Chiara Offreduccio was born to the noble Offreduccio family of Assisi and from her childhood was drawn to severe austerity and prayer. At eighteen, after hearing Francis preach the Lenten sermons of 1212 at the cathedral of San Rufino, she fled the family palace on Palm Sunday night, met Francis at the Portiuncula chapel below the town, and there had her long blonde hair shorn off and exchanged her noble clothes for a coarse rough habit and rope cincture. Her father pursued her with armed men to drag her back; she clung to the altar and held out her shorn head.
Francis settled her at the small church of San Damiano outside the walls of Assisi, where she remained, never leaving the enclosure, for the remaining forty-one years of her life. Her sister Agnes joined her a fortnight later, then their mother Ortolana, then their sister Beatrice. The community grew into the Order of Poor Ladies (later called the Poor Clares), the second order of the Franciscan family. Clare composed for them a Rule centered on absolute poverty — refusing endowments even after several popes attempted to compel them to accept some property — that was confirmed for her on her deathbed by Pope Innocent IV.
Her contemplative life centered on the Eucharist. In 1234, during a Saracen attack on Assisi, she rose from her sickbed, took the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament from the chapel, and held it before the besiegers; tradition holds that they fled. (For this episode Pope Pius XII in 1958 designated her patroness of television — because as she lay sick at Christmas 1252 she saw and heard the midnight Mass at the basilica of St. Francis across the valley as if on a wall of her cell.) She received Innocent IV's confirmation of her Rule on August 9, 1253, kissed the document, and died two days later. She was canonized by Alexander IV in 1255.