Below are excerpts from a recent post from Joan Chittister titled the radical among us which remembers Clare of Assisi, co-builder of the Franciscan movement.

The feast of Saint Clare of Assisi is August 11.

Chief among Francis’ followers was a woman who was a leader in her own right. The young noblewoman Chiara Di Offreduccio, Clare, was an intelligent, educated, and pious person. Her own family castle had been sacked during the social upheavals in Assisi. She was well-bred, well-to-do, and meant for the better things in life. When she heard Francis preach, however, she knew that his call to radical poverty was hers as well.

Clare was the one, in other words, who really proved that what Francis talked about was doable for people in general, even pampered upper-class ones.

In the end, Francis and Clare brought five things to the world that shocked all of Europe into a new consciousness and that call to us yet today. They brought a call to peace; a consciousness of the poor; a sign that it is possible to be happy without things; a radical reading of the Gospel of Christ that depoliticizes the meaning of conversion; and a new sense of the feminine. 

Perhaps poverty is not the sign of the inept. Perhaps poverty is not a mark of lack of character. Perhaps poverty is a sinful residue of a sinful system that blames the victim for its victimage. Perhaps poverty is something about which we all have a responsibility.

The legacy of two intrepidly simple people who would not accept life as it was because it could be so much better is as much a gift to the twenty first century as it was to the thirteenth.
            ––from A Passion for Life: Fragments of the Face of God, by Joan Chittister

joanchittister.org/