Francis and Clare

Every Capuchin friar traces his life back to two people who knew each other in a small hill town in Umbria eight hundred years ago. Their stories are not legend. They are the reason the friars exist at all.

Saint Francis of Assisi

Francis was born around 1181 or 1182 in Assisi, the son of a cloth merchant. As a young man he wanted the life his money could buy, and then he wanted glory, and he went to war against the neighbouring city of Perugia. He was captured and held as a prisoner. Something in him changed during that imprisonment, though he could not yet say what.

Back home, praying before the crucifix in the small, half-ruined church of San Damiano, he heard Christ speak to him: “Go and rebuild my house.” He took it literally at first, and began repairing the stonework of that one church with his own hands. His father was furious at the money Francis had spent on it, and dragged him before the Bishop of Assisi to settle the matter publicly.

In front of the bishop, Francis stripped off his clothes and handed them back to his father, saying that from now on he would call no one father except God in heaven. It was a complete renunciation, done in public, with nothing held back for later.

What began as one man repairing a wall became something much larger. Francis gathered companions who wanted to live the Gospel without money or possessions, and in 1209 Pope Innocent III gave oral approval to their way of life. The written Rule was confirmed in 1223 by the bull Solet annuere. Francis called his brothers the Friars Minor — the lesser brothers — and preached that the whole created world was kin to be praised, which he set down in his Canticle of the Creatures. In 1224, two years before his death, he received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion, on the mountain of La Verna. Francis died on 3 October 1226 and was canonised within two years, in 1228. His feast day is 4 October.

Saint Clare of Assisi

Clare was born into a noble family in Assisi on 16 July 1194. She had heard Francis preach, and on Palm Sunday in 1212, aged eighteen, she left her father’s house at night and went to Francis and his brothers at the Portiuncula. There she received the religious habit, and there was no going back.

She settled at the church of San Damiano, the very building Francis had repaired with his hands, and lived out her life there. Women gathered around her, and they became known as the Poor Ladies, later the Poor Clares. Clare fought for decades to keep what she called the Privilege of Poverty — the right of her community to own nothing at all, even collectively, at a time when the Church wanted to soften that demand for women’s monasteries. She would not give it up.

During a Saracen siege of Assisi, Clare is said to have gone to the wall of San Damiano and held up the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance before the attacking soldiers, and the assault broke off. Near the end of her life she wrote her own Rule for her sisters — the first Rule ever written by a woman in the Church’s history. It was approved in 1253, two days before she died on 11 August that year. She was canonised in 1255. Her feast day is 11 August.

Why they still matter here

The Capuchin reform began in 1525 because a group of friars in the Marches of Italy thought the Franciscan life had drifted from what Francis actually asked for, and wanted to get back to it. That instinct — check the life against the founder, not against custom — is still the reason Capuchins exist as a distinct branch of the Franciscan family, approved by Pope Clement VII in 1528 under the bull Religionis zelus.

In New Zealand the friars minister in parishes in Hamilton and Auckland, a long way from Assisi in distance and in century. But the two facts that shaped Francis and Clare have not changed: a man who gave up everything he had rather than keep part of it back, and a woman who would not let anyone soften the poverty she had chosen. Friars vowing poverty, chastity and obedience today are making the same choice those two made first, in the same words, for the same reasons.