Audacious Nuns: Institutionalizing the Franciscan Order of Saint Clare

Church History, March, 2000 by Lezlie Knox

The sisters were pressured to profess the Urbanist Rule. On 11 December 1263 Cardinal Orsini sent a letter urging them to adopt it at once. Not only would their order be united under one rule, he advised them, but the new constitution would protect them from future pastoral crises since he would assign ministers to their convents. Moreover, he told them, the brethren could no longer refuse to provide care by citing the variety of constitutions.(59) Nevertheless, the new legislation forced the nuns to confront their relationship to Clare's legacy: should they accept a rule that did not guarantee their incorporation into the Franciscan order and that did not guarantee their original ideal of poverty?(60) The majority of Clare's followers in the 1260s seemed less concerned with the issue of poverty and more focused on complete incorporation into the Franciscan order. But like the Friars Minor, they would not accede docilely to papal attempts to direct their way of life.

Rejection of the Urbanist Rule appears to have been widespread among the Franciscan nuns throughout central Italy. Cardinal Orsini appealed to the Tuscan visitator to determine how many nuns were refusing to profess the new rule and for what reasons.(61) Their resistance endured beyond the initial promulgation of the new constitution. Urban's successor, Clement IV, twice issued bulls addressing the refusal of many sisters to profess the rule.(62) In 1265 he warned sisters in the Umbrian province that they would lose the cardinal's protection if they refused to profess Urban's rule.(63) They would be expelled from the order and forfeit pastoral care from the Friars Minor.(64) Clement urged the sisters to profess the new constitution with proper humility. He assured them that the cardinal protector would guarantee that they received pastoral care and annual visitations. In the event that the nuns' opposition was a matter of conscience, the pope also released the nuns from earlier vows in order to profess the 1263 constitution.(65) There are no records extant as to whether he tried to carry out his threat.(66) Presumably he did not proceed immediately because three months later, in March 1266, Clement wrote to Cardinal Orsini about further opposition from the Franciscan nuns.

In his letter, the pope complained that a delegation of sisters from the Order of Saint Clare had come to his palace at Viterbo, all with one declaration: they would not profess the Urbanist Rule. They were demanding either to return to the original form of their profession or to be allowed to adopt the Isabelline Rule, a constitution recently composed by Bonaventure and other friars for the sister of the King of France.(67) Unfortunately, no records survive to report who these women were, how many traveled to the papal palace, who presented their demands to the court, and most importantly, what specifically motivated them to organize a protest before the curia. It is difficult to reconstruct their dissent based only on Clement's brief complaint.(68) The stakes involved in the sisters' bold protest become clearer, however, as do the stakes they saw in adopting Urban's legislation, by comparing the two proposals set before the papal court.