CELEBRATING ST ANTHONY OF PADUA, 2026

FR LOUIS SCURTI FOCUSES ON THE SENDING OF THE  APOSTLES BY JESUS, AND ST ANTHONY BEING SENT TO ALL!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

The Lord be with you. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. At the sight of the crowds, Jesus' heart was moved to pity for them, because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few. So ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for the harvest. Then he summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness. The names of the twelve apostles are these. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons. Without cost you have been received. Without cost you are to give. And the scriptures of Sunday are the scriptures of the eleventh Sunday of the year, normal Sunday. But boy, do they apply to Saint Anthony a great deal. But they apply to us, and they apply to the apostles. So I think our reflection today is Jesus sending the apostles, Jesus sending us, Jesus sending Saint Anthony. The apostles were mandated to go and preach and cure and heal all in the name of Jesus. When Anthony was a child, he was baptized, and that began, as for all of us, our ministry as Christians. And as he grew up, he was in a very well-to-do family, and was interested in becoming an Augustinian, like his Holiness Pope Leo is an Augustinian member of the Society of Saint Augustine. He was educated, stayed with them for a while, and then one day something happened, probably the same thing that happened to each of the apostles as they were sent, something which was significant to change them. The apostles were changed by being mandated to go out in the name of Jesus. Anthony, as an Augustinian, saw three martyrs being carried back to his homeland. And the martyrs were recently martyred in Morocco by, I guess today we'd call them Islamists. That idea has not stopped that particular religion in behavior, has it? Kill, martyr, behead the enemy. The word Islam, as you know, means to submit. Now this was in the thirteen hundreds, but the idea came from Muhammad, which was seven hundreds. But the idea has not ended. So we as a Catholic community have to be very aware of the infiltration of Islamists, extremists, who believe that we must submit or else be killed. And that was Muhammad's philosophy. That was how Muhammad gathered his troops. Islam submit to being a member of the community or be beheaded. And that's been going on for centuries. And regrettably, we as a community in the United States are experiencing that infiltration. But we are also sent as members of the community of our own faith, our own church, as the apostles were to go out and preach, to go out and believe, to go out and share what we believe, and that is Jesus Christ, his love and forgiveness. To reconcile those two is quite a challenge. We can reconcile one way by putting our heads in the soil, that doesn't work. We can fight, then we become terrorists, as they are so often, not all, of course. Or we can be witnesses. Witnesses of our faith as Christians. And that's exactly what Jesus wanted his apostles to do. And we are being sent as the apostles were, to heal, to cure, to share the word, to take care of one another. That mission has not ended. Of course, Jesus predates Islam by many centuries. But our mission has not ended, and we are still commissioned to do that, as Anthony was. When he saw the mortars come in, they were from Morocco being processed into his hometown. He felt a need to go and preach in Morocco. So he went to his superiors and asked if he could change his religious order. He was an Augustinian. The monks who were just brought in as martyrs were Franciscan, followers of Saint Francis. And he was given permission to become a Franciscan. And just so we know, contemporary-wise, he was only a few years from Saint Francis. Saint Francis wrote to him, and we have those documents. So they're contemporaries, Saint Francis, the founder of the Franciscans, and our own Saint Saint Anthony of Padua. He took on his mission very seriously and set sail eventually to go to Morocco and preach Christ to the community there. God had different plans. See, when you and I set out our plans, that's nice. It's good to have a goal, but God's in charge. So don't be surprised if your plans change a little bit. Long as you are working in the Spirit of God and asking for His guidance, He's with you. He's with you to assist you in your decisions, to assist in your ministry, whatever ministry that is. So he's on the ship. Now I'm Sicilian by birth, by family, heritage. He's on the ship and it gets shipwrecked, and it lands not in Morocco, but in Sicily. And we say the Holy Land. He arrived, not really, but he arrived at the Holy Land of Sicily. And from there, he was taken into a local religious convent to be cared for. He was damaged, he was hurt. When he got his health back, he progressed, stayed in Italy, went on the mainland, and just started reaching other religious communities. Franciscans were relatively new then, and was housed at various Franciscan communities until he made his way up north. When he went up north, and I'm telling you this story because he's our saint, he's our patron, but things like this happened to all of the apostles. God intervened, pushed them directly by the Holy Spirit, and God does that to you and me. God intervenes and for opens the Holy Spirit, he pushes us in a certain direction that we should be going in. And he arrives in Padua, where there is a community of Augustinians and Franciscans, and they were having an ordination. However, for some reason, the Holy Spirit knows, the preacher was not present. So you have a huge church, huge community, but no preacher. So they knew Anthony had shown his education, his intelligence. Say a few words. That