Saint Anthony Mary Claret

Antoni Maria Claret was born in Sallent, in Catalonia, on December 23, 1807, the son of a weaver. As a boy he worked at the loom and learned the trade, and at twenty he was already running a small textile mill. He was ordained a priest in 1835. He went to Rome to be sent on mission; because of his fragile health, both Propaganda Fide and the Jesuits turned him down. He went back home and invented his own way of being a missionary: parish missions, from town to town, in Catalonia and the Canary Islands. He preached thousands of them, on foot, and became the most famous preacher in Spain. In 1849, in Vic, he founded the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Claretians. And he did something few people in the nineteenth century had grasped: he started printing. He founded a popular publishing house and put millions of booklets into circulation for a few cents each, in a country where almost no one had books at home. In 1850 he was made archbishop of Santiago de Cuba. He found a very harsh situation there: slavery, irregular marriages, absent clergy. In seven years he reorganized the diocese, opened schools and model farms for former slaves, and faced fifteen attempts on his life; in one of them he was wounded in the face. He later became confessor to Queen Isabella II, and when she was deposed he followed her into exile. He died in Narbonne on October 24, 1870. Pius XII declared him a saint in 1950. The Smorfia puts Saint Anthony at number thirteen. If your name is Anthony, today is your name day.