Order Of The Poor Clares

The Poor Clares, officially the Order of Saint Clare (Latin: ''Ordo Sanctae Clarae''), originally referred to as the Order of Poor Ladies, and also known as the Clarisses or Clarissines, the Minoresses, the Franciscan Clarist Order, and the Second Order of Saint Francis, are members of an enclosed order of nuns in the Roman Catholic Church. The Poor Clares were the second Franciscan branch of the order to be established. The first order of the Franciscans, which was known as the Order of Friars Minor, was founded by Saint Francis of Assisi in 1209. Three years after founding the Order of Friars Minor, Francis of Assisi and Clare of Assisi founded the Order of Saint Clare, or Order of Poor Ladies, on Palm Sunday in the year 1212. They were organized after the manner of the Order of Friars Minor and before the Third Order of Saint Francis was founded. As of 2011, there were over 20,000 Poor Clare nuns in over 75 countries throughout the world. They follow several different observances and are organized into federations.

The Poor Clares follow the ''Rule of St. Clare'', which was approved by Pope Innocent IV on the day before Clare's death in 1253. The main branch of the order (OSC) follows the observance of Pope Urban. Other branches established since that time, who operate under their own unique Constitutions, are the Colettine Poor Clares (PCC) (founded 1410), the Capuchin Poor Clares (OSCCap) (founded 1538) and the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration (PCPA) (founded 1854).

Foundation and rule

The Poor Clares were founded by Clare of Assisi in 1212. Little is known of Clare's early life, although popular tradition suggests that she came from a fairly well-to-do family in Assisi. At the age of 17, inspired by the preaching of Francis of Assisi in Assisi Cathedral, Clare ran away from home to join her community of friars at the Portiuncula, some distance outside the town. According to tradition, Clare's family wanted to take her back by force, but Clare's dedication to holiness and poverty inspired the friars to accept her resolution. She was given the habit of a nun and transferred to Benedictine monasteries, first at Bastia and then at Sant' Angelo di Panzo, for her monastic formation. Though some doubted her ability to become a nun, Francis of Assisi encouraged her on her journey. St. Francis believed that women, as well as men, had the capacity to completely forgo ordinary pleasures and live in poverty and did not seek to limit them in this regard based on their gender. This shared belief of both Francis of Assisi and Clare of Assisi would lead them to form the Order of St. Clare. An order of women, dedicated to living an oath of poverty and service, just as the Order of Friars Minor, formed by St. Francis just three years prior.
By 1216, Francis was able to offer Clare and her companions a monastery adjoining the chapel of San Damiano where she became abbess. Clare's mother, two of her sisters and some other wealthy women from Florence soon joined her new order. Clare dedicated her order to the strict principles of Francis, setting a rule of extreme poverty far more severe than that of any female order of the time.Farmer, David (ed.) ''Oxford Dictionary of Saints'', Oxford University Press (1997), p. 103 Clare's determination that her order not be wealthy or own property, and that the nuns live entirely from alms given by local people, was initially protected by the papal bull ''Privilegium paupertatis'', issued by Pope Innocent III. By this time the order had grown to number three monasteries.

Spread of the order

The movement quickly spread, though in a somewhat disorganized fashion, with several monasteries of women devoted to the Franciscan ideal springing up elsewhere in Northern Italy. At this point Ugolino, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia (the future Pope Gregory IX), was given the task of overseeing all such monasteries and preparing a formal Monastic Rule. Although monasteries at Monticello, Perugia, Siena, Gattajola and elsewhere adopted the new rule – which allowed for property to be held in trust by the papacy for the various communities – it was not adopted by Clare herself or her monastery at San Damiano. Ugolino's Rule, originally based on the Benedictine one, was amended in 1263 by Pope Urban IV to allow for the communal ownership of property, and was adopted by a growing number of monasteries across Europe. Communities adopting this less rigorous rule came to be known as the Order of Saint Clare (OSC) or the Urbanist Poor Clares.Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007, Vol.9. p. 603

Clare herself resisted the Ugolino Rule, since it did not closely enough follow the ideal of complete poverty advocated by Francis. On 9 August 1253, she managed to obtain a papal bull, ''Solet annuere'', establishing a rule of her own, more closely following that of the friars, which forbade the possession of property either individually or as a community. Originally applying only to Clare's community at San Damiano, this rule was also adopted by many monasteries. Communities that followed this stricter rule were fewer in number than the followers of the rule formulated by Cardinal Ugolino, and became known simply as "Poor Clares" (PC) or Primitives. Many sources before 1263 refer to them as Damianites (after San Damiano).Bert Roest, ''Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform'' (Brill, 2013).

The situation was further complicated a century later when Colette of Corbie restored the primitive rule of strict poverty to 17 French monasteries. Her followers came to be called the Colettine Poor Clares (PCC). Two further branches, the Capuchin Poor Clares (OSCCap) and the Alcantarines, also followed the strict observance. The later group disappeared as a distinct group when their observance among the friars was ended, with the friars being merged by the Holy See into the wider observant branch of the First Order.

