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The Franciscan Spirit Through the Ages / 235 CHAPTER 9 POOR CLARES AND TERTIARIES Too extensive a role may have been attributed, in the foregoing pages, to the Friars Minor, who certainly have no monopoly on the spirituality of St. Francis. That spirituality is, on the contrary, shared and spread also by the other two Orders rooted in the Gospel experience of Francis: the Poor Clares, contemplative nuns entrusted to the vigilance of Clare of Assisi, and the Third Order of St. Francis, which, from the outset, gathered together baptized people of every social class who lived in the world. It has of course been impossible to avoid referring to Poor Clares and to tertiaries in the foregoing chapters on holiness, the apostolate and social involvement; but now the time has come to pay closer attention to them in their own right. The Poor Clares a. The Project of Clare and Francis Right at the outset a question arises which we shall not claim to resolve: would St. Clare and St. Francis have wanted women to share the spiritual experience of Francis by being consecrated to God through religious vows like the Friars Minor, but also living like them outside the monastic cloister? Although no text of the time gives us an answer, many indications lead us to believe that this may have been what Clare and Francis envisaged. But nothing in the customs of that age, nothing in civil or ecclesiastical law, nothing in the outlook of anyone then could support the practice of such an ideal. When we see what Clare went through just to get an exception to common law known as the "privilege of poverty," we get some idea of how unthinkable it would have been to seek a dispensation from cloister! Franciscan spirituality, or better, Franciscan evangelism thus had to be lived by women consecrated to God within the cloister without the material support that would normally derive from real estate, without any revenues at all—in a word, in poverty. But far from hindering the growth of the new Order, named the "Poor Ladies," this ideal was soon acknowledged by both church and civil/feudal authority. By the time of St. Clare's death in 1253, her 236 / Willibrord C. VanDijk, O.F.M. Cap. way of seeking holiness had begun to spread throughout Europe. Let us just mention, by way of illustration, the following blesseds and saints: Philippa Mareri in Italy (d. 1236), Agnes of Prague in Bohemia (d. 1280), Cunegunda (d. 1292) and her sister Yolanda (d. 1298) in Poland and others in Germany, Flanders and France—including Isabella of France (d. 1270), the sister of St. Louis and foundress of the Longchamp monastery where she shared in the life of the Poor Clares without actually taking vows. b. The Source of Vocations One cannot fail to be impressed by the number of young women from princely or noble families who became Poor Clares. It is often claimed that these vocations were forced—decided by paternal authority well before the age when a true personal decision could be made. This claim is not altogether false. But to evaluate it accurately one would have to study each case in painstaking detail, a task which has never been undertaken and which would doubtless be futile anyway. Why the Poor Clares? A princess, a daughter of a nobleman would fit in better in a monastery of Benedictines, of Canonesses, even of Cistercians. In fact, there were some Dominican monasteries set aside for noble ladies. But the Poor Clares? It was not long after the Order's founding that vocations started coming from noble families, and yet the abbess was generally chosen without regard to her former state in life. She was always chosen for a specified time and never considered entitled to an endowed benefice. Doesn't this indicate that the spirituality of these religious houses superceded their utility as convenient places for daughters who had become a burden to their families? The religious who chose to follow St. Clare wanted to distance themselves from the world they considered morally depraved, but they also wanted to hold onto their culture and urbanity. To cite but one example: beginning with her adolescence, Battista Varano (d. 1524), daughter of the Duke of Camerino, had both undergone mystical experiences and read the ancient classics. Rejecting marriage to a prince, she became a Poor Clare and described the mental sufferings of Jesus Christ in mystical and theological treatises in which...

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