Saint Clare of Montefalco

Her sister gave her a secret oratory, where she could occupy herself without hindrance; and it happened several times that she remained there motionless, her mind and heart united to God, from Matins until Terce, and even until None. In one of these divine conversations, the holy Virgin presented her Son to her, in the form of a small child. Clare did not dare to approach him out of respect; but the Virgin said to her: "Here, Clare, embrace your Spouse." She came to embrace him, and this divine Child, to inflame her heart further and give her an insatiable desire for his possession, then hid under his mother's mantle and disappeared. What were the ardors of this spouse after that, and what did she not do to find this beloved, whose beauty she had glimpsed? He appeared to her again in the form of a lamb of incomparable whiteness, which placed itself in her arms and lay upon her breast. It was because of these admirable caresses that she was sometimes at night, in her cell, shining like a star, and that in the morning, so that she would not be disturbed by the natural day, small clouds formed around her, which hid the light of the sun from her. Several very secret things were revealed to her from then on. She knew the state of a woman who had died; she saw her in purgatory, plunged into a sea of pain that cannot be expressed.

When our Blessed one was a little older, God inspired her sister Joan, superior of the community, to leave the house where she was, which was too small and too inconvenient for the number of her daughters, and to build a convent on a neighboring hill, in a place where she would see a cross. All the sisters began to pray for the fulfillment of this order, and they saw, indeed, on the top of the hill of Saint Catherine, a cross of light which seemed to be followed in procession by several women. They did not doubt that this was the place that divine Providence had destined for them. Thus they acquired it and built a small monastery there; having moved there after an infinity of contradictions and obstacles which were raised against them by the malice of the demon, they begged the Bishop of Spoleto, their diocesan, to give them the Rules of a congregation received and approved by the Church, to be their own Rule, in order to become true religious. The Bishop gave them the Rule of Saint Augustine, which they received with unpara lleled joy, and upon wh Règle de Saint-Augustin Religious order occupying the priory during the Middle Ages. ich they perfectly formed all their conduct. Clare was the one who showed the most zeal and ardor in this whole affair, and she also deserved to receive from her spouse a crown of flowers, while waiting for him to crown her with thorns and to make her share in all the bitterness of his Passion.

However, as the construction of the convent had exhausted all the wealth of these poor girls, they were reduced to begging for a living. Clare offered herself willingly for this act of humility, and she performed it for some time with marvelous edification; she never entered any house, for fear of breaking the silence there, or of being looked at in the face. Even in the most violent rains she remained in the street, contenting herself with the shelter she could find there. When she was given alms, she received them on her knees to thank the author of all goods, and then her benefactors. She did not fail to observe her fast and her other austerities rigorously: thus, she was consumed little by little, and it was necessary, to preserve her life, to remove her from this employment. But when the spirit of penance has once taken possession of a heart, nothing is capable of stopping it. Clare no longer had the fatigue of the quest, but she replaced this fatigue with much more rigorous treatments. Her body was like a victim that she immolated every day for the sins that were committed in the world: blood often flowed from it under the blows she gave herself. The horsehair, which she applied to her wounds, perpetually renewed this pain for her: she gave herself no relief, neither by a tranquil sleep, nor by sufficient food. Silence was the inseparable companion of her penance, and one day when she broke it without necessity, she stood, as punishment, with her feet bare in icy water, for the space of one hundred Pater nosters which she recited with incredible humility and fervor. She avoided the parlor as much as she could, and when obedience obliged her to go there, she always kept herself very covered, without seeing or being seen, and spoke only very softly and almost in monosyllables. Her sister complained that she kept this rigor towards her own brother, who wished to see her; but she replied with great wisdom that, since one did not speak with the eyes, but with the tongue, it was quite useless to see each other in these conversations, and that it was enough to hear each other.

