Saint Anthony Mary Zaccaria

Anthony Mary Zaccaria was born in Cremona in 1502, into a family of old nobility. He lost his father early and was raised by his mother, Antonietta Pescaroli, widowed at eighteen. He graduated in medicine at Padua and went back to Cremona to practice as a doctor. He treated the poor without charging them, and along with the medicine he taught them the catechism. After a few years he realized that what he wanted to do was something else, and he became a priest: he celebrated his first Mass in 1529. In Milan, where he moved, he founded three things at once within a few years. The Clerics Regular of Saint Paul — known as the Barnabites, from the Milanese church of San Barnaba, their first home. The Angelic Sisters, with Countess Ludovica Torelli of Guastalla: one of the first women’s congregations not bound to the cloister, which for that reason was viewed with enormous suspicion. And the Married Couples of Saint Paul, for married people. Three congregations — one for men, one for women, one for lay people — conceived together and for the same purpose: to wake up a Church he considered asleep. The enemy he always named was lukewarmness. He died in Cremona on July 5, 1539, at thirty-six, worn out. Leo XIII proclaimed him a saint in 1897. The Smorfia puts Saint Anthony at number thirteen. If your name is Anthony, today is your name day — though many wait for the thirteenth of June.