Saint Anthony of Padua: "God is Love"

Today, June 13, we celebrate the feast of Saint Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), Doctor of the Church, Confessor, Franciscan friar, and patron saint of lost items, travelers, and the poor. Saint Anthony’s life is one of preaching, writing, and prayer. He was canonized less than one year after his death, demonstrating the respect and veneration the Church held him in. In canonizing Anthony in 1232, Pope Gregory IX spoke of him as the “Ark of the Testament” and the “Repository of Holy Scripture.” In 1946 Pope Pius XII officially declared Anthony a Doctor of the Universal Church. Based upon his unending love for the Lord, the Church wants us to learn from Saint Anthony the meaning of true wisdom and what it means to become like Jesus, who humbled himself for us and served others without hesitation. Saint Anthony of Padua remains one of the most beloved and admired saints of the Church.


Below, a sermon written by Saint Anthony, entited "God is Love."

"God is love," we read today at the beginning of the Epistle. (I John iv, 8) As love is the chief of all the virtues, we shall treat of it here at some length in a special way . . . .


If God loved us to the point that he gave us his well-beloved Son, by whom he made all things, we too should ourselves love one another. "I give you," he says, "a new commandment, that ye love one another (John xiii, 34)." . . . We have, says St. Augustine, four objects to love. The first is above us: it is God. The second is ourselves. The third is round about us: it is our neighbor. The fourth is beneath us: it is our body. The rich man loved his body first and above everything. Of God, of his neighbor, of his soul, he had not a thought; that was why he was damned.

Our Body, says St. Bernard, should be to us like a sick person entrusted to our care. We must refuse it many of the worthless things it wants; on the other hand, we must forcefully compel it to take the helpful remedies repugnant to it. We should treat it not as something belonging to us but as belonging to Him who bought it at so higha price, and whom we must glorify in our body (I Corinthians vi, 20). We should love our body in the fourth and last place, not as the goal of our life but as an indispensable instrument of it.