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 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 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 his community of friars at the Portiuncula, some distance outside the town.Michael Walsh (ed.). Butler's lives of the Saints, Burns and Oates (1991) p. 246. 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 three years prior.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. (1929). Cahill & Co. 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.Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (1998). Convents confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant nuns in Germany. Marquette University Press
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.Goodrich, Jaime.(2021). “The Rare Books of the Galway Poor Clares.” Library 22.4:: 498–522.