From: rich <
richarra@gmail.com>
November 7th =E2=80=93 Bl. Antony Baldinucci
d. 1717
ON this day the Society of Jesus and several Italian dioceses that
profited by his labours keep the feast of this Bl. Antony, the fifth
son of Philip Baldinucci and Catherine Scolari, of Florence. His
father, painter and writer by profession, after recovery from an
illness, which he attributed to the intercession of St. Antony of
Padua, vowed his next child to that saint; and when a boy was born in
1665, appropriately within the octave of his feast, he had him
baptized Antony and brought up with the idea of becoming a priest. The Baldinucci family lived in the same house in the via degli Angeli at
Florence in which St. Aloysius Gonzaga had lived for a time when a
child, and the intimate memory of this young saint had much influence
on the growing Antony. When he was 16 he offered himself to the
Society of Jesus and was accepted, in spite of his rather uncertain
health.
Antony hoped to be sent as a missionary to the Indies, but instead he
was set to teach young men and give instructions to confraternities,
first at Terni and then in Rome. A bout of seizures and bad headaches
caused him to be sent back to Florence, and then to several country
colleges, where his health improved and he began to preach, very
successfully. When he was thirty he was ordained priest, and after he
had completed his tertianship he asked if he might now go to the
Indies. He was refused and sent to minister in Viterbo and Frascati,
in whose neighbourhood he spent the remaining 20 years of his life,
working principally among the poorer and uninstructed people. To
attract them he adopted missionary methods that were, to put it
mildly, demonstrative and startling, modeled on those of St. Peter
Claver among the Negroes and Bl. Julian Maunoir among the Bretons. Bl.
Antony organized imposing processions from different places to the
centre where the mission was being held, in which penitents walked
wearing crowns of thorns and beating themselves with a discipline; he
himself often preached carrying a heavy cross or wearing chains, and
would strike the hearts of the people by going along the streets
scourging himself violently. After a due impression had been made and
he had got the people of a place to come and listen to him, he would
modify his methods to a more usual pattern. To keep order in the
crowds that flocked to his preaching he appointed lay marshals, often
men of notoriously bad lives, who were thus flattered and brought to a
more amenable frame of mind. Among the exterior results of his
missions was generally a public burning of cards, dice, obscene
pictures and other occasions of sin and excess. He found particularly widespread the evils of reckless gambling, violence arising from
revenge, and lewdness of speech and action, and his zeal did not end
in bonfires but brought about many real conversions and the
establishment of organized good works.
Although he was incessantly engaged in preaching missions and the work ancillary thereto, Bl. Antony wrote down numerous sermons and
instructions and kept up a wide correspondence. He rarely slept more
than 3 hours in a night, and then on a bed of planks, and fasted 3
days of every week; in view of his tremendous activity Pope Clement XI dispensed him from the daily recitation of the Divine Office, but
Antony did not make use of the dispensation. In all he gave in twenty
years 448 missions in 13 dioceses of the Abruzzi and Romagna. In 1708
he was called to preach the Lent at Leghorn by order of Duke Cosimo
III. Antony arrived bare-footed, in a tattered cassock, with his
luggage on his back, and at first the gentry would not come to his
sermons. But he won them in the end, and every Lent after he had to
preach in some principal city. The year 1716 saw a terrible famine in
central Italy, and Bl. Antony was indefatigable in the work of relief.
He was still only just over fifty, but he was literally worn out with
work and hardly survived the strain of this additional effort. He died
on November 7 in the following year. During a mission at Carpineto in
1710 he had stayed in the house of the Pecci, a family which
afterwards gave a pope to the Church in the person of Leo XIII. By
this pope Bl. Antony Baldinucci was beatified in 1893.
The details of the history of Bl. Antony are very fully known from the testimony of the witnesses in the process of beatification as well as
from his own letters and other contemporary documents. There is a
satisfactory, if summary, account of these sources in the Acta
Sanctorum, November, vol. iii. Within two and a half years of the
missioner's death a substantial biography had been published by Fat=
her
F. M. Galluzzi. The best modern life is probably that by Father
Vannucci (1893), but there are several others, e.g. by Father Goldie
in English (1894). See also DHG., vol. iii, cc. 756-760. A large
collection of Bl. Antony's letters was edited and published by Fath=
er
L. Rosa in 1899.
Saint Quote:
Love the poor tenderly, regarding them as your masters and yourselves
as their servants.
--St. John of God
Bible Quote:
Never repay evil with evil. As scripture says: Vengeance is mine--I
will pay them back, says the Lord. But there is more: If your enemy is
hungry, you should give him food, and if he is thirsty, let him drink.
Resist evil and conquer it with good.=C2 (Romans 12:17,19-20,21 )
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Saint Margaret Mary's Prayer of Consecration To the Sacred Heart
I, ( your name. . .), give myself and consecrate to the Sacred Heart
of our Lord Jesus Christ my person and my life, my actions, pains, and sufferings, so that I may be unwilling to make use of any part of my
being save to honor, love, and glorify the Sacred Heart.
This is my unchanging purpose, namely, to be all His, and to do all
things for the love of Him, at the same time renouncing with all my
heart whatever is displeasing to Him.
I therefore take Thee, O Sacred Heart, to be the only object of my
love, the guardian of my life, my assurance of salvation, the remedy
of my weakness and inconstancy, the atonement for all the faults of my
life and my sure refuge at the hour of death.
Be then, O Heart of goodness, my justification before God Thy Father,
and turn away from me the strokes of His righteous anger. O Heart of
love, I put all my confidence in Thee, for I fear everything from my
own wickedness and frailty; but I hope for all things from Thy
goodness and bounty.
Do Thou consume in me all that can displease Thee or resist Thy holy
will. Let Thy pure love imprint Thee so deeply upon my heart that I
shall nevermore be able to forget Thee or to be separated from Thee.
May I obtain from all Thy loving kindness the grace of having my name
written in Thee, for in Thee I desire to place all my happiness and
all my glory, living and dying in true bondage to Thee.
Amen.
--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2
* Origin: News Gate @ Net396 -Huntsville, AL - USA (1:396/4)