She is also, genuinely, the patron saint of television — and that needs explaining rather than skipping, because the reason is better than the joke.
Historical Context
Who she was
Born in Assisi in 1194 to a wealthy family, Clare heard Francis preach and left home at eighteen to follow the same poverty he had chosen. Francis cut off her hair himself. She spent the next forty years enclosed at San Damiano and founded the order that still bears her name.
The fight of her life was over money. Every authority around her, including several popes, wanted to give her community property and a secure income, on the reasonable grounds that enclosed women could not beg. Clare refused for decades, and kept refusing until a pope finally wrote the right to absolute poverty into a rule in her own words. That is the document Innocent IV approved as she was dying.
And the television. Pius XII declared her its patron in 1958, on the strength of an incident in which Clare, too ill to attend, saw and heard the Christmas midnight Mass being celebrated in a basilica some distance from her convent. Whatever you make of the story, the logic of the patronage is exact: she is the saint of watching something happening somewhere else.
The Collect for Her Feast
The Church’s own prayer to her, from the Roman Missal for 11 August:
O God, who in your mercy led Saint Clare to a love of poverty,
grant, through her intercession,
that, following Christ in poverty of spirit,
we may merit to contemplate you one day in the heavenly Kingdom.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Prayer to Saint Clare in Distress
The traditional novena prayer, and the one most often said to her:
O glorious Saint Clare,
God has given you the power of working miracles continually,
and the favour of answering the prayers of those
who invoke your assistance in misfortune, anxiety and distress.
We beseech you, obtain from Jesus,
through Mary his Blessed Mother,
what we beg of you so fervently and hopefully,
if it be for the greater honour and glory of God
and for the good of our souls.
Amen.
Her Own Blessing
Everything else on this page is a prayer to Clare. This is a prayer by her — the blessing she left her sisters, and the only text here in her own voice.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May he show his face to you and be merciful to you.
May he turn his countenance to you and give you peace.
I, Clare, a handmaid of Christ,
a little plant of our holy father Francis,
a sister and mother of you and the other Poor Sisters,
although unworthy,
ask our Lord Jesus Christ through his mercy
and through the intercession of his most holy Mother Mary,
of blessed Michael the Archangel and all the holy angels of God,
and of all his men and women saints,
that the heavenly Father give you and confirm for you
this most holy blessing in heaven and on earth.
I bless you in my life and after my death
as much as I can and more than I can
with all the blessings with which the Father of mercies
has and will have blessed his sons and daughters
in heaven and on earth.
Amen.
A Prayer for Failing Eyesight
Her other old patronage, and probably the reason most people first came to her.
Saint Clare, who saw at a distance what your eyes could not reach,
pray for me in the loss of my sight.
Ask that what I can no longer see clearly
may matter less to me than what I can,
and that I may be given help, and patience,
and someone to read to me.
Amen.
Best Times for This Prayer
- On 11 August, her feast.
- In genuine financial trouble — she is the saint of chosen poverty, and knew the unchosen kind too.
- For failing eyesight, or before eye surgery.
- For an enclosed or contemplative community you know.
- By anyone who works in television or broadcasting.
- When you are watching something you cannot be present at — a funeral, a wedding, a Mass from a hospital bed.
Scripture Connection
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 5:3
Clare took the verse at its most literal and then spent forty years defending the reading against a Church that kept trying to soften it for her. The Collect for her feast asks for “poverty of spirit” rather than actual destitution, which is the concession she never made and which the rest of us are allowed.
Related prayers
St Lucy is the other great patron of the eyes and sight. For the Franciscan root, St Bonaventure wrote the life of Francis that shaped how the order remembered him.
St Scholastica is the earlier model of the same vocation — an enclosed woman beside a famous brother-founder — and St Agnes, whose name Clare’s own sister took in religion, is on the site too.
