Reinterpreting Clare of Assisi: from healer to liberator
Author: Br. Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, OFM
Date Published: August 11, 2026
I love the month of August. It begins with the Feast of the Pardon in honor of Santa Maria degli Angeli, patroness of the Franciscan famiglia, and moves through saints like San Lorenzo, Santo Domingo, Santa Rosa de Lima, San Agustín and his mother Mónica, and the feasts of the Transfiguration and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. It also celebrates the birth of significant people in my life. With all of this, I have one more reason to love el mes de Agosto.
I was born on Aug. 11, la fiesta de Santa Clara, in the same year that the Poor Clares allowed the San Damiano Crucifix and the oldest tavola icon of Clare to be put on public display after seven centuries. I have spent most of my scholarly life living into that coincidence.
Discovering Clare through her own words
The legacy Franciscan Province of the Sacred Heart of Jesus sent me to study at the Antonianum in Rome during the year of Clare's 800th birthday. With the confidence only a young friar has, I decided my study of Clare was meant to be. She is mi hermana and my patroness and I wanted to get to know her as well as possible.
Clare scholar Marco Bartoli gave me what every graduate student craves: a thesis topic. Little, he said, had been done on the “Processo di Canonizzazione di s. Chiara d'Assisi,” the canonization process compiled three months after her death in November 1253. I read it in español, italiano, English, even au français. Nothing struck me.
Then my thesis director, Fray Fernando Uribe, OFM, advised me to read the original text. Traduttori traditori, as the saying goes. Translations never carry the wealth of the original.
Reading the Processo in fifteenth-century Umbrian was about as welcome as a kick in the pants. There was nowhere to learn Medieval Umbria, so I read it and reread it. On my seventh pass, my Latinidad kicked in. I found myself face to face with Medieval Espanglish. Like Espanglish, Medieval Umbrian is a mestizaje de lenguas, a mixture of Latin, Spanish and Italian. I've been mixing languages since childhood; reading Umbrian suddenly came easily.
That's when Clare's Processo opened itself to me. I found her not simply a healer, but an impressive woman of liberation – one who, having been liberated by God, gave herself in turn to the liberation of others.
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St. Clare and her sisters depicted praying beneath a starry night in stained glass that hangs in the Church of San Damiano in Assisi. (Photo courtesy of Br. Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, OFM)
The meaning behind the words
When I compared the Umbrian text to modern Spanish and English translations, the difference was obvious. The word liberatione, liberation, appears 13 times in the Processo. The verb liberare, to liberate, appears in 74 forms. Clare herself is described as liberale, liberal, meaning generous. This is not incidental. A language of liberation runs throughout the document.
Modern translations quietly convert this into the language of healing. Ignacio Omaechevarría's Spanish edition translates liberare as some form of "to free" only 15 of those 74 times; the other 59 times he renders it as "to heal," or simply as "healing." Regis Armstrong's English edition, Clare of Assisi: Early Documents, does the same: of the 74 occurrences, he uses "liberated" once, "delivered" once, "to free" six times, and "to cure" or "to heal" the rest of the time, on one occasion not translating the word at all.
The witnesses at Clare's canonization did not experience this ambiguity. When Sister Benvenuta testified about Friar Stephen, who had lost his mind and was sent by Francis to San Damiano so that Clare might make the sign of the cross over him, she said simply that he woke and partisse liberato, he left liberated.
When another sister recovered from illness after Clare blessed her, the text says she was sanata et liberata, cured and liberated, both words, side by side, doing different work. The sisters spoke the same way about San Damiano and the city of Assisi being freed from the Saracens as they did about bodies and minds being freed from affliction. For them, it was one continuous vocabulary. Clare liberated the sick, liberated the troubled, liberated the monastery, liberated the city. The translators split what the witnesses had not split.
St. Clare's spirituality of liberation
With that discovery, Fray Fernando sent me to Latin American liberation theology to ask what a Christian spirituality of liberation might look like when read back into Clare's own century. In The Cord in 2002, I named five currents running through the Processo's witness to Clare: contemplation, poverty, fraternity and sorority, the Eucharist, and the sign of the Cross. Each of these carries the Christian forward toward the Reign of God by way of identification with the humiliated, poor, naked, and crucified Christ found in the poor, the least, the marginalized and oppressed of this world.
A decade later, when I was promoted to full professor at Catholic Theological Union, I returned to Clare and found the five currents had grown into seven components:
embracing the reality of our cotidiano (every day),
an ongoing conversion to Christ and to God's Reign,
a contemplative worldview,
a preferential option for poverty,
the solidarity of a universal sorority and fraternity,
the Eucharistic communion of the Church,
the sign of the Cross as an instrument of liberation.
The additions were not afterthoughts. They named what had been implicit all along: that Clare's liberation begins in fidelity to the reality of the concrete, daily conditions of a noble family's wealth, a city's war, and a young woman's exile, and that it moves through a real conversion, the decisive turning on that Palm Sunday night when she abandoned her family's house, before it ever becomes contemplation, poverty or Eucharist.
Liberation, in other words, is not one item on a list. It is the movement that carries a person through all the others.
A fresco of St. Clare in the Convent of San Damiano in Assisi painted by Tiberio d'Assisi in the 16th century. (Photo courtesy of Br. Gilberto Cavazos-Gonzalez, OFM)
Reading Clare today
Clare is too easily remembered as the planticella, the little plant who flourished in Francis's shadow. The Processo, read on its own terms, resists that image. It presents a woman of noble origin who deliberately relinquished her status as a maiore to live as a minore in service of the poor, embodying the evangelical logic of dispossession, sine proprio, having nothing of one's own.
She is not simply the recipient of a charism Francis handed to her. She is a subject in her own right, whose radical commitment to Jesus Christ in poverty and evangelical life posed a real, if quiet, challenge to the social and ecclesial structures of her age.
Clare never wrote a systematic theology of liberation, and it would be a mistake to hand her one now. What the Processo discloses instead is a coherent forma vitae minorum, a form of life in which liberation is embodied rather than theorized. Her conversion can be read as a decisive sequela Christi, a following of Christ in the form of embracing the minores and the poor, while her praxis holds together the same constellation her witnesses named: a contemplative worldview, a preferential option for poverty, a commitment to the universal fellowship of brothers and sisters, a Eucharistic sense of mission, and an ongoing formation in the sign of the Cross. As with Francis, in the readings offered by Leonardo Boff and Pedro de Anasagasti, the saints keep disclosing dimensions of the Gospel that stay perennially relevant even as their historical expressions change.
That is not an anachronism imposed on the 13th century. It is what happens when a text is finally read in its own words, in its own tongue, by someone faithful to the reality of his own cotidiano, and whose own tongue happens to also be a mestizaje. Clare of Assisi, read this way, does not belong only to the past. She remains a theologically rich and historically grounded witness to a Gospel power that liberates, and that calls forth liberators, in every age.
Br. Gilberto serves at Catholic Theological Union as Professor of Spirituality, the John Duns Scotus Chair of Franciscan Spirituality and Director of the Certificate Program in Franciscan Spirituality.
Editor's note: This post first appeared on Br. Gilberto's blog Gilberto Cavazos-González, OFM and has been republished here with permission. The photo used at the beginning of the article is of a stained glass window of St. Clare of Assisi at the chapel of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Raleigh, North Carolina (Wikipedia Commons).