Who is Clare of Assisi?
[taken from an address by our Holy Father] Dear Cloistered Sisters, Eight hundred years ago, Clare of Assisi was born to the nobleman, Favarone di Offreduccio. This “new woman,” as the Ministers General of the Franciscan families wrote of her in a recent letter, lived as a “little plant, in the shadow of St. Francis, who led her to the heights of Christian perfection. The celebration of such a truly evangelical creature is meant most of all to be an invitation to rediscover contemplation, that spiritual journey which only the mystics experience deeply. To read her ancient biography and her writings — the “Form of Life, her Testament, and the four extant letters of the many she wrote to St. Agnes of Prague — means being so immersed in the mystery of the triune God and of Christ, the Incarnate Word, as to be dazzled. Her writings are so marked by the love stirred up in her by her loving, prolonged gazing upon Christ the Lord that it is not easy to express what only a woman’s heart coul
