A story of two Anthonys

I have always loved hagiography, that is, the study of the saints. They were my children's stories when young. A hagiographer must first learn all about how to identify the subjects and symbols that distinguish one saint from another. An easy matter if only one knew how and an accomplishment that has been superseded by modern technology. I would not think that today hagio-iconography would interest anyone apart from students of history of art and, maybe, students of theology.

Iconography was invented in an era wherein the written word was for the rank and file of any western population, a load of gibberish. Only monks and scholars could read and even royalty applied thumbnail signatures to their letters patent! Out of the Dark Ages came hagiography, iconography and heraldry, great arts that survived humanism and enlightenment but which are rapidly waning in the unromantic modern age in which we live.

Therefore, should you come across a painting or a statue of a young tonsured friar holding the Christ Child on an open book and ask the average 18-year-old to identify the saint, the instant recognition of St Anthony of Padua would be a highly unlikely occurrence.

To us over 50, the identification of saints was something that one learnt by perusing the vast collections of holy pictures that we were given by pious aunts and cousins and which were shoved into our massive black Tridentine missals.

We had dusky St Martin of Cupertino on a horse donating his cloak to a beggar. We had the two saints Catherines being mystically married to the Infant Jesus. We had the Blessed Virgin in all her different attributes; in white with a blue sash for Lourdes, both arms raised as the Assumption, with the Child Jesus and holding a scapular for Mount Carmel and standing on a crescent moon as the Immaculate Conception.

I can go on and on; the variations are endless: St Dominic's little dog with a torch in its mouth and St George's white horse and dragon, St Publius with his lion and St Paul with his viper. However the one that concerns me today is St Anthony of Padua whose feast was celebrated last Wednesday.

This is the saint who is reputed to find things that have been lost.... at a price! He was in fact a Portuguese nobleman, a descendant of Geoffrey de Bouillon who led the First Crusade and a mystic who came to be known as the Hammer of the Heretics, a performer of wondrous miracles and one of the age's greatest thaumaturgists.

I had never been to church on the feast of St Anthony before. I knew that one was given a little loaf, St Anthony's bread, but nothing else. The Lapsi church was looking cool and iridescent in the dying afternoon sun. The recently-restored fresco work on the barrel-vaulted ceiling was a riot of shades of blue. Lapsi church, till a few decades ago, was St Julians parish church. On the left of the altar was a life-size statue of St Anthony with a diminutive Bambino in his arms. What was so moving was that the Holy Child was caressing the saint's cheek.

Besides commemorating the great saint, the rector of the Lapsi church, Fr Claude Portelli, explained that we were also commemorating the life of another man named Anthony; a holy man whom we all knew and loved in every sense of the word and who left us just over a year ago to embrace the Christ Child whom he served to the utmost and adored to the full all his life.

A fellow parishioner, Andrew Borg, had compiled and just published Volume 1 of the writings of Dun Anton Sciberras and the parish was officially launching the book that day along with being presented by a painting by me of the interior of the Lapsi church with Dun Anton in the foreground holding the relic of St Julian. Proceeds of the sale of prints made from the original will go towards funding restoration projects in this gem of a church that lies in a time-warp in the sleepier area of St Julians.

I got to know Dun Anton shortly before I moved to St Julians 13 years ago. My mother had already met him and, true to form, instructed me that should I see a priest wearing a soutane scurrying in the streets of old St Julians I was to stop and offer him a lift to wherever he was going. I saw him the very next day and stopped. I introduced myself and after a slight demur he hopped in and asked me to take him to Spinola Road to give some old lady Holy Communion. Before I knew it I had unknowingly become a St Christopher.

Most parishioners were used to ferrying Dun Anton about but many times he used his legs. A vigorous and energetic soul was Dun Anton who until quite recently led the annual pilgrimage to Mellieha on foot. He was everywhere, visiting the sick in hospital and the incarcerated in prison, He used to say Mass for the staff of the St Julians hotels that had to work on Sunday.

Nothing was too difficult, nothing was too much trouble when it came to spreading the word of the gospel and preaching the love of that same Christ Child being held by his patron saint. Even when fighting terminal cancer, emaciated and sometimes bruised and bleeding after a fall, Dun Anton fought his own body and literally dragged himself to the Lapsi church to say evening Mass not to let his faithful parishioners down.

Above all, Dun Anton, erudite and literary as he was, was not humbug, far from it. One knew instantly and for certain that this was a humble gentleman of the old school who had sincerely dedicated his entire life to the service of God and his fellow men. His Christianity was deeply embedded in his bones and even if at times I found his sermons a bit difficult to follow one knew that this was a man who was speaking straight from the heart.

If there is a God I am convinced that when Dun Anton appeared at the gates, St Peter was asked to stand aside as the Holy Child appeared in person with St Anthony to welcome him. I would expect no less.

At the time Dun Anton died I was going through a very difficult and emotionally shattering period of my life and I was not in the right frame of mind to have written this tribute to him.

The Mass last Wednesday brought it all back. I was so sorry not to have written this earlier. During Dun Anton's last illness many people were already saying that he was a living saint. I am sure that the necessary documentation is being compiled to forward his cause for beatification and I am sure that he is quite capable of performing the de rigueur miracles from wherever he is. All that officialdom apart, what is important is the example he set for us; a convinced Christian priest who was really an instrument of God's peace and who genuinely lived each and every tenet of the Sermon on the Mount to its full extent without ever sparing himself, right to the end. If that's not sainthood I really do not know what is.