Homily for Thursday, 13 June 2019– Memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 3:15-4:1, 3-6; Psalm 85:9ab, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Matthew 5:20-26

Thursday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

“Dear St. Anthony, please come ‘round. Something is lost and cannot be found.” How many of us have prayed this prayer or a prayer like this to St. Anthony when we have lost something?

St. Anthony of Padua is known as the patron saint for finding lost items. This association between St. Anthony and lost items is based on a legend of a Franciscan novice under St. Anthony’s guidance who left his religious order in anger, taking with him St. Anthony’s breviary, or book of daily prayers. According to the legend, an angry St. Anthony appeared in a dream to the novice the night after the novice had suddenly left the Franciscans with St. Anthony’s breviary. St. Anthony’s appearance in his dream convinced the novice to return to the Franciscans and to return the breviary to St. Anthony while accepting to do penance for having stolen the breviary and for his outburst of anger.

Maybe the novice’s vision of an angry St. Anthony in his dream was so effective in persuading the novice to return St. Anthony’s breviary and return to the Franciscans because it was so out of character for St. Anthony to lose his temper. St. Anthony is one of the most versatile saints of the Church, and a patron of many causes besides lost items, but he was not known as an angry saint. However, St. Anthony is associated with instances in which he interceded to quell anger or to repair the damage of angry outbursts. In one instance, a knight in Tuscany had beaten his wife, but then turned to St. Anthony in sorrow for his own sin. St. Anthony healed the knight’s wife. Another version of this legend has a young woman whose hair had been torn out by her husband turn to St. Anthony. Miraculously, while St. Anthony prayed for the woman as well as for repentance for her husband and reconciliation in their marriage, the woman’s hair grew back in St. Anthony’s presence.

St. Anthony of Padua is a saint of repentance and reconciliation. In Matthew’s Gospel today, Jesus intensifies the Old Testament commandment not to kill to include outbursts of anger that are meant to destroy or demean others: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors… ‘You shall not kill,’ and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”

On the one hand, anger in itself is not a sin but an emotion with which God has created us all. Even God; even Jesus becomes angry occasionally, as the Bible shows us. On the other hand, God calls us to master our more intense emotions like anger so we do not use these emotions to destroy other people or ourselves. Jesus’ commandment could be extended, appropriately in our time, to avoidance of gossip, passive aggression, and other subtler but as-destructive forms of lack of control of our anger.

Maybe most important, though, is what Jesus says further on in today’s Gospel. If we are aware that another person “has anything against us,” Jesus says, “go first and be reconciled with your brother.” In other words, we might recognize that we are all sinners and that, sooner or later, we will need another’s forgiveness or need to forgive another person. Jesus asks us to anticipate this need for forgiveness, to be reconciled to one another, in a sense, preemptively. On this memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, may St. Anthony intercede for us, so that we might master anger; that we might know our own and one another’s need for reconciliation, and anticipate one another in this need, going “first” to “be reconciled with” our brothers and sisters.