The Order of Poor Ladies

The Order of Poor Ladies — Ordo Pauperum Dominarum — is what the world now calls the Poor Clares. Officially the Order of Saint Clare, they are the Second Order of St. Francis: Franciscans, but contemplative, enclosed, and women.

1. A midnight escape

It began on Palm Sunday night, 1212. In Assisi, 18-year-old Clare Offreduccio, the loveliest debutante of a wealthy noble family, slipped out of her family’s palazzo. She ran to the little chapel of the Portiuncula, where Francis of Assisi was waiting.

He cut off her long fair hair, clothed her in a poor grey habit, and she vowed herself to Christ in absolute poverty. 

Her family tried to drag her back by force. Francis moved her to the rough, half-ruined church of San Damiano just outside the walls. There, her younger sister Agnes joined her, followed by their mother and then other women from Assisi’s well-to-do families. It was unusual — not peasants seeking security, but noblewomen deliberately choosing destitution. 

Clare called them simply the Poor Ladies.

2. What made them different

Every other women’s monastery in medieval Europe had endowments. Land, rents, dowries — guarantees you would not starve.

Francis and Clare refused them. Their rule was sine proprio—without property, either personal or communal. They would live by the work of their hands and by alms, day by day.

Clare wrote her own Form of Life, the first rule for a religious order ever written by a woman. Its heart is what she called the Privilege of Poverty. In 1216, Pope Innocent III granted it as an exception: the Poor Ladies of San Damiano alone were allowed to own nothing at all. Later popes tried to give them property for security. Clare fought them for 40 years, even on her deathbed in 1253. Two days before she died, Pope Innocent IV finally confirmed her Rule.

That is why, after her death, the Order she founded was renamed in her honor as the Order of Saint Clare, commonly referred to today as the Poor Clares. 

3. The charism

If the First Order (Friars Minor) preached poverty in the world, the Second Order lived it behind walls.

Three pillars:

1. Poverty as mirror. For Clare, poverty wasn’t asceticism for its own sake. Christ was the poor mirror, speculum, in which she saw herself. To be poor was to be free to love without owning.

2. Enclosure. Unlike the male Franciscans, Clare and her sisters led enclosed lives in monasteries. The cloister wasn’t punishment — it was a chosen garden. Francis told her: “Go to San Damiano and live there.” It became a place of intense sisterhood, prayer, and manual labor. 

3. Joyful contemplation. They are not social workers in the usual sense. Their work is prayer — the Liturgy of the Hours, long silent prayer, and what later centuries called perpetual adoration. The Church calls them contemplatives: their hidden life is offered for the world.

A typical day even now: rising before dawn for Vigils, Lauds, work (making altar breads, vestments, icons, supporting themselves), study, community recreation, Vespers, and Compline.

4. A turbulent history

The Order spread like fire. By 1260 there were more than 100 monasteries from Spain to Bohemia. Agnes of Prague, a Bohemian princess, built one of the most famous. In 1263 Pope Urban IV imposed a new rule that allowed communal property — many houses accepted it for survival. Those became known as Urbanist Poor Clares.

The ideal of radical poverty kept resurfacing:

• In 15th-century France, St. Colette of Corbie reformed the Order back to Clare’s original severity — the Colettine Poor Clares, still the strictest.

• In the 16th century, the Capuchin Poor Clares emerged alongside the Capuchin friars.

• In 1854 in France, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration were founded, centered entirely on adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. 

They have been suppressed, exiled, bombed, and restored. The Gravelines convent in the Spanish Netherlands, for example, was founded in 1607 by English women who had to leave England to live as Catholics. That story repeated in every revolution. 

5. Where they are today

There are now about 20,000 Poor Clares in more than 70 countries, in over 600 autonomous monasteries. Each monastery is independent — there is no generalate, no motherhouse. Each abbess answers directly to the Pope.

They still call themselves officially OSC — Order of Saint Clare — but also Clarisses, Minoresses, or Second Order Franciscans. 

If you walk into Assisi today, you can still visit San Damiano. The choir where Clare and her first sisters prayed is tiny, stone-cold in winter, blazing in summer. The fresco in the chapel shows her surrounded by her sisters — women who chose to have nothing so they could have everything.