my favorite saint is Clare of Assisi because she is A) the patron saint of television, B) my name saint, C) a motherfucking boss who wanted to join St. Francis of Assisi’s band of like wandering homeless bro-dudes for Christ and Francis was like “sure!” and the Catholic Church was like “but you’re a LADY” and she was like “fuck you, you think ladies can’t sleep on the ground and eat tree bark as well as these asshats, LET ME FUCKING EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW POVERTY WORKS”, oh btw i should explain that Clare came from a family that was RICH AS HELL and so did Francis so like please give them props for voluntarily giving up their comfy beds and nice clothes because they were like “it’s shitty to think that you’re helping the poor by just tossing gold coins at them from inside your MOTHERFUCKING CASTLE”
So ANYWAY
the religious orders for nuns at the time were like pretty cool in some ways because if you were a lady who didn’t want to get married and have a jillion babies you could be like “SORRY BOYS, GOD’S CALLIN’, GOTTA GO JOIN A BENEDICTINE CONVENT, DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOUR ASS ON THE WAY OUT” and then spend the rest of your life chilling with ladies and doing needlework and reading fucktons of books and being better educated than 99% of the best-educated men in the upper classes, but that was largely a privilege for rich ladies, so in a lot of ways it wasn’t really all that big of a social change? like abbots and abbesses were still in the upper strata of society? but what francis and his dudebros did was like revolutionary at the time, like “WE SHALL OWN NO PROPERTY AND EAT WHATEVER COMES OUR WAY AND WHATEVER WE HAVE WE GIVE TO THE POOR FIRST AND WE’LL LIVE IN THE WOODS IF WE HAVE TO, WHATEVER, IT’S ITALY, THE WEATHER’S USUALLY PRETTY CHILL, BUT MOST OF ALL WE WON’T HAVE TO GIVE ANY FUCKS ABOUT BUREAUCRACY OR THE POLITICAL ELITE B/C WE’RE GETTING BACK TO NATURE, DUDES”! like it was this lowkey Robin Hood plus 1970′s hippie commune plus socialism plus Twelve Apostles cosplay plus the biggest middle finger imaginable to their mortified rich parents (”girl was that your son Francis singing hymns to Brother Moon in the town square while dressed in rags” “GIRL I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, PASS THE CHARDONNAY”). and that’s all like super rad! and even though it started with dudes because it was just ol’ Frank and his bros, they were all for having the ladies come hang!
BUT WAIT
because in order to have their way of life legitimized which was super important to Francis – he didn’t want to just be a ragtag bunch of weirdos, he wanted this to be a religious movement that would spread through Europe and hopefully revolutionize a CORRUPT AF institutional church bureaucracy – he had to get the Pope’s approval to make them a religious order. Which he super did, no problem. So then Clare trots over to Rome and she’s like “yeah so I’m gonna need that same piece of paper you gave my BFF Francis” and they’re like “TAKE YOUR VAGINA AND YOUR FRAGILE SILKY WHITE GIRL-SKIN AND YOUR WEAK LITTLE LADY BOD BACK TO ASSISI, SWEETHEART, LEAVE THE SLEEPING-IN-THE-WOODS SHIT TO REAL MEN” and they wouldn’t legitimize her religious order (which was already like a major posse by this point) because there were zero religious orders at that time for women which required a vow of poverty.- though there were already LOTS for dudes, not just the Franciscans – because they thought the girls couldn’t hack it.
“BITCH PLEASE”
So Clare (who by the way a lot of Catholics treat like she was just Francis’ junior partner but SHE OUTLIVED THAT MOTHERFUCKER BY THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS, so she’s LITERALLY the reason his ideals and his legend spread as far as they did, because she was running the fucking show) basically made it her life’s work to pester an endless succession of Popes, one after another, into granting a poverty dispensation to the Poor Clares. They weren’t waiting on permission to like DO THEIR SHIT, mind you – Clare kept doing Clare, living with her ladies in the convent Francis LITERALLY BUILT FOR HER WITH HIS OWN TWO HANDS WHICH IS ROMANTIC AF, I’M SURE THEY WERE GOOD CELIBATES AND DIDN’T BANG BUT YOU CAN’T TELL ME THEY WERE NOT TOTALLY IN LOVE, I SHIP IT LIKE FEDEX, and engaging in the same radical practices as the Franciscans of living in actual community with the poor. Not just like throwing a few bucks in the collection plate on Sunday and patting themselves on the back for what good Christians they were, but throwing their doors open so that anyone in Assisi who was hungry or homeless could be welcomed without judgement as their brothers and sisters. So FINALLY after ACTUAL DECADES like the fifth or sixth Pope in a row that she screamed at was like “OH MY GODDDDDDD, FIIIIINE, take your poverty dispensation and FIND A NEW HOBBY BESIDES YELLING AT POPES EVERY TEN GODDAMN SECONDS,” and that’s how Clare of Assisi struck a blow for feminism in the 1100′s by convincing the Catholic Church that women’s bodies were not fundamentally weaker than men’s.
OH ALSO
THIS FUCKING HAPPENED
”In 1224, the army of Frederick II came to plunder Assisi. Clare went out to meet them with the Blessed Sacrament in her hands. Suddenly a mysterious terror seized the enemies, who fled without harming anybody in the city” (x)
SO SHE’S ALSO LIKE A VALKYRIE BASICALLY
Plus when she was old and too sick to go down to the chapel for Mass, she had visions where she could watch what was happening on the wall of her bedroom, so she could still participate, AND THAT’S WHY SHE’S THE PATRON SAINT OF TELEVISION
IN CONCLUSION, Clare of Assisi was a mouthy feminist badass who bitch-slapped the societal expectations of her mother, her zillionaire family, her entire social caste, all of Assisi basically, like seriously half a dozen Popes, all of institutional Catholicism, and pretty much like THE WORLD to give up her inheritance, cut off all her hair, and go run away with her best friend to go build a hippie commune in the woods based around the radical notion that poor people are actual human beings.
bennu rising 