03181212 Second Order is founded by St Clare

Clara was born in Assisi in 1194, into a noble family. When the young woman, educated and experienced in women's and domestic chores, wanted to marry, she had already met Francisco, twelve years her senior, several times, and had listened to his preaching that called her to the radical following of the poor Christ. and crucified. This call has never been silenced in her. 

Clare turned to Francis, through whom she felt called by God. And both came to the conclusion that Clara had to give way to radical poverty. How this was to be done, however, was not yet clear to them. Certainly with the approval of the Bishop of Assisi, Guido II, Clare secretly left her parental home on Palm Sunday night (March 18/19, 1212), rushing down the valley, on her way to the Porziuncula chapel, then lonely in the middle of the forest, where Francis and his brothers were waiting for her. 

There, she received, St. Francis' hands, a gray penance dress, the veil and the rope. The next morning, her relatives, dismayed, went in search of the young woman, and found Clare in the monastery of the Benedictines of Bastia, four kilometers west of Assisi, where Francis had taken her and where Clare was to remain until that the Lord "willed something else", as the "St. Clare's Legend" tells us (n. 8). 

The relatives tried to persuade Clara with advice, promises, flattery, and, finally, they wanted to force her to return home. Clare then ran to the altar, grabbed the tablecloths, and uncovered her tonsured head. Faced with this position, her relatives leave her.

Soon something surprising will happen: 16 days later, her sister Agnes, younger than her, joins her. The family rises up!

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