The spread of the order began in 1218 when a monastery was founded in Perugia; new foundations quickly followed in Florence, Venice, Mantua, and Padua. Agnes of Assisi, a sister of Clare, introduced the order to Spain, where Barcelona and Burgos hosted major communities. The order then expanded to Belgium and France, where a monastery was founded at Reims in 1229, followed by Montpellier, Cahors, Bordeaux, Metz, and Besançon. A monastery at Marseille was founded directly from Assisi in 1254. The Poor Clares monastery founded by Queen Margaret in Paris, St. Marcel, was where she died in 1295.'' Queen Isabella (c.1295/1358) and the Greyfriars: An example of royal patronage based on her accounts for 1357/1358'', Michael Robson, ''Franciscan Studies'', Vol. 65 (2007), 328. King Philip IV and Queen Joan founded a monastery at Moncel in the Beauvais diocese. By A.D. 1300 there were 47 Poor Clare monasteries in Spain alone.

The growth the Poor Clare community was experiencing would not last long. Plagues and wars would soon devastate Europe from the 1340s and onward. Plagues such as the Black Death alone would kill up to 20 million people in Europe. In addition, there would be many different military conflicts that would also affect the Poor Clares, such as The Hundred Years’ War that would start in 1337 and go to 1453. Due to the extreme loss of life from both sickness and war, many religious communities were forced to rebuild and recruit more people to the order.

The Poor Clares were a part of this and would have to redefine who they were and who they would let into the order as they were eager to build it back up. For example, prior to both The Hundred Years’ War and the Black Plague in 1330, The Poor Clares had around 80 women who were a part of the order in Toulouse, France. However, by 1370, The Poor Clares’ would only have four women who were still a part of the order. This would lead them to evacuate to local towns and start recruiting individuals to the order. Not all the people who were recruited by the Poor Clares during this time were willing to embrace vows of abstinence, poverty, or obedience. This would bring conflict within the order as there wasn’t unity in the standards that were once the foundation of what the Poor Clares stood for. This would lead to several reform movements, such as the one spearheaded by Juan the 1st.

Europe

United Kingdom

The first Poor Clare monastery in England was founded in 1286 in Newcastle upon Tyne. In medieval England, where the nuns were known as "minoresses", their principal monastery was located near Aldgate, known as the Abbey of the Order of St Clare. The order gave its name to the still-extant street known as Minories on the eastern boundary of the City of London.

After the dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII, several religious communities formed in continental Europe for English Catholics. One such was a Poor Clare monastery founded in 1609 at Gravelines by Mary Ward. Poor Clare nuns from Walloon Convent and eight English women, one of whom being Mary Ward, rented a place in town until the convent was completed. The convent was completed in 1609 and provided a permanent place for the nuns to live until 1626 when a fire destroyed most of the building and forced the nuns to seek temporary shelter until it was repaired. Disaster struck again in 1654 when an explosion destroyed almost all of the town, including the convent.

Later expelled from their monastery by the French Revolutionary Army in 1795, the community eventually relocated to England. They settled first in Northumberland, and then in 1857 built a monastery in Darlington, which was in existence until 2007.

Following Catholic emancipation in the first half of the 19th century, other Poor Clares came to the United Kingdom, eventually establishing communities in, e.g., Notting Hill (1857, which was forced to relocate by the local council in the 1960s, and settled in the village of Arkley in 1969), Woodchester (1860–2011), Levenshulme (1863), Much Birch (1880), Arundel (1886), Lynton (founded from Rennes, France, 1904–2010s), Woodford Green (1920–1969), York (1865–2015) and Nottingham (1927–2023).

The community in Luton was founded in 1976 to meet a shortage of teachers for local Catholic schools. It was originally based at 18 London Road in a large Edwardian house. In 1996, the community refocused on a ministry of social work and prayer, and moved to a smaller, modern home at Abigail Close, Wardown Park.

Germany

With the Reformation, nuns in catholic monasteries in Germany would be forced to leave their convents and return to family or other networks.

Ireland

The Poor Clares Order is the longest-surviving female religious community in Ireland. As of 2024, the Poor Clares celebrated their 382nd anniversary of being in Ireland. In Ireland there are seven monasteries of the Colettine Observance. The community with the oldest historical roots is the monastery on Nuns' Island in Galway, which traces its history back to the monastery in Gravelines. The community has a rare book collection which is the most comprehensive single collection of early-modern Clarissan material in English in the world.

