St. Anthony of Padua
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. He was born at Lisbon in Portugal in 1195. As a young man he joined the Augustinians. However, he later joined the newly formed Franciscan order. He desired to be martyred for the faith and to go among the Saracens, but he fell sick on the way and, being obliged to turn back, the ship in which he had embarked for Spain was driven by the weather to Sicily. From Sicily he came to Assisi to attend the General Chapter of his Order, and then withdrew to the hermitage of Monte Paolo near Bologna. He was ordained priest and became noted as preacher. He was noted for his wisdom and his fluency and his preaching drew large crowds. The power of his preaching led to him being called the “Ark of the Covenant”. Though St. Francis was hostile to academic learning he supported St. Anthony being the first person in his order to lecture on the interpretation of Scripture at Bologna. His popularity as a preacher led him to travel to many provinces. He eventually settled in Padua, where he died on this day in 1231.
The newly formed orders of the friars (the Franciscans and the Dominicans) played a pivotal role in the development of the life of the Church in the High Middle Ages. Prior to this point those who had taken upon themselves the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience had sought to withdraw from the world and live an enclosed life, whether alone as a hermit or corporately as a monastic community. Hence, there were two types of ministry within the Church, the regular clergy (those who belonged to a religious order such as the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Carthusians or any of the other orders) and the secular clergy (the parochial clergy). This system had served the Church well for many centuries. But with the growth of towns in medieval Europe a new type of ministry was required to address the new urban population. This was the ministry of the friars. Friars were those who had taken upon themselves the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, but, unlike the traditional religious orders, they lived in the world, rather than seeking to withdraw from the world.
St. Francis took as his model the pattern of life of Christ himself who had sent out his followers without purse and scrip to preach the Gospel in the towns and villages of Galilee and Judea. The first disciples of Jesus had not lived an enclosed life in isolation from the world like the later religious orders nor were they assigned a specific cure of souls as in the later parochial system, but had lived an ascetic life preaching the gospel within the world. Jesus had called his followers to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, to be a sign within the world that the Kingdom of God, future in its fullness, was now being manifested in his own person and ministry. What had been the pattern of preaching and living for the first followers of Jesus St. Francis took as the pattern of preaching and living to be followed in medieval Europe.
We often tend to look back on medieval Europe as a great age of faith in which the continent was covered with parish churches and religious orders. In one sense this is true, but it is important to remember that while in theory the Church was available for everyone in practice there were those who fell outside the system and were not reached by either the parochial clergy or the conventional religious orders. This was especially the case in the newly expanding towns in medieval Europe. There was a dearth of preaching and it was this deficiency that the friars sought to address. They were to focus especially not on the type of settled ministry exercised by the parochial clergy or the enclosed life of a conventional religious order, but on preaching the Gospel. St. Francis realised that this preaching would only be taken seriously if the friars led by example and lived by the gospel that they preached. He saw in St. Anthony a man who had the charism to preach the Gospel both by word and above all by example. Though St. Francis himself was hostile to the world of books and academia (which he saw as a distraction from the Christian life) the ministry of the Franciscan order in the towns and their role as preachers led them to take a prominent role in the universities. Along with their Dominican counterparts they were to form the two great rival schools of theology who dominated in the universities in the middle ages.
The Church showed great wisdom in supporting the ministry of the friars at a time when many of the parochial clergy were hostile to them (they saw the friars as rivals to themselves who were invading their territory). Fidelity to the faith delivered once for all to the saints should not be seen as a static thing, but rather as a dynamic principle that can develop new charisms to further the preaching of the gospel. Both the ministry of the parochial clergy and that of the conventional religious orders were vital to the Church, but they also needed to supplemented by the ministry of the friars who could reach areas which a more settled and conventional ministry could not reach.
It was this mission to seek and save the lost that inspired St. Francis and his followers like St. Anthony of Padua to preach the gospel to the peoples of the new towns of medieval Europe. We are called to follow this same mission today. Let us pray that we will follow the example of St. Anthony of Padua, and preach the gospel and seek and save the lost in our own time and place.
by the Revd Dr Robert Wilson PhD (Cantab), Old Roman Apostolate UK
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