Why St. Clare Still Makes Our Screens Feel Strange

St. Clare as patron saint of television sounds a little absurd at first. Medieval nun, cloistered life, stone walls, no electricity, now somehow connected to the glowing rectangle in my parish office that never stops blinking with notifications. I admit I smile every time her title comes up.

Still, the more I sit with it, the less cute it feels.

The Church celebrates her feast on Aug. 11, and the usual facts are there: Assisi, noble family, she left wealth behind after hearing Francis preach, she founded what became the Poor Clares, she led that community for decades, and she fought hard to preserve a life of real poverty. EWTN also points to something many Catholics know only vaguely, that Clare was the first woman to write a rule for a religious order that received papal approval. That's not a decorative detail. That's steel in the soul.

I think we sometimes turn saints like Clare into soft-focus holy cards when they were much tougher than most of us would tolerate in ordinary life. A young woman from privilege walks away from comfort, resists family pressure, resists institutional pressure too, and insists that the shape of her life must match the Gospel she has heard. That is not pious sentiment. That's disruption.

The saint who wouldn't soften the edges

What struck me most in this account is how long Clare held her ground. Not for a week. Not during one dramatic escape scene that later gets painted nicely. For decades.

She resisted efforts to make her community safer in worldly terms by accepting property or financial support that would blunt its original charism. I can already hear practical people clearing their throats. To be fair, I'm often one of them. Parish budgets don't pay themselves, roofs leak, insurance forms multiply like rabbits. There is always a sensible reason to compromise just a little.

Clare seems to have had a gift for hearing those sensible reasons and then asking whether they were faithful reasons.

That distinction matters more than we admit. A lot of Catholic life gets managed into dullness because we confuse prudence with fear. We baptize our anxiety and call it wisdom. Clare didn't.

There's also something bracing about the fact that she wrote a rule herself and saw it approved just before her death. She wasn't merely preserving someone else's vision like a museum curator dusting off Franciscan ideals for visitors. She understood the charism deeply enough to give it form, language, boundaries. Contemplative women have done this kind of hidden intellectual and spiritual labor for centuries while many of us kept talking as if only visible ministry counts.

I've learned more than once that some of the strongest people in the Church are behind grilles or in quiet chapels where nobody is building a platform around them.

Television, oddly enough

Now to the part everyone remembers because it's strange enough to stick: patron saint of television.

That title can tempt us into cheap jokes about what saint handles bad cable reception or whether Clare would approve of streaming services. I enjoy dumb parish humor as much as anyone. Last week someone asked me if there's a patron saint for weak Wi-Fi in the rectory kitchen. There probably should be.

Still, television is not trivial territory anymore, if it ever was. Screens shape imagination. They catechize without asking permission. They enter our homes carrying beauty, noise, manipulation, distraction, tenderness, loneliness, all mixed together in one constant current.

So when I hear that Clare is linked to television, I don't hear quaint trivia. I hear a challenge about sight itself. What do we look at? What forms us? What comes through the screen and settles into the heart almost unnoticed?

Clare's life was marked by Eucharistic devotion, which EWTN rightly highlights as central to her spirituality. That matters here because adoration trains attention in a way screens usually don't. Before the Blessed Sacrament you can't swipe away silence. You can't optimize prayer for speed. You stay put long enough for your own restlessness to become visible, which is annoying frankly... and often healing.

I suspect many of us are less afraid of bad content than we are of stillness.

A cloister can expose an entire culture

There is another irony I can't shake. A woman who enclosed herself from the world now speaks pointedly to a world that cannot stop broadcasting itself.

Clare's witness does not tell us to smash every screen and move into caves. I'm not saying that, and if I did my parish staff would hide my laptop by noon. But she does force a harder question than "Is this content allowed?" She asks whether our habits of seeing have made us poorer in spirit or merely busier in mind.

We know how to condemn obvious garbage on television or online. Fine. Easy work. The subtler danger is becoming unable to receive anything contemplatively at all: liturgy as content, prayer as background audio, even suffering as something we consume from a distance before dinner.

A cloistered nun from Assisi stands there like an inconvenient witness saying no, your eyes were made for more than this.

And maybe that's why her feast still lands with force after 800 years or so. Not because she's charmingly medieval or attached to an unusual patronage title, but because she reminds us that attention is moral territory. What we gaze upon changes us.

Tonight plenty of Catholics will say a quick prayer to St. Clare and then pick up their phones three seconds later. I probably will too if I'm honest.

Still... perhaps before the next episode starts, before autoplay decides for us again, before another hour disappears into pleasant static, it might be worth asking St. Clare to teach us how to look.