One Sunday morning, as I was vesting for the 8 a.m. Mass, I glanced at the schedule and realized for the first time that I was supposed to preach.
My pastor walked into the sacristy, and I told him that I mistook the schedule and hadn’t prepared a homily.
“Well, then,” he said, “we have a problem.”
And he walked out.
By then, it was about 7:55, so I had roughly 15 minutes — ten of them with the Mass already in progress — in which to concoct a homily.
I can credit only the Holy Spirit with the fact that I thought of an obscure baseball player from the 1950s — Julio Becquer — who kept a crucifix in his pocket and touched it whenever he stepped into the batter’s box.
I somehow saw a connection between that practice and the gospel reading for that day.
St. Anthony, a 13th century Franciscan friar whose feast we celebrate on June 13, had a similar experience.
After poor health had frustrated his desire to work in North Africa as a missionary, Anthony, a native of Portugal, was living in a rural hospice in the Romagna region of northern Italy.
While he was there, an ordination of priests was scheduled, but no arrangement was made for a homilist.
Anthony’s superior first asked and then ordered the reluctant friar to preach.
Whatever homily Anthony composed made a powerful impression, and he was ultimately commissioned to preach the Gospel throughout Lombardy.
During what remained of his relatively brief life, Anthony took on other responsibilities, including as a teacher in France, but preaching — in which he directly confronted the heresies of his time — was always the foremost of his pursuits.
Eventually, he preached in the court of Pope Gregory IX and was commissioned to publish a collection of his homilies for feast days.
He died in Padua on June 13, 1231 and was canonized less than a year later by Pope Gregory.
Anthony was modest about the preaching prowess that gained him his reputation.
"I ask,’’ he wrote concerning his homilies, “that if you find anything edifying, anything consoling, anything well presented, that you give all praise, all glory and all honor to the Blessed Son of God Jesus Christ.
“If on the other hand, you find anything that is ill composed, uninteresting or not too well explained, you impute and attribute it to my weakness, blindness, and lack of skill.’’
There are a lot of stories about miraculous events connected to St. Anthony — including the appearance of the infant Jesus in his arms — but his glory emanates from the fact that he preached the Gospel without compromise and that he lived the Gospel in simplicity and humility.
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.