homily, well, probably a sermon, which is a lot longer than a homily and goes into greater detail. That sermon earned him the title of Golden Tongue because the congregation was so moved with his eloquence and his application of the scriptures to their lives that he became famous, and people wanted him to go to their churches, their communities. And there were times in which so many people would gather, he had to preach outside because there were no churches big enough to accommodate his congregation. And think of the lives, because we're paralleling now, the apostles and you with St. Anthony. The apostles went off to different lands too. They had to learn new languages, they had to gather communities. And eventually, here we are. We're the descendants of the apostles. The apostles are called first followers of Christ, and all of our bishops are called successors of the apostles. So the mission goes out, and it still goes out. So our newly named bishop is the successor, Ronald, the successor of the apostles. And we are successors of the ministry of Christ. So as time went on, Anthony became very popular, and certain attributes were assigned to him. His extra love for the poor, his preaching, his sensitivity to the people. Look at the first line of today's scripture from Matthew. Jesus' heart was moved for pity because they were like troubled and abandoned, like a sheep without a shepherd. See, Anthony take that seriously. So his heart was always focused on preaching God's word of sensitivity, preaching God's word of charity. In time, he became associated with miracles. Different things were attributed to him, and people had no logical understanding except his holiness. One time he was confronted by a group of antagonists, non-Catholics, non-Christians, and they refused to listen to him. They left and he was alone. And in his he must have been quite a character, in his fulfillment of his personality, he went to the rivers and preached to the fish. And that sounds a little pots, doesn't it? But as he preached to the fish, they came up out of the water to listen to him. Like he was bait. He was giving them food. Just the way he gave us food to his preaching, and the way Christ feeds us to his preaching. People thought this was odd. He had a great reverence for the blessed sacrament. And as we did yesterday with the procession of St. Anthony and the Statue of Our Lady, he processed it through the streets. And one day, one of his antagonists, who was an atheist, couldn't believe that they would do this, and people would kneel down because the blessed sacrament is being passed by. So this man, one of his antagonists, stood there with all of his narcissism. However, he had an animal with him. My grandfather used to call Mushe. He had a donkey with him. When Anthony went by with the blessed sacrament held up high, the man stood up, he wasn't going to kneel down. But the donkey knelt down. Amazed everyone. And if you follow the windows in our own church, you'll see some of these miracles are highlighted in those windows. That was a popular one. Another one was a little child, and it all ties in. We're going to be giving bread. We call it the bread of St. Anthony after Mass. We gave it yesterday as well. Why? Anthony was very concerned with the poor. And one day a child fell down a well. And he could have been drowned. He probably was drowned. They fished him back up. They put him in front of Anthony. And through his blessing and intercession and the blessing of Almighty God, the boy came back to life. The mother of the child was a miller. She ground seeds, wheat for bread. Her promise was that she would give to the poor the child's weight in flour to feed the poor. And hence Saint Anthony's charity is now exemplified in this little miracle. And we still carry that honor to today. And yesterday we gave out little loaves of bread. And the money from the bread goes to the poor. We ourselves are poor in so many ways. And we need that nourishment. But the nourishment comes from the Eucharist. And Anthony was very proud of that. Very proud to be someone who carried Christ in his heart. Eventually, in Padua, he was taken sick. He was only 38. On June 13th, 1231, he passed. When he was buried, within a year he was canonized by the Pope, which is totally unheard of. And when his body was exhumed, his tongue and jaw were not corrupt. And today his tongue is enthroned in a reliquary in the Basilica of San Antonio in Padua. And we have guests from Padua here, I know, today. And that's us. That's our history. Yes, as a parish, but yes, as Christians. Because that's our destiny. For our throne, for our mouths to be enthroned? No. For us to live in glory, for us to live like Christ. The apostles were sent to live that way. And you know the story of all the apostles. We don't have the time now for all 12 martyrdoms. The only one not martyred was John the evangelist. But they were all sent, like you and I are sent, to heal the unclean spirits, to cure every disease and every illness, to instruct, and to take care of one another as members of the family of Christ and as his sheep, metaphorically. Anthony now, patron, did that in a superb way. There are so many other stories. You want to hear them, read about them. There are plenty of sources, resources for us to consult. But we're here today to realize that the mission that Christ put his disciples on has not ended. We can highlight it with Anthony. We can highlight it with each of us. Where we are, our job, whether we're in school, whether we're retired, whether we're new in the area, it doesn't matter. As Roman Catholics, we've been commissioned to bear the word of Christ into the world. Yesterday we did it with a procession. Tomorrow we have to do it with our words and with our actions, bringing Christ to one another.