It was an English woman, popularly known as the Venerable Mary Ward, who founded a convent of English Poor Clares in Gravelines France in the 17th century. Women from different countries would come and seek admission there. One of them was a young woman, known as Marianna Cheevers, who sought admission into the abbey in 1619. Marianna was a young Irish woman from Wexford, and she became the first Irish Poor Clare since the Reformation. She was professed in December of 1620 and was followed by four other woman from Ireland. Two of the women who joined her were daughters of Viscount Dillon, one of whom was Cisly Dillon, and the other two were Alse Nugent from Westmeath and Mary Doudal from Dublin. By May of 1625, all five of them would be professed and become the first five Poor Clares from Ireland since the Reformation. The five women were determined to start a convent that was exclusively Irish and selected Cisly Dillon, daughter of Theobald Dillon, 1st Viscount Dillon, to be their abbess, even though she was only 22 at the time.''Poor Clare Tercentenary Record, 1629-1929: being a brief account of the lives and actions of certain devout women who restored the Poor Clare cloister to the Ireland of the early seventeenth century''. Dublin: Cahill & Co, 1929.

On May 20, 1625, they would arrive at the town of Dunkirk, which was only 14 miles from Gravelines, and was located on the coast in the Low Countries. The Low Countries would have been swarming with the Irish at that time. As the Irish fought in almost all the Spanish wars as mercenaries from 1587 to 1814, in fact, in 1585, Queen Elizabeth pledged to help the protestant Dutch fight for their independence from the Spanish Catholics and sent over 500 Irish Catholics to fight. When the Irish and their English Colonel William Stanley, who was also catholic, found out that they had been sent to fight the Spanish Catholics, they quickly changed sides in the conflict and paved the way for thousands of other Irish people to come and fight for the Spanish. It was soldiers like these that Cisly and the others hoped to help. People like Owen Roe O’Neil, a famous soldier and leader in Irish history, would have been around the Low Countries at this time. Other Irish men like Owen, grew up in places like the Spanish Netherlands and the Low Countries (located north of France) and would not return to Ireland unless brought back by fellow insurgents or family members still living in Ireland. In other words, the Low Countries and the Spanish Netherlands were full of Irish Catholics.

As all five of the women had connections among Irish officers, it is unsurprising that they wanted to form a convent in the Low Countries. What is surprising is the courage they exercised as they had no money. They hoped to survive on the money they received with alms, but their alms were not enough. Unable to make the high rent, they were forced to leave after eighteen short months and moved to a town called Nieuport, which was just further up the coast close to Ostend. Since most of their donations came from Ireland and the war was going on, they had little to nothing to etch out a living. Since Charles the 1st was now king, they wondered if they should return to Ireland. Communities that had been shut down after the Reformation were being restored by the Irish Franciscans. Though Charles the 2nd would have had a greater impact in the restoration of Catholicism than Charles the 1st, if only for the fact that he enjoyed a longer reign as monarch of England than his father.

In June of 1629, the Poor Clares finally arrived in Ireland, and the five nuns settled in Dublin. They set up a convent on Merchants’ Quay and received twelve novices, out of whom they professed six. Everything was going well until on February 24, 1630 an order from England came to close all religious houses. They managed to remain hidden until October 22, 1630, when they were apprehended by authorities. As they were being marched off, people in the street saw them in their habits and started a riot to free them. Abbess Cisly was able to quiet the mob, and after being interrogated by authorities, the women were allowed to leave and given orders to dissolve the convent and told to leave Dublin within the month.

They separated into groups of two to avoid attention, and the young Abbess Cisly went to her father’s estate and found a piece of land that was away from the public. The nuns named it Bethlehem, as they would take shelter here, just as Christ Jesus took shelter in the stable following his birth. They lived there in peace for over a decade and were renowned for their piety. After some time, they built a nunnery in Drogheda and started to grow in numbers. Though those ten years were a blessing of peace, unrest would plague them again. Persecution under the Penal Laws and the Irish rebellion would lead to the destruction of their monastery and would leave them with no choice but to dissolve for a time. Many of them took refuge in Dublin and eventually formed a convent there and that community would become one of the oldest communities in Ireland. Originally a separate community of Irish women under a common mother superior with the English nuns, they moved to Dublin in 1629, the first monastic community in Ireland for a century. The first Abbess was Cisly Dillon, a daughter of Theobald Dillon, 1st Viscount Dillon.

War forced the community to move back to Galway in 1642. From that point on, persecution under the Penal Laws and war led to repeated destruction of their monastery and scattering of the community over two centuries, until 1825, when fifteen nuns were able to re-establish monastic life permanently on the site.

Later monasteries were founded in 1906 in both Carlow and Dublin. From these, foundations were established in Cork (1914) and Ennis (1958). In 1973, an enclosed community of nuns of the Franciscan Third Order Regular in Drumshanbo, founded in England in 1852 and established there in 1864, transferred to the Second Order, under this Observance.

There is Poor Clares monastery in Faughart, County Louth.

Continental Europe

Currently there are communities of Colettine Poor Clares in Bruges, Belgium, as well as in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and in Larvik, Norway. There are several monasteries in Hungary, Lithuania and Poland of the Urbanist and Capuchin Observances.

There are notable Clarissine churches in Bamberg, Bratislava, Brixen, and Nuremberg. There also is a small community in Münster, Germany, and a Capuchin monastery in Sigolsheim

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