During the pontificate of Pope Pius XII a group of astronomers went to the Vatican for a private audience. As they gathered in the audience chamber, they expected the pope would deliver a brief, conventional speech on some religious topic. Instead, Pius XII surprised his visitors by launching into a discussion of sun spots.
This example is not out of the ordinary. Consult any listing of Pius XII’s speeches and you’ll find him addressing a host of specialized, non-religious topics.
As a man who made it a kind of hobby to keep up with the latest developments in the sciences, Pope Pius was fascinated by the emergence of television as the hot, new communications medium of the 1950s. The possibilities of the new technology impressed him so much that in 1958 he gave television its own patron saint: he chose St. Clare of Assisi, whose Feast it is today.
It isn’t often that a pope formally names a patron saint for a particular cause or phenomenon. Usually the connection of a saint with a cause occurs at the grassroots level among ordinary Catholics. And to be honest, at first glance it is hard to see any link between TV and a 13th-century cloistered nun.
St. Clare is best known as St. Francis of Assisi’s closest colleague. In 1212, when she was 19 years old, Clare ran away from home in the middle of the night to become the first female member of Francis’ religious community. But being the first Franciscan nun is not what made Clare exceptional; rather, it was her unswerving commitment to St. Francis’s ideal of Christ-like poverty.
Francis wanted the members of his order to be as poor and humble as Jesus Christ had been when He was personally present on earth. But what was appealing in theory could be difficult to put into practice. Within Francis’s own lifetime some Franciscans who found the rule of poverty too hard toned down their founder’s ideal and began to acquire real estate.
But not Clare and her nuns. They refused to own anything that would generate income; they relied entirely on the good will of donors for their support. Two popes thought Clare was taking St. Francis’s ideal too literally, but she would not back down. For 41 years Clare clung to her principles, and she won — although only at the last minute. In 1253, as she lay on her deathbed, Pope Innocent IV traveled to Assisi to see Clare for the last time, and he brought a gift: a papal document that gave formal approval to Clare’s rule.
None of this is remotely related to television, of course. Nonetheless, Pius XII knew what he was doing. He recalled an episode from St. Clare’s life that one could say prefigured TV. A witness at Clare’s canonization proceedings testified that one Christmas Eve, St. Clare was so ill she could not leave her bed to attend midnight Mass. After all the nuns had gone, Clare sighed and said, “See Lord, I am left here alone with You.” At that moment God granted Clare a vision in which she saw and heard the Mass as clearly as if she had been present in the convent chapel. Pope Pius interpreted this vision as a kind of miraculous broadcast, and named St. Clare the patron of television.
Thomas Craughwell is the author of Saints for Every Occasion (Stampley Enterprises, 2001).
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
