Abbey-Roads2

Tomorrow is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church.

I love the depictions of him with the Infant Jesus - legend has it that a man, at whose house the friar found lodging, looked in on the saint and witnessed him conversing with the Infant Jesus, who stood upon the open Scriptures Anthony was studying.

I suspect St. Anthony had a deep devotion to the Child Jesus, as have many saints.  Devotion to the Child Jesus teaches us humility by drawing our attention away from ourselves and focusing it solely upon Jesus, who captivates our heart by his innocence, simplicity, poverty, humility, and divine charity.  The love of the Divine Infant teaches us to “break out of the shell of selfishness and self-centeredness where we seek to be brilliant and to prove our goodness, wisdom, and power.” (Jean Vanier)

[Thanks to Vincenzo for the image of St. Anthony.)

From Bishop Richard Williamson - one of the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988 for the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X - FSSPX / SSPX:

Again, yes and no. The only solution to the world’s problems is from good clergy, because the only solution is Our Lord Jesus Christ, since without Our Lord sin is insoluble. Only Our Lord can pay for and wash out sin. Now, Jesus Christ chooses to operate through His Church, and the Church is the priests, the priests run the Church. Therefore, all good comes from good priests, but correspondingly, all evil comes from the clergy too. The Latin expression for this is omne malum ab clero. They say that down in Hell, every soul would point to another soul and say: “You were responsible”. And then that soul would point to another and so on, and at the end of every chain is a priest. Terrible thought. I’m afraid a number of the leading heretics were priests: Nestor, Eutyches, Arius was a deacon, Luther… The real evil comes through the priest because the real good comes through the priest. So when the devil gets a priest to work for him, he does terrible damage. - Rorate Caeli

Hard to argue with that.