 published another recension of the rule which in some respects brought it nearer to Franciscan than to Benedictine observance, but which permitted the holding of property in common; he wrote that he did not wish to force this rule on any community unwilling to accept it. St. Clare was unwilling, and she set to work to draw up a rule which should unequivocally provide that the sisters possess no property, either as individuals or as a community. It was not until two days before she died that this rule was approved for the convent of San Damiano by Pope Innocent IV.
From the time when she was appointed abbess, much against her will, by St. Francis in 1215, St. Clare governed the convent for forty years. Thomas of Celano, who often heard St. Francis warning his followers to avoid any injudicious association with the Poor Ladies, states categorically that St. Clare never left the walls of San Damiano. Unhappily even during her life, and for long after her death at intervals, there was disagreement between the Poor Clares and the Friars Minor as to the relations of the two orders: the observant Clares maintaining that the friars were under obligation to serve them in things both spiritual and temporal.
St. Clare bore years of sickness with sublime patience, and at last in 1253 the long-drawn-out agony began. Twice during its course she was visited by Pope Innocent IV, who gave her absolution. She died the day after the feast of St. Laurence, the forty-second year after her religious profession, and the sixtieth of her age. She was buried on the day following, on which the Church keeps her festival. Pope Alexander IV canonized her at Anagni in 1255.
from Butler's Lives of Saints © Harper Collins