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In The News |
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February 23 - 200,000 Visit St. Anthony's Relics
Some 200,000
people took
advantage of the
special showing
of St. Anthony's
relics that
occurred at the
basilica in
Padua last
week."What is
amazing is that
all those people
--
it was an
interminable
procession --
had the clear
perception not
of being before
someone who was
dead, a skeleton
or some bones,
but before a
person who is,
and who is alive,"
the
vicar-general of
the Diocese of
Padua, Monsignor
Paolo Doni told
Vatican Radio.
St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), one of the first followers of St. Francis of Assisi, is "one of the most popular saints in the whole Catholic Church, venerated not only in Padua [...] but in the whole world," Benedict XVI said at a general audience earlier this month. The vicar said the large turnout shows that "people have a great need to have a spiritual reference point, a person." The pilgrimages to Padua, he proposed, were due to "the presence of a person -- in this case Anthony -- who is not of the past but of the present," according to "the great truth that is the communion of saints," which "transcends time and space." "This presence of Anthony, with the values he proposed and continues to propose, has been as though renewed these days," he said. When St. Anthony's coffin was opened at the first transfer, some 30 years after his burial, most of his body was found to have returned to dust. However his tongue remained fresh, seen as a sign of his gift of preaching. Anthony's relics were last displayed in 1981, marking the 750th anniversary of his death. Read More ....
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