St. Anthony of Padua: the Dead Testify in Court.
St. Anthony of Padua, Italy (1195-1231),
originally from Lisbon, Portugal, is one of the most well-known and loved
friars of St. Francis of Assisi. God gave Anthony many spiritual gifts such as
reading hearts, miracles, healings, raising the dead, bilocation, and more. He
was a famous preacher (once preaching to fish who gave him their full attention
– when the people would not). He had memorized the entire Bible, and was a
beautiful example of the virtue of humility.
Upon St. Anthony’s death, at only 36,
there were so many miracles both at his tomb and elsewhere that his cause for
sainthood was introduced in the year of his death. He was canonized less than a
year later with the Pope stating that he was “unwilling to withhold the honor
due on earth from one whom Heaven itself has surrounded with glory.”
In fact, there were so many miracles
attributed to St. Anthony that his life was examined in detail by the
Bollandist Society, an association of scholars, philologists, and historians
formed in the early 17th Century to research, study, and discern the lives of
the Christian saints. Among the Bollandist listing of miracles that they
regarded as “pure miracles” (not legends), were a dozen cases of the dead being
restored to life.
The following event may be the most
astonishing miracle of St. Anthony’s life. In Lisbon, Portugal, a man had been
murdered and the murderer threw the victim in the garden of Anthony’s father’s
estate. His father was arrested and accused of the murder. Anthony, being in
Padua, Italy, came to know of his father’s situation by divine knowledge. As Anthony
was the Provincial of the Franciscans in Padua, he did not need to ask
permission to go to his father, but out of humility he sought, and received,
permission from the Franciscan Father Guardian.
St. Anthony began the walk from Italy to
Portugal, but wondered if he would arrive in time to help his father. Suddenly
he found himself having been transported to Lisbon. Immediately he entered the
court where his father was then on trial.
The resuscitated man then turned to
Anthony and asked absolution from an excommunication he was under. Anthony
obliged, and that man sank back in his coffin, a corpse once more.
The judge, utterly astonished, asked
Anthony who, then, was the guilty party? Anthony replied, “I came to clear the
innocent, not to denounce the guilty.”
Anthony then returned to Padua – apparently again with divine help as he found he had been absent only two nights and a day.
Dibby Allan Green