Clare of Assisi
San Damiano, Assisi
Nine stops with Clare — the saint who watched Mass from her sickbed
When Clare of Assisi was too ill to be carried down to the chapel on Christmas night, she saw and heard the whole Mass on the wall of her cell. Seven centuries later the Church made her the patroness of television for it — but she is far more truly the patroness of everyone who has ever followed the Mass from a bed, a chair, or a screen, and wondered whether it counted. Clare spent twenty-nine of her forty-one years at San Damiano too sick to rise. She is not a saint who visited the housebound. She was one. Walk this road with her, from the night she ran from her father's house to the morning she told her own soul to go forth in peace.
The nine days
Day 1 · The Flight — The Night She Ran
Assisi, Palm Sunday night, 1212
Day 2 · The Enclosure — The Small House
San Damiano, below the walls of Assisi
Day 3 · The Privilege — The Privilege of Poverty
The rule she would not surrender
Day 4 · The Sisters — Bound to One Another
The Poor Ladies of San Damiano
Day 5 · The Bed — Twenty-Nine Years
Her cell at San Damiano
Day 6 · The Wall — What She Saw From Her Bed
Christmas night, 1252
Day 7 · The Gate — She Set Him in the Window
San Damiano, 1240
Day 8 · The Mirror — Gaze, Consider, Contemplate
Her letters to Agnes of Prague
Day 9 · The Blessing — The Good Road
San Damiano, 11 August 1253