June 13, Catholic Father’s Day

The Paternal Instinct of St. Anthony of Padua

by Nicholas Frankovich
6 . 13 . 14

Anthony, O.F.M., age thirty-five, died in Padua on this date in 1231; 352 days later, Pope Gregory IX declared him a saint. In the history of the Western Church, Anthony’s elevation from the grave to the altar remains the fastest since Pope Alexander III, in 1170, removed from local bishops the power to canonize saints and invested it exclusively in the papacy. About twenty years after the Franciscan friar set his posthumous record, a Dominican friar, Peter of Verona, came this close to breaking it: 354 days. Maybe causes for sainthood just tended to move more swiftly back then. Even so, Anthony’s moved faster than the rest.

Without the benefit of audio and video, we may hesitate to credit the legends of his strong voice and quiet charisma, and here the measurable rush to make him a saint helps. It is at least one fact to support our impression that the deep sanctity his contemporaries responded to was bound up with considerable charm: His natural brilliance fought with his Christian humility and eventually managed to shine through. How could a man so self-effacing have turned out to be underneath it all really so gifted? Subito sancto!

To judge from the quantity of St. Anthony shrines, statues, paintings, and scheduled Tuesday devotions at parish churches, enthusiasm for him still burns hotly among the faithful. An early artistic convention was to show him with a flaming heart, which must have mirrored that of his most ardent admirers. He’s their crush. Padre Pio and John Paul II rival him in this regard lately but are still new to the game; Anthony the Miracle Worker has been at it now for almost eight hundred years. In the universe of popular Catholic devotion, if St. Thérèse of Lisieux is the homecoming queen, our man from Padua is the starting quarterback.

I used to despise him. My introduction to Anthony came through my beloved grandparents, who hailed from the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea and must have seen him as a more local hero than I realized at the time. (To a boy growing up in the Cuyahoga Valley in northeastern Ohio, Padua was a Catholic high school in Parma, and Parma was a suburb of Cleveland.) On their dining-room wall there hung a large brownish print, in a brown frame, of St. Anthony in what has become his traditional pose: A young man with a ridiculously delicate complexion, tonsured underneath his halo and wearing a robe, stands holding a baby and a—flower. Please.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/06/june-13-catholic-fathers-day-4