St. Anthony Mary Claret (October 24th)

Of the Saints remembered on the General and Servite Calendars this week:

Oct. 22nd -- St John Paul II, Pope

Oct.  23rd -- St John of Capistrano, Priest

Oct. 24th -- St Anthony Mary Claret, Bishop

Oct. 25th – Bl. John Angelo Porro, OSM, Priest 

Since two parishes down from us here in the Diocese of Orange, CA (and in the same deanery) we have a parish dedicated to St. Anthony Claret (and previously when I was stationed in Chicago again “two parishes up from us” was a parish staffed by the Claretians), I  have chosen to write my reflection about him this week.

The future St Anthony Claret was born on Dec. 23, 1807, in the town of Sallent in the Catalan speaking Barcelona Province of Spain, the fifth of eleven children to Juan and Josefa Claret.  His father was a maker of wool, he himself became a weaver prior to discerning a call to priesthood and religious life.

After being ordained in 1835, he proved to be a successful preacher / missionary throughout the Catalonia region of western Spain because he was a native speaker of the local Catalan language.  However, his popularity did make him enemies among anti-=clericalists in the region – this part of Spain had been invaded several times by post-Revolutionary France – which sent him into exile to the Canary Islands for a couple of years for his own safely, where he continued preaching his missions across the countryside.  [Interestingly enough, the Catalonia Region, centered in Barcelona later became the center of (Communist) Spanish Republicanism during the Spanish Civil War].

After returning to Spain in 1849, he felt called to found a religious congregation called the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (the Claretians) which was dedicated to propagating the faith through both preaching and publishing.   [Note here that the future St. Anthony Mary Claret was also a Third Order member of my own religious order, the Servants of Mary].

He was subsequently ordained bishop and sent to serve as the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in Cuba.  While there, he both completely reorganized the diocese, its seminary, built hospitals and schools, and he made three complete visitations of the diocese, he preached his missions to the people incessantly.

It was in Cuba that he gained a reputation of being a miracle worker, credited with stopping several earthquakes by simply kneeling down in prayer (well, earthquakes generally are not of long duration…), but also levitating up to six feet in the air before credible witnesses.

Eventually, he was recalled to Spain by Queen Isabella II to be her personal confessor.

Interestingly, he became a preacher against the coming evil of Communism, claimed that he had received divine warnings against it, when Communism, in the 1850s, was but a fledgling movement with perhaps only a few hundred followers worldwide.

In his last years, he was invited to help in the preparation of the First Vatican Council, which was brought to a premature end by the war that unified Italy in 1870.

The future St Anthony Claret’s life forms a fascinating _bridge_ between the life and times of St. Dominic (about whom I wrote earlier, who lived 600 years before him, but worked in the same region of Spain as the future St Anthony Claret centuries later, and who had devoted his life to fighting the radical anti-Catholic heresy of his time of Albigensianism / Catharism) and the modern violent, indeed murderous, anti-clericism of Communism that really emerged after St Anthony Claret’s life in the twentieth century in both Republican, centered in Barcelona, Spain in the 1930s and later in Cuba in the late 1950-60s to the present day.

Note here, that my religious order, the Servants of Mary has a martyr named Maria Guadalupe Ricart Olmos (feast day Oct 3rd), who was murdered by Spanish Communists in Republican Spain outside of Valencia in 1936.

It is fascinating to think how a region of the world, such as southern France / Catalonia could be repeatedly traumatized for generations, even centuries, and the need to pray for its people’s peace.

And we are finding that there’s a not altogether dissimilar need to pray for peace (and the re-conversion) of Russia, a land that has been similarly traumatized now for several generations as well.

St Anthony Mary Claret, pray for us!