Friday, 1/17/13
Today the Church
honors St. Anthony, not calling to mind the innumerable key chains and wallets
he has located for us, but rather for the role he played in giving its shape to
our early church. Let’s look at his story.
As a wealthy young
Egyptian in the year 265 A.D., Anthony fell so in love with Christ that he
began giving away his wealth to the poor. Then, twenty years further on, in
285, he felt a strong desire to be alone with God. In pursuit of that dream, he
hid himself in an abandoned Roman outpost on the banks of the Red Sea.
To implement his
desire for talking with God, he gave each day to the chanting of the whole of
the Book of Psalms. In those years passing Bedouins kept him alive by tossing
scraps over the wall to him. Through the next forty years other men and women
took up living alone in hermitages near Anthony’s outpost, and going along with
his practice, they took to chanting of the Psalms as their way of praying.
One such hermit, a
man named Pachomius, kept recalling how Jesus had said, “By this will all men
know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.” That had
him urging the nearby hermits to come together for a community life in which
they would need to practice mutual tolerance.
Now, up to that time
the Church had made no provision for Christians to go to confession. The
Sacrament was there, but people were not using it until Anthony and Pachomius
began urging their followers to use frequent confessions as a means of rooting
out sinful ways.
In their time their
bishop was Athanasius of Alexandria, and on his frequent visits to the new
monasteries and convents in his diocese he became so impressed by their way of
life, that he wrote an account of it; and bringing his book to Europe, it
became the blueprint for all the monasteries and convents that were to become a
vital part of Catholicism for the next seventeen hundred years.
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