There was no task in the house, however lowly, to which she did not apply herself with joy. She was the relief of all the other sisters, and when she saw one too burdened with work, she immediately set about helping her. Her sister, the superior, having fallen ill, she merited her recovery through her prayers, but in a quite supernatural way: angels, having descended into her room, performed such a charming concert that it dissipated all her illness and restored her entirely to health. This was, however, only for a short time. She died after eight years of her priorship of the monastery of the Holy Cross, and our Blessed one, after having had a revelation of her glory, was elected superior and abbess in her place. Her humility made her resist her election greatly; but God wanted her to be superior, in order to give the final perfection to this nascent house, and she had to, despite herself, bend under this yoke and take charge of the conduct of her sisters. She did indeed take it, but in a most holy manner. Her example was a living rule that taught each one what she had to do. She was always the first, not only in exercises of piety and devotion, but also in the most humiliating tasks. She applied herself diligently to the spiritual advancement and relief of her daughters. She encouraged them in their sorrows with words of fire. She corrected them for their faults with incredible sweetness; and, if she was obliged to punish them, it was always with so much love that they thanked her for it. As for temporal matters, she did her best so that necessary things would not be lacking to them, for fear that sorrow and anxiety might distract them from prayer and make religious life unbearable. It happened one day that the town of Montefalcone, and then the monastery of Saint Catherine, were in extreme scarcity, to the point of having no bread. These poor daughters were a little troubled by it; but their trouble did not last long, for the holy Mother, having implored the help of heaven, angels appeared visibly, bringing in baskets a large quantity of bread, which served for their sustenance for several days, and did not run out until the scarcity had passed. She then gave them an admirable exhortation, to lead them to trust in God, to the mortification of their senses, to the love of the cross and penance, to humility of spirit and heart, and to all other religious virtues.

To advance them in perfection, she gave them admirable regulations; among others, to bend the knee a thousand times a day, to adore the sovereign majesty of God; to banish from their parlor those ladies, great chatterboxes, who bring the world into the cloister; to keep their enclosure inviolably, to speak to men only by necessity, with the curtain drawn and never alone; to have continually before their eyes the thought of the Passion of the Son of God, and to often place themselves in the uncomfortable posture of this divine Redeemer stretched out on the cross. She did not allow the nuns to have any money in private; but she had all gifts and alms put in common. She ordered that after the sustenance of the community, what money remained should be distributed to the poor; that every time they baked, they should give them twelve of the finest loaves, in honor of the twelve Apostles, and that, for the relief of the souls in purgatory, the office of the dead should be said every day after the canonical hours. As for her, she was so inflamed with divine love that she could not tire of weeping or chastising herself for the offenses and ingratitude of sinners. She sometimes wished to have a hundred bodies or a body as large as a mountain, to make herself suffer at the same time in a hundred different places, as much for her own sins, which were always very light, as for the sins of all men.

Her humility was so profound that she looked upon and treated herself only as the most imperfect and miserable of all creatures. She endured only with great difficulty that the honors and deference that inferiors owe to their superiors should be rendered to her. It seemed to her that everyone should arm themselves to persecute and crush her, and she was even astonished that she was suffered for a moment on earth, and that she was not loaded with contempt, insults, and opprobrium. After having held the first rank in the choir, in the chapter, and in the refectory, by an indispensable necessity attached to her office, she took the last to wash the dishes, to sweep, to make the beds of the sick, and to serve the least of the novices. She disparaged herself as much as she could, not believing that she could say anything to her disadvantage that was not much less than what her unworthiness deserved. The poorest furniture, the most torn clothes, the coarsest veils were the most agreeable to her. One cannot worthily express her charity and mercy, not only towards her daughters, but also towards all kinds of miserable people. Her dinner and supper were ordinarily for them, because, contenting herself with bread and water, or a few mouthfuls of vegetables, she consecrated the rest to Jesus Christ, suffering and hungry in his members. She had a particular care for the sick and the ulcerated. She prepared remedies that she sent to them; and, if they were women, she uncovered their wounds, washed them, and bandaged them with wonderful application and kindness. Far from the infection turning her away from performing these duties, she made them her dearest delights: one day when an ulcer, extremely dirty and horrible to see, made her heart leap and almost made her fall into a faint, she had, to overcome this natural repugnance, after having recovered a little, the courage not only to look fixedly at this hideous wound, but also to bring her mouth to it, to kiss it with affection. When one overcomes oneself in this way, there is nothing left that is costly in the spiritual life, and one is capable of the strongest impressions of grace and the most heroic actions of Christianity.

What did she not do to convert sinners, to obtain mercy for them from God, to reconcile families and cities armed and embittered against one another, and to restore peace to the provinces? Her prayers, accompanied by humiliation and penance, were so effective that she won an infinity of victories in this regard. One day, she undertook the conversion of an impious man who, plunged into all sorts of crimes, despaired of forgiveness and his salvation. The matter was very difficult, and at first, she found only great rebuffs at the feet of her Spouse; but she did so much, through her fasts, vigils, bloody disciplines, groans, and tears, that she finally bent His justice and obtained the grace for this desperate man. Indeed, he came to find her while she was still in prayer for him, but with a spirit so humbled and a heart so contrite that it was easy to see that the finger of God, which is the Holy Spirit, had wrought great things in his soul. It was through the help of her prayer that the inhabitants of Montefalcone, Florence, Arezzo, Perugia, Spoleto, and Reate, today Rieti, having set out on campaign to destroy one another through horrible massacres, laid down their arms and returned home. Let us add here, to show the charity of our Blessed one, that she was a dove without gall: not only did she easily forgive insults, but she also procured every kind of good for the people who had outraged her or offended her community. Witness a certain notary, who had stolen all the titles of her convent, and two young men who had entered it armed to carry off their sister: she used all the credit she had with God and with men in order to deliver them from a violent death that their crimes had justly deserved.

Very violent illnesses often tested her patience and made its eminence and perfection appear; but the slander and false testimonies of the impious against her innocence were even harsher trials. She was in the midst of these tribulations like a rock which, in the middle of waves and storms, does not shake and loses none of its firmness. She loved those who hated her and prayed for those who persecuted her. She was never more cheerful than when she knew she had been decried; and she was seen overwhelmed, on one side by very violent bodily pains, and on the other by horrible calumnies, without any of this weakening her constancy or giving her a moment of sorrow or anxiety. Her purity was more angelic than human, and she lived in the flesh as if she had no flesh at all. Being only eleven years old, she uncovered herself a little while sleeping by inadvertence and without having contributed to it by her will; her sister reproved her for it as for a great fault, and she performed a long and harsh penance for it, as for a very enormous sin. From that time on, she arranged herself for sleeping in such a way that she could not uncover herself, and that none of her limbs could touch another while naked. She did not allow anyone, not even her daughters, to touch the slightest part of her body. Finally, it was for the preservation of a virtue that was so dear to her that she was so harsh to her own body and that she overwhelmed herself with so many austerities and penances.

She was, so to speak, always in prayer. Besides the canonical hours and the office of the dead, which she attended with wonderful attention and reverence, she had several other vocal prayers that she performed very exactly. All the rest of the time, after the indispensable duties of her office, she spent in mental prayer and in uniting her spirit and heart to her Beloved. The adorable mystery of the most Holy Trinity was the most frequent subject of her meditation, and God one day granted her the grace to represent it to her with wonderful clarity, although much inferior to that of the beatific vision. Her tenderness for the mystery of the holy Sacrament of the altar, where she found her Spouse hidden under the veils of bread and wine, was incredible. She received Him corporally as often as she could; but it can be said that she always received Him spiritually: her hunger for this divine food was never satisfied, and she always had her understanding, memory, will, and heart open to receive Him. This is what earned her the privilege of being communicated twice by the hand of Our Lord: once when her sister, to mortify her, had forbidden her the holy table, and another time when, having forgotten her mantle, she did not dare approach the grille because she did not believe herself to be in decent attire. Her sighs and tears on these two occasions were extreme; but her Spouse soon changed them into an unspeakable consolation when He placed in her mouth the One whom her heart desired, so that she could say with the Spouse: 'I have found the Beloved of my heart, I hold Him and I will never let Him go.'

The Passion of Our Lord was also one of the sweetest objects of her contemplation and affections. She could not think of it without her heart breaking with regret and her eyes melting into torrents of tears. She wished to see in spirit all that had happened in the course of this bloody tragedy, in order to take part in the sorrows that her Spouse had endured therein: she asked for it, and she was heard. The entire Passion was represented to her as distinctly as if it had taken place before her eyes, and she felt all the pains one after the other, with sufferings that cannot be expressed. Her head felt sharp and piercing stings, as if she had been crowned with long thorns. Her feet and hands were as sensibly pierced with pain as if large nails had passed through them with the violence of a hammer. Her saliva had no less bitterness and acridity than if it had been gall, wormwood, or vinegar, and her body was as bruised as if four or five powerful executioners had discharged upon her, with all their might, whips and scourges until they were weary. The shame of nakedness, although she was clothed, the anguish of heart capable of making one sweat blood and water, the terror of death, and the other distresses of the Passion were imprinted upon her, so that she became a living image of her suffering and crucified Savior.

She invited all her daughters to the practice of these lovely devotions, from which she drew such great fruits; and when she spoke to them about it, she did so with such unction that they were all sensibly touched. In one of her conferences, as she dwelt a little on the sweetness that one feels in the meditation of the sufferings of Jesus Christ, a sister of the company replied that she meditated upon them assiduously, and that she nevertheless experienced none of those consolations that she led them to hope for. This word moved our Saint and gave her we know not what feeling of vanity or impatience. She did not consent to it, but she did not stop it with all the promptness and care that the fidelity of a beloved spouse demanded. Her Spouse was angered by it, and by a terrible judgment, He abandoned her, for a fault so slight and imperceptible, to eleven years of dryness, languor, interior abandonment, boredom, scruples, temptations, and illnesses, without a continual redoubling of fasts, hair shirts, disciplines, sighs, and tears, and an infinity of humiliations and interior annihilations being able to soften His justice. It had to be gone through: no more visions or revelations for her, no more tender and loving colloquies with her Beloved, no more taste in the service of God, no more openness in prayer, no more pious and moral assurance of being in grace; finally, nothing but coldness and rebuffs from the part of Him whom she cherished so tenderly, and, instead of the sweet thoughts of our holy Mysteries, with which her soul was accustomed to be filled, nothing but dishonest imaginations, movements of blasphemy, feelings of despair, and a thousand other abominable impressions that hell is capable of producing or suggesting. This was the purgatory of Clare, where, without her noticing it, her passions and her slightest imperfections were destroyed, her virtues were perfected, her humility was consumed, and her love for God received a wonderful increase; for, what is admirable in an abandonment of such long duration, this faithful Lover remained constant and unshakable in the service of her Savior; so many temptations and evils could never tear from her heart either a half-consent to sin, or an impatience at seeing herself so mistreated, or a discouragement in her exercises, or a diminution of fervor, or an instant of boredom and melancholy; she bore her pain with sorrow, deplored her state with inexhaustible tears, asked for the help of the prayers of all pious persons to bend the anger of her irritated Lover; she had him told, like the Spouse, by the guardians of the city, that is to say by her confessors and directors, that she was languishing with love; but it was not by complaint, it was with an annihilated love and an amorous annihilation that wounded the heart of the One she sought without Him letting her know anything of it.

Finally, after this long time of abandonment, He returned to her, and brought her back into His divine cellars with more sweetness and familiarity than ever. She was warned of this return by several visions, and was disposed to it by the beginnings of caresses, which seemed to her all the more sweet and charming as the delights of heaven, as well as those of earth, had been entirely unknown to her for eleven years. Thereafter, there were only ecstasies, raptures, visions, and revelations, which were followed by great miracles and a life already entirely heavenly and similar to that of eternity. There is in the process of her canonization an entire book that speaks only of these extraordinary favors; but we would be too long if we wished to report the slightest part of them here. We will only say that on one Christmas night she saw distinctly the whole mystery of the humble and glorious birth of the Son of God; and that, from the Kings to the Purification, she was in a continual ecstasy where Jesus Christ showed Himself to her in the glory He has in the seat of His justice, with an infinity of souls, of whom very few ascended to heaven without passing through the flames of purgatory; some were plunged there to pay the penalty for their cowardice, and others were cast by the demons into the lake of sulfur and fire, with a noise so terrible that it seemed the entire universe was falling into it with them. She learned, in this rapture of twenty-seven days, that she still had fifteen years to live, as indeed she lived all that time. It was during this same time that Our Lord appeared to her again carrying His cross on His shoulders, and said to her: "It has been a long time, my daughter, that I have been looking on earth for a firm and solid place where I can plant my cross, and I have found none more suitable than your heart; you must therefore receive it, and suffer it to take root there." One could not make her a more charming and lovable proposal. She opened her whole heart to receive a plant so precious, and which can only bear fruits of salvation: it is believed that from then on the marks of the Passion were imprinted there as they were found after her death, as we shall say at the end of this eulogy. From that time on, the blessed Clare spent entire weeks and months without eating. She was endowed with such an excellent gift of prophecy that she knew and predicted distinctly the things that were to happen; thus, she predicted to Cardinal Giacomo Colonna his deposition from the cardinalate and his reinstatement. This cardinal, after having been reinstated, presented her with a finger of Saint Anne, the flesh of which was all vermilion. She likewise predicted to the Bishop of Spoleto, her diocesan, that he would be raised to a higher degree; indeed, he was promoted to the dignity of cardinal and Bishop of Ostia. She also sometimes had the gift of tongues, speaking with foreigners in their mother tongue, although she had only learned Italian. The secrets of consciences were known to her, and she read there the most hidden sins that sacrilegious persons had sealed in confession. She made this well known to one of her nuns who had retained a shameful crime and could not resolve to declare it. Finally, this excellent abbess had an infused knowledge that revealed to her the most sublime reasons of our mysteries, and made her capable of resolving the strongest objections of the heretics.

By this knowledge, she confounded and disarmed a heretical priest of the sect of the Fraticelli. Under a beautiful appearance of piety that made him reg arded a Frérots Heretical group opposed by Claire. s a saint and an apostle, he came to the grille of her monastery to corrupt her faith and that of all her daughters, by persuading them that the freedom of the Gospel allowed them to do everything and even to plunge into the most infamous vices. She attacked him with a vigor worthy of a Doctor of the Church, and refuted his blasphemies so learnedly that he was forced to withdraw with the shame of having been defeated by a woman. She overcame with the same ease the demon who appeared to her to inspire the same errors in her; but, although she shed tears continually and performed very great penances to obtain the destruction of this heresy, she did not, however, have the consolation of succeeding, and it only ended a few years after her death.

These admirable actions brought her great reputation: everywhere, people spoke only of the holiness of Clare of Montefalcone. Her miracles further increased this esteem, for she raised two people from the dead and healed the sick of fever, scrofula, epilepsy, and other kinds of infirmities; finally, she cast out the demon from those who were tormented by it. As the time of her death drew near, Our Lord warned her that she would soon receive the reward for her labors; that she had committed no faults that were not entirely erased by penance, and that her eleven years of abandonment had saved a thousand people from eternal damnation. From that moment, she was filled with such delights that she was already half in heaven. She was administered the sacraments of the Eucharist and Extreme Unction, which she received with the ardor of a seraph. The angels and the Sovereign of the angels himself visited her, and the demon, who had the effrontery to appear before her, received only eternal confusion. She protested to her daughters that the cross of Jesus was at the bottom of her heart, and that the y wo cœur Miraculous relic containing the instruments of the Passion. uld find it engraved there: she cried out, in a kind of rapture, that the reward being prepared for her was too great. Finally, after having exhorted her community once more, she rendered her most pure spirit to Our Lord, to enjoy his presence eternally. At the same hour, several people saw her ascend to heaven, all radiant with glory and accompanied by a troop of blessed spirits. Her face remained as fresh and rosy as it had been during her life. As she had told her daughters that they would find the cross of Jesus in her heart, they resolved to open it to bear witness to this truth. It was a rather bold action for young women, to whom natural tenderness hardly permits such operations. They performed it nonetheless, and, having opened her chest, they found a heart almost as large as the head of a small child. Respect for this venerable heart made them deliberate whether they should split it; but a holy curiosity outweighed this respect. They cut this heart through the middle, into two equal parts, and then they perceived, on one side, the figure of Jesus Christ crucified and pierced by a lance in his right side, with that of his crown of thorns, his nails, his lance, and the sponge with which he was given vinegar to drink; on the other, the figure of the column and the whip, composed of five branches, which served for his flagellation: all of which was formed in an admirable manner from the fibers and small nerves of the heart. A wonder so surprising could not remain confined to this convent: the nuns themselves gave notice to their bishop, who, placing little faith in it, sent his vicar general to them to examine the truth. The vicar general went there only in a spirit of contradiction, persuading himself that it was only the imagination of young women, and his haughty and bizarre mood even led him, when he saw these marks of the Passion so well engraved, to cut them with a razor so that one would think of them no more. But he was very surprised to find them imprinted in the same way on the new surface that his razor made on such a precious heart. He yielded to this blow and recognized the miracle of the loving power of God. The nuns, who had also found in our Saint the gallbladder to be extremely large and hard, further begged this vicar general to allow the doctors he had brought to open it. It was done, and there appeared three small balls as large as hazelnuts, ash-colored and extremely hard. God inspired them to weigh them, and it was found that these balls, so similar that one could not distinguish one from the other, were also of equal weight, and yet each weighed as much as the other two, and all three put together, without one being able to recognize where this equality came from; which was an admirable figure of the mystery of the most Holy Trinity, which our Blessed one had deeply imprinted in her spirit. Finally, a third wonder: the blood that flowed into the incisions of the heart of thi très-sainte Trinité Central concept symbolized by the three windows of the tower. s incomparable virgin has remained without corruption and in the form of blood, and one has even seen it boil since, when the Church was threatened by some great misfortune, as Bollandus testifies happened before the island of Cyprus was taken by the Turks. One still sees today, at Montefalcone, this heart enriched with the signs of the Passion; these three balls of equal weight, one of which, however, split through the middle in the year that heresy entered the kingdom of France; and this clotted blood, with the entire body. Many miracles have been performed through her intercession since her death; the account of them is found in the authors of her life, who are numerous, both from the Order of Saint Augustine and that of Saint Francis.

This death occurred on August 17, 1308, under the pontificate of Clement V, successor to Boniface VIII. Eight years later, Pope John XXII issued two bulls to proceed with the necessary inquiries for her canonization. These two Bulls state that the Saint was of the Order of Saint Augustine. Pope Urban VIII permitted all religious men and women of this Order to celebrate her Mass and office. Abraham Bzovius speaks extensively of her in his Annals.

Pope Clement X approved the proper lessons of her office and had her name inscribed in the Roman Martyrology. The cause of the blessed one was resumed under Pope Clement XII. Finally, on September 7, 1850, the Sacred Congregation of Rites declared that the theological and cardinal virtues of the blessed Clare were established to a heroic degree. His Holiness P ope Pi Pie IX Pope who canonized Josaphat in 1867. us IX confirmed this sentence on the 13th of the same month. The apostolic process regarding the miracles of the blessed Clare, begun on October 22, 1850, was completed on November 21, 1851, and approved by the Sacred Congregation of Rites on September 25, 1852. Pope Pius IX confirmed this decree on the 30th of the same month.

In her images, Saint Clare holds a balance in her hand, one of whose pans contains one globule and the other two. When she died, tradition reports, three small solid globes were found in her heart. This was regarded, as we have just seen, as an image of her devotion to the Holy Trinity, and, indeed, one of these globules, whichever it might be, placed in one of the pans of the balance, exactly counterbalanced the other two.

We have supplemented the account of Fr. Giry with the Analecta Juris Pontificii.