Anthony: Words of Fire, Life of Light
by Melanie Bettinelli on May 20, 2012
Even though my fourth child is named Anthony, I must confess that I didn’t know much about St Anthony of Padua at the time we named him. The name had come up repeatedly as we wrestled to find a boy’s name and it was one Dom seemed to favor. I decided to give in and go with his top pick because I wasn’t really happy with anything. Then Jen’s Saint’s Name Generator chose St Anthony of Padua as my patron saint for last year. That seemed like a good enough reason to stick with the name and to try to find out more about this very popular saint.
Still, I wasn’t having much luck finding a promising looking book till the Daughters of St Paul had a book sale at the end of Mass one day. This book on St Anthony just jumped out at me. It had this beautiful cover. (A different image than the one on the cover pictured above.) And a big section of colored art plates in the middle of the book. Pretty pictures will always grab my eye. I picked it up and found it was a novelized biography. That’s promising. I don’t love to read non-fiction. I find that often biographies and histories can be very dry and no matter how interesting the subject I just lose interest if the story isn’t told well. I love reading historical fiction and this promised to be a sort of perfect marriage between a well-researched biography and a good historical fiction. Madeline Pecora Nugent’s book is very well researched and I love that the end notes explain what in each chapter is fact and what is fiction and also explains why where the historical records disagree she went with one version of the story over another. Where she has St Anthony preaching, Nugent uses selections from Anthony’s published sermons. So although we don’t have a record of what he said at that particular occasion, we do know that the words she has put into his mouth are ones that are very like what he could have said because they are the saint’s own words.
Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person and tells the story of an encounter with the saint. Many, but not all, are stories of miracles. Many are stories of conversions. But not all. It was refreshing that some of the individuals whose eyes the narrator allows us to see through do not in fact change their lives as a result of their encounter with the saint. Real life is like that. Some people are too hardened, too entrenched in sin, to change even if they do witness a miracle and hear a golden-tongued saint preach.
I loved getting to know St Anthony better and I do feel like in the course of this book he became a friend. I do hope to continue to get to know him and hope to find more books in the future. Still, for now I feel like I’ve read enough to be able to tell Anthony all about his patron saint when he gets old enough to ask. More, this time I spent with St Anthony also drew me closer to Christ. There were several passages that stopped me in my tracks and that stuck with me for days and days. They were just what I needed to hear at that moment. I truly can’t recommend this book highly enough. You will be glad to get to know St Anthony beyond just asking him to find your lost car keys and as more than a worker of miracles.
You can find the book here at Pauline Books and Media.
Comments
Amazon UK have it on Kindle! Sample is on my iPad
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Posted by Kathryn on 05/21/12 at 12:48 AM
What is her authorial voice like in this volume? I read her Divine Offic for Dodos a while back, and her style was so cutesy/peppy (I found it wildly inappropriate to the subject matter!) that it’s rather turned me against reading anything else she’s written.
Posted by GeekLady on 05/21/12 at 05:50 AM
GeekLady, Not at all cutesy and peppy. It really reads like a novel and the narrator is a very transparent sort of voice, there doesn’t feel like there is an authorial voice at all. Each chapter is told in a third person limited voice, so you only “see” the thoughts of the person from whose viewpoint the chapter is told, all of the events are experienced through their perception/filter so there is never a chance for the author to get into Anthony’s head or to play omniscient God who sees everything. I found the characters convincing, an interesting cast of personalities.
Posted by Melanie Bettinelli on 05/21/12 at 07:41 AM
I just have to share a quick St. Anthony story. We collecte painted saint dolls. Gaba (my mom) had bought the girls St. Anthony for Christmas this year. Well, our resident kleptomaniac promptly misplaced several of the wooden saint dolls. We found all of them except the patron saint of lost things (the irony did not escape me). We combed the house to no avail.
More recently, my oldest daughter said we should just get another St. Anthony so we could find all the things that we’ve lost recently.
I finally decided to get another one just because I missed having this heavenly friend in our collection.
I wrapped it up for the klepto - sweet Mary Elizabeth - because I feel sorry for her that we’re always blaming her for every misplaced item when sometimes she is not the guilty party. Well, when she opened it, I joked that maybe this means we will find all of the things that have gone missing.
Not an hour later, my oldest was playing when she found a birthstone ring that we had lost several months ago. St. Anthony works!
Indeed. I told my daughters we really should start praying to him for the most important things that have gone astray - lost souls!
St. Anthony, pray for us!
Posted by Kate Wicker on 05/21/12 at 08:38 AM