St. Clare of Assisi
Patron of television, eye disease, and enclosed religious life
- Feast day
- August 11
- Origin
- Assisi, Italy
- Era
- 13th century
- Order
- Poor Clares
- Canonised
- 1255
About the saint
Clare Offreduccio was born in 1194 to a noble family of Assisi. At eighteen she heard Francis preach and slipped out of her father''s house on Palm Sunday night in 1212 to receive the habit from him at the Portiuncula.
She founded the Poor Ladies at San Damiano, later the Poor Clares, and lived there for forty years, most of them in ill health. She fought successive popes for the "privilege of poverty" — the right of her sisters to own nothing at all — and won it two days before her death.
She was the first woman known to have written a monastic rule for women. Pius XII named her patron of television, because when too ill for Mass she reportedly saw and heard it on the wall of her cell.
Works
Documented miracles
The Saracens turned back
Ill in bed, she had the Blessed Sacrament carried to a window as imperial troops scaled the convent wall; the attackers withdrew.
San Damiano, 1240
The vision on the wall
Too sick to attend Christmas Mass, she reported seeing and hearing the liturgy from her cell, the basis of her patronage of television.
Assisi, c. 1252