It was not easy to free himself from the crowd that followed him incessantly and wanted him to keep on preaching. He entered city surrounded by the crowd. He celebrated the mass. He returned once again in the plaza of the market and continued to preach. When he was exausted of preached hundred and hundred of people wanted to be confessed. He sat at the confessional and listened till very late in the day to delivered themselves of the poison of sadness which was fossilised in their beings, who denied and espelled their heretical views, who repented the wrong doing and accepted penance.
Only after midnight the Friars minor were able to drag Anthony out of the church. The crowd followed them with hymns and with lit torches. Anthony by that time could hardly stand up because of hunger and tiredness.
"Brother, you have defeated the heretics, they don’t dare to show up any longer!" said Friar Sylvester, a young Friar with a big head and a clear beard.
"You have won! They won’t dare any longer to lift their crest! Hosanna! Hosanna!"
"They are afraid, and they ran away." assured friar Simon.
"You will see, the population will send them away from the city."
"Someone must say to the people to get them out from their dens" said Friar Corrado, who was the eldest of the group of the Friars minor in Rimini. "They have menaced us of death! We were afraid to cross the road! The time of recovery has come!"
"We can’t Friars, we can’t" said Anthony. He was so tired, his voice was breaking and his tongue could hardly move.
"Ignoble heretics! Plague of Satan!"
"It is people who have made a mistake. We have to conquer them to our cause."
"Why, do you think that kind of people can be persuaded? They are afraid only of the force!"
"In France, people as such, were sent to the pyre!"
"Our Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t allow us to fight against men. And friar Francis… Have you heard how he tried to conquer to our faith the Sultan of Egypt personally?"
Friar Conrad kept silent, but from the pugnacious expression of his face it was not difficult to guess that he was not persuaded at all.
The night was serene and warm. The moon was rising. Its silvery-green light flowed in the narrow pathways of the city just as a stream of water that flows without noise. Anthony was so much tired, that he dreamed only of throwing himself on the straw and shut his eyes. He didn’t want to eat anything, he drank greedily some water. The friars continued to converse vivaciously between themselves.
All of a sudden they heard a knock at the door. The happy chatter fell suddenly in silence. The enthusiasm turned into worry. One of the Friars went to give a glance out. He returned swiftly. With a shaken voice he whispered:
"It is a 'black'! "
"How does he dare?" Friar Conrad’s voice had suddenly lost his sense of combativeness.
"Certainly behind him there would be others... He wouldn’t have come alone." "They came to take revenge..."
"They will kill us..."
"Let's run away!" whined Friar Sylvester.
Anthony opened a way between the friars that kept on squeezing around him.
"Allow me..."
He opened the door. The newly arrived stayed in front of the door looking like a black column.
"Hello, brother" Anthony said. "Have you come to see us?"
"I have come to see you."
the voice of the man dressed in black was low and loud. "I want to speak to you."
Behind Anthony crowded the Friars. The fact that the 'perfect' was by himself had encouraged them.
"Do not talk to him, Friar" whispered Friar Conrad.
"They are full of traps and they hate us. He could be ready to knife you... For them to kill is nothing..."
"Seeing that he want to talk to me, I cannot refuse it" replied with his head turned back.
"Come in, brother" he said to the new comer.
"The time is late, but we will speak..." He was very tired and would have willingly deferred the meeting for the following day. But the other had come and Anthony, admiring his courage, said:
"Come in, please."
Their room was rather large. The Friars slept just at its extremity. From the opposite side the ruined walls formed some kind of a niche. The roof in that point was pierced, one could see the sky throbbing of stars. Anthony reached that point along with his guest. In silence he indicated to him a beam that lay along the wall. They both sat. The olive torch that was placed on the ground formed a circle of light outside of which all was in deep obscurity. Anthony wasn’t able to see the face of the newcomer. From the bottom of the room, from the dark could be heard the heavy gasping of the friars sat on the straw.
The silence lasted for a long time.
Then the man said, indicating with a gesture the poor environment which surrounded him:
"You live as a mendicant. But now that you have conquered the people you can transfer yourself in better lodging." Anthony shook his head.
"I have no intention of transferring myself in better lodgings. We, Friars minor, do not search the comforts of life."
"You do not search for them today, but tomorrow..." in his voice resounded irony.
"Today a hut with a pierced roof, but tomorrow a palace. If it is not you, it will be others."
"It is true." said Anthony "That is the nature of man. He elevates himself, but falls under the heavy weight of his desires. Because of this we have always the need to search refuge in God, since He is the only that can transform weakness to strength."
"In man struggles spirit and matter. They are enemies."
"No." He denied. "The body and the spirit are created the one for the other, to form a unity. The body is weaker, therefore must be submitted to the spirit. Man behaves well if the spirit guides the matter towards good things, behaves badly if the spirit used the matter in an improper way. The bad nevertheless is not inherent in the matter. God 'saw all the things that he had created and they all were very good.' Evil was not to take the apple from the tree of knowledge, but wicked was the will of our progenitors."
"If the subject wouldn’t burden the spirit, man would be a free man. He conquers freedom only when he frees himself of the subject."
"Men is not spirit and he always is in need of the matter. To free oneself from it means simply run away from life."
"Then the soul goes back to the good God, it unites itself with him. There is only one God, always good and merciful. However Jesus didn’t redeem us with the sublimity of the thought, but with his human blood. He has taught us that it is not dirty what we eat, but what we say and listen to. Satan is our enemy. He, however, doesn’t hide in the bread, in the whirlwind, in the animal. It is pure spirit and desire to persuade man that he too is only spirit. He induces him to despise the matter, he explains that sin passes through the matter."
"If Satan would have been only a fallen angel he wouldn’t be so powerful."
"He is not powerful. He is rebel towards his Creator, and that all the same he must obey. Even if he doesn`t want to, he has to perform the work of the Lord. All his strength consists on the fact that we agree to listen to it. All his power is in the fact that he is able to persuade man to aspire to rise above the common things."
"You are a man that possesses a big doctrine. You must admit that only when you won the body you have conquered the maximum truth of existence."
"The body remind a donkey, who is himself a creature of God, but it must be guided. The fire is a great gift of God, and we bless it when it heats us in the cold night, but we have to be careful that doesn’t burn our houses. The matter is from God, the spirit must however subdue it... "
They kept quiet for a little while. They were like two adversaries that after the first exchange of words and ideas would have stopped because of tiredness. From the bottom of the room one could here the gasping of the Friars. Certainly they were not asleep. They were listening to the conversation.
"Who are you?" asked suddenly the man. He shrugged his shoulders.
“A Friar minor. The least..."
The man dressed in black shook his head.
"No, no... You are so very similar to that Francis that burned the church."
Anthony laughed.
"You are wrong. Friar Francis doesn’t burn the church. He supports it. The Holy Father has seen him in his dream, while he was supporting with his arms the dangerous walls."
"Yet, in order to make a great restoration, one must burn the heaped refusal. The fire by burning purifies. Your Francis is accomplishing an enormous work. Many judge him as mad and stupid..."
"He is neither of them!"
"I agree. That man has confused the ideas of many philosophers. But you too... You must anyway admit that the matter is wicked, seeing that it can be corrupted."
"The plant and the body will rot, but their decomposition renders possible a life yet more blooming. Jesus said: if the seed will not die in the earth, it will not grow a new spike."
"Are you saying that according to you, not even death proves that the matter is wicked?"
"Sister death, she too obeys to the will of God. Death touches man and represents the sentence of the supreme mercy. It frees man from tribulations, it saves man from the evil that he has done..."
"And the wars? and the oppressions and the persecutions? You certainly know what has happened recently in Provenza, of which cruelty soils Montfort. The pyre that he has lit are still burning."
"Is is necessary to accuse God from every evil that man does? Jesus has never said to kill. He said to love."
"And the Church?" he suddenly stood up from the beam on which he was sitting. He raised his arms, and his ample sleeves rippled as two black wings.
"And the Church, doesn’t it invite to kill? Doesn’t the Church bless those who go to kill?"
"Man, even to the Church infer terrible wounds, even in the Church, man remains a man."
"He loves his creature so much that leaves him the freedom of choice, even in evil times. But if someone upsets the order that was created by Him, suffering will follow. Suffering touches the one that is in the wrong, and the one that was in the right, to the guilty and to the innocent..."
The man dressed in black bowed over Anthony that continued to stay sitting down.
"Then you admit that it was an injustice?"
"No" he denied.
"It is not an injustice. It is mercy. The union in the suffering allows some to offer their suffering for the others... God is not in a hurry to condemn. He wants a continuous re-equilibrium through love... Even in this God respects to the maximum our dignity, making us responsible the one with the others."
"You want to be responsible for those fat Bishops and Prelates who pronounce such beautiful words, and despise the poor? They despise you too."
"Jesus too, during his live knew contempt. To be treated as he was treated is a great honour. Do not judge the Priests of the Church by what some do. Francis recommends to respect them. Shouldn’t we respect those who through the word bring God on earth? If they sin, it is not up to us to judge them. God will judge them. Because just as the services of the Holