For Anthony this theological structure did not remain a purely abstract ideal, far from the real life of the people and the society of his day. To conduct the man who was sullied by sin, seduced by Satan, disfigured by the passion for money, by pride and by sensuality, toward this new justice and supreme liberty that is the salvation given by Christ the Father, was the radical commitment of his life, of his wearying pastoral ministry.


Disciple of Francis of Assisi, he wanted to live side by side with the most humble and poor class of society, taking on as his own their sufferings and the contradictions in which the populace groaned, abandoned to the arrogance of the strong, unprotected from the violent. Biographical sources and the chroniclers of the time tell us that Anthony fought courageously to restore each man with his original image and resemblance to God, opening his heart to receive the Gospel of the Kingdom carried by the Saviour.

It is important to keep in mind how much of the impassioned testimony documented in the first biography has clearly biblical references:

"He brought brothers in discord together in peace; he gave freedom back to prisoners; he caused the restitution of that which had been robbed through usury or violence; it got to the point that, when houses or lands had been mortgaged, the price was presented to the Saint, and based on his advice as to whether they had been taken in a good or bad manner, they were returned to those who had been robbed. He liberated prostitutes from the obscene market, and thieves famous for misdeeds held back from laying their hands on the things of others."

In this untiring work of peace, justice, reconciliation and respect for each person, in particular the weakest, the unprotected and the exploited, two episodes are emblematic of how much Anthony committed himself to the protection of human rights and the dignity of the person. Two moments of his life in which, according to ancient testimony, he found himself directly before the political powers. The first was his objection to the severity of the statutes of the City of Padua and the second, his resistance to the cruelties of Ezzelino in his treatment of the prisoners of war.

The following is a brief review of the context presented so as to allow the Saint's behaviour in relationship to human laws to emerge by itself. He exposed these laws for their terrible injustice as compared to the truer justice of the divine laws, and showed how they had declined from their original legitimacy as an active extension of natural law and to have the value of an "ordinatio rationis," to become, on the contrary, irrational dispositions and instruments of social disorder, in contrast to the good of man.

On March 17, 1231, almost at the end of the famous daily Lent that had galvanised city life, Anthony appeared before the mayor of Padua and his municipal council asking for a reform of the penal code for insolvent debtors, who were regularly sent to languish in harsh and inhuman prisons, treated like animals more than like human beings. He was able to have the punishment changed from prison to the attachment of goods and exile from the city. In the ancient city statutes the notary premised the new juridical disposition with this significant annotation:
"ad postulacionem venerabilis fratris Antonii, de ordine fratrum minorum."

The other episode happened about two months later, around the end of May, 1231. Even though he was exhausted and near death, he agreed, under pressure from the families involved, to go to Verona to obtain the liberation of Count Rizzardo of Saint Boniface and the other Guelph friends, who were being held prisoners in Lombard prisons. He went to and fro for days between the leaders of the Lombard League, the mayor of Verona, and the court of Ezzelino da Romano with moving prayers to touch the hardened hearts of those men, to win over the inexorability of political reason. The chronicler Rolandino annoted with disenchantment that, despite the justness of the case, Anthony had to return "in nullo penitus exauditus," without having obtained anything, because not even prayer is fruitful if no trace of humanity is present ("ubi nullus est ramunculus caritatis").

This unarmed challenge of a feared tyrant like Ezzelino and his military law shows how much our Saint took to heart the defence of rights, the responsibility toward people flattened by the arrogance of the iniquitous; even then Anthony rose up intrepidly for the most difficult of the rights: that of the defeated.

The two biographical episodes mentioned here are icons of the Saint from Padua's concern and solicitude to redeem every person he met from the different types of slavery, to watch over the creature dignity and promote their full expansion toward the supernatural destiny to which he is called. Beyond the recomposition of rights and pure legality, it is this greater justice that he searched for, promoting in the cities and, above all, in the families, reconciliation, friendship, and peace following the model of a true communion of the sons of God, corresponding to the divine project for humanity and the Church.

Basing his thought and his action on the authority of that project, Anthony had an invincible critical strength before any human authority or institution. He immediately distanced himself from earthly needs which he saw as being in conflict with the law of God, revealed or natural.

The extremely high ethical and mystical ideal that animated his pastoral ministry was, however, often in conflict with the harshness of the situation of sin and injustice that weighed on the family, social and political structures of the cities and countryside that he passed through. Our Saint never lost faith and he burned up his short existence for the renewal of the lives of the most alienated masses and the institutions contrary to the dignity and well-being of human beings. His commitment also shows through clearly in the series of miracles sent to the Pope for Anthony's canonisation. Miracles which, above all, worked for the protection of the poor and the relief of the ill who had no human aid, and, in particular, for the safeguarding of the family, with great tenderness for children, comfort for wives mistreated and offended by brutal husbands, and support for family bonds in any kind of difficulty.

This is the Gospel of Anthony, a Gospel that repeats the one of Christ himself, announcing the love and the faith that God still today has for man and unveiling the possibility for a new and different humanity in which every person, who in his native richness is a cipher of the Almighty, can have solidarity with others and carry together the weight of life; continually winning that selfish instinct that closes us off from each other and that deadly cynicism that has dominated certain cultures for too long.

Text by Antonino Poppi, adapted by Paolo Floretta.