A Jewel Case for the Bible

There are those who think that the Church is being a little hasty in the process of conferring sainthood on Blessed Pope John Paul II. He has reached the penultimate stage of the process – beatification – only six years after his death.

I wonder what these folks would have thought about the process taken in the case of Saint Anthony of Padua, whose feast day is today. He died on 13 June 1231, and he was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 30 May 1232, less than a year after his death.

Now that’s some serious santo subito!

Anthony was only 35 years old when he died, but he was already famous for his preaching, his writing, and his life of holiness.

Volumes of his sermons were published, sermons for every Sunday and major feast day of the year, and this in an age where every book was copied out by hand. He was made a Doctor of the Church in 1946 and is known as Doctor Evangelicus – the “Evangelical Doctor”.

For a while, he even preached at the Papal Court, where it was said his preaching was a “jewel case of the Bible”.

Originally an Augustinian priest, he was among the first generation of followers of Saint Francis of Assisi. He led the poor existence of a wandering friar for the last decade of his short life.

About thirty years after he died, his body was exhumed to move it to a new shrine erected in his honour. Though his body was but a skeleton and a few handfuls of dust, his tongue remained fresh. It was entombed in a separate reliquary, where it remains in the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, incorrupt to this day.

Saint Bonaventure saw this as a sign of Anthony’s gift of preaching, but this is only one in an exhaustive list of miracles ascribed to the intercession of the saint.

In my little parish church, we have a statue of Saint Anthony, though he is somewhat incongruously depicted as an older man with a long beard. The icon at the top of this article is perhaps closer to what the saint looked like in life – young, vigourous, ascetic, brilliant.

It seems as though everything I thought I knew about Saint Anthony is wrong. He wasn’t an old Italian, he was a young Spaniard who preached in Italy. I thought he was known principally for finding and recovering lost things, and it turns out what he was most interested in recovering was lost souls.

Oddly, for someone so famed for his written word, it is extremely difficult to find Saint Anthony’s works in print these days. I would love to read – heck, I’d love to publish – a translation of his sermons.