Audacious Nuns: Institutionalizing the Franciscan Order of Saint Clare

Church History, March, 2000 by Lezlie Knox

III. AFTERMATH: THE SISTERS' RESPONSE

The surviving documents from the 1261-63 battle demonstrate how the papacy negotiated with the Friars Minor to secure pastoral care for the nuns. What they do not show overtly, however, are the accommodations sought from the sisters. While it was the nuns' audacious attempt to bind the friars to them legally that initiated the conflict, these documents do little to reveal the sisters' ongoing concerns and attempts to safeguard their interests. For these matters, it is necessary to turn to the next confrontation between the Clarisses and the papacy.

On 18 October 1263, during the same period in which the pastoral relationship between the friars and nuns was being decided, Pope Urban IV published a new constitution for the Clarissan nuns.(54) Two reasons motivated his decision to promulgate new legislation. First and most obviously, he sought to reassure the brothers by giving the sisters a rule that did not require the Order of Friars Minor to provide spiritual care as some of the earlier rules had done. The new legislation adopted the provision from the 1218 constitution (authored by Cardinal Hugolino) that the cardinal protector would be responsible for the nuns' spiritual care. The protector was encouraged to appoint Friars Minor to see to that duty, but the choice was discretionary. Nonetheless, since the 1263 rule also required that the friars and sisters share one cardinal protector, the brothers' appointment again appeared to be an advantageous solution.(55) The new legislation was a clever compromise designed to insure the brethren's participation without provoking anew their earlier protests.

Pope Urban, however, had a second reason for promoting the new statute--legislative unity. The Franciscan nuns were living under different rules. Some houses had adopted Hugolino's constitution of 1218, while others followed Pope Innocent IV's rule of 1247, and a few convents with close ties to San Damiano had been allowed to profess Clare's rule of 1253.(56) The diversity of statutes among the Franciscan nuns had created confusion. Houses had different obligations and degrees of observance, most notably concerning poverty. Clare had intended all her followers to live without material support, but the papacy was reluctant to expand this right beyond San Damiano. Individual houses thus were forced in practice to seek privileges on their own.(57) Indeed, the more separated they were from personal contact with Clare or San Damiano, the less likely they were to seek a privilege of poverty, even though in her rule Clare had made this observance a hallmark of female Franciscan identity. With the new legislation, Pope Urban superseded her ideal of female apostolic poverty by requiring each house to have adequate material support.

Urban's rule of 1263 thus seized an opportunity to redefine the demarcating ideals for Franciscan nuns. As a symbol of this change, Pope Urban renamed the sisters the Order of Saint Clare.(58) This new institutional designation proclaimed that the enclosed Franciscan nuns were no longer "Poor Ladies" (povere donne), as Clare's first followers were known. Neither were they Minoresses--that is, female equivalents of the friars--nor even Damianites, the spiritual heirs to Clare's ideals. The pope's desire to regularize monastic legislation among the nuns thus proved an attempt to separate the sisters from their unique spiritual heritage. In effect, the pope was seeking to make them act like other orders through central governance (exercised by the cardinal protector) and legal coherence (symbolized by their changed name and guarantee of material support).