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August 11
Clare of Assisi and John Henry Newman
David Barnhart
August 11, 2025
Boliva, 2009. Own Photo.
Today is the feast day of Clare of Assisi, who with her colleague Francis started the order of Franciscans and Poor Clares in the Roman Catholic Church. Their commitment to prayer, silence, solidarity with the poor, manual labor, vegetarianism, and reverence for nature have remained a model for Christian monasticism for centuries.
Today is a feast day, in the Church of England, for John Henry Newman, who died on August 11, 1890. He was a priest in the Church of England, beginning as an evangelical and gradually moving more and more toward “high church” Anglicanism, until he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. He was both a poet and a church historian who helped begin the “Oxford Movement” within the Church of England which deepened its ties to Roman Catholicism.
Reflection:
Clare of Assisi wrote:
“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God's compassionate love for others.”
John Henry Newman wrote:
“God has created all things for good; all things for their greatest good; everything for its own good. What is the good of one is not the good of another; what makes one man happy would make another unhappy. God has determined, unless I interfere with His plan, that I should reach that which will be my greatest happiness. He looks on me individually, He calls me by my name, He knows what I can do, what I can best be, what is my greatest happiness, and He means to give it me.”
and
“To live is to change, and to change often is to become more perfect.”
Prayer: God, our loves shape and change us. Let us love more fully, so that we may change more fully, and may become more fully perfect. Amen.