Clare of Montefalco

Received while still a child into a community of recluses led at Montefalco by her sister Joan, Clare took the rule of Saint Augustine there in 1290 and then succeeded her sister as abbess of the monastery of Holy Cross. She said she had received the cross into her heart after a vision, in 1294. At her death on 17 August 1308 her nuns opened her body to embalm it: they reported seeing in the heart raised figures which they read as the instruments of the Passion, and they found in the gallbladder three stones which they took for a sign of the Trinity. The opening of the body is documented; the reading given to it is devotional. The cause was pursued in the years that followed, then everything halted at the death of John XXII in 1334; the cult was confirmed in 1737 and canonisation came only in 1881, under Leo XIII, nearly six centuries after her death.