11/28/2025
Happy (belated) American Thanksgiving!
JOKE-OGRAPHY:
This comic was inspired by my little cousin and goddaughter who chose St. Clare as her confirmation saint. Congratulations!
St. Clare was a contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi (the bird guy, yeah). She was one of his first followers, moved by his lifestyle of radical, joyous poverty in imitation of Christ, and his dedication to the poor and sick. After St. Francis's example, St. Clare founded and wrote the monastic rules for her own order, the Order of Poor Ladies (later called the Poor Clares, after her). These were the first monastic rules known to have been written by a woman!
In this cartoon, I tell a legend about St. Clare that's been passed down for ages. The vision on the wall made her a patron saint of extrasensory perception, which is pretty esoteric for a Catholic patronage. In the 1900s, she was also declared the patron of television and computer screens, once the Church saw the evangelical power of new media. Screens are powerful portals of both good and evil, so it's good to have a saint looking out for them, even if she died WAY before they were invented. Maybe St. Carlo Acutis can explain them to her now. Buddy-patron series when?
The first three panels of the cartoon are just telling the legend of the wall vision as I heard it. The last panel depicts an anachronistic scenario where St. Clare holds a remote control (like for a television) and asks God if she can also change the channel on her wall vision and watch the Yankees, a modern-day baseball team (like on an actual television). Not only were remotes not invented in St. Clare's time -- the 1200s -- but the Yankees also weren't founded yet, nor were they broadcast on television until sometime in the later 1900s. Because of this centuries-wide time-gap, when St. Clare asks about the Yankees, God checks His watch and says she should be able to catch them in about 700 years. This is the highest of all lariouses.
