The Order of St. Clare was founded in the year 1212 in Assisi, Italy. From there it quickly spread througout the world. In 1644 a Poor Clare from Seville, Spain, who had previously founded a monastery in Cartagena de los Indias (Columbia), accepted the call to bring the Poor Clares to Havana, Cuba. There they flourished for a little over 300 years, until forced out by Castro's communist regime in 1961. The government wanted their large edifice to use for the state-run school, so they literally had machine gun-weilding soldiers move into the monastery and occupy it side-by-side with the nuns. Sister Margaret Mary Johnson, abbess of the Poor Clares in New Orleans, heard about the plight and made arrangements to get the sisters out of Cuba and bring them to New Orleans. Madre Clara Gomez, abbess of the Havana community, and her council stayed behind to try to keep the monastery going in hopes that the community could eventually return to Havana. The soldiers has thus far been "civil" to the sisters and did them no personal harm, but one day the sisters heard their gardener speaking to some of the soldiers. "You will harm these sisters over my dead body!" he was heard to say. The next morning, his body was found hanging from the archway; the sisters concluded it was time for them to vacate!

The New Orleans Poor Clares, who numbered around thirty at the time, took the Cuban sisters, who also numbered thirty, into their monastery and helped them make a new foundation, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Three of the New Orleans sisters: Sr. Margaret Mary, Sr. Bernadette, and Sr. Theresa Clare, would eventually join the Corpus Christi foundation as permanent members.

In 1966 the Corpus Christi monastery, built in the Flour Bluff section of town - down the road from the Naval Air Station and directly across the street from Waldron Field, the abandoned Navy touch-and-go airstrip - was completed. The only fly in the ointment was that shortly after the sisters occupied the monastery, the Navy re-opened Waldron Field and began training their novice pilots on the finer points of taking off and landing. With several planes in the air circling around and directly over the monastery, on a good, clear day the planes were timed at going overhead approximately every 20 seconds! And by the early '80's the Navy had made the decision to condemn the land directly under the flight pattern (including the monastery), so there was another move in the offing. This time the sisters decided to move inland from the coast; a big factor in that decision was the experience of having to board up and evacuate during several hurricanes. In 1984 Bishop Harris accepted our community into the Austin Diocese, and by 1986 the relocation to Brenham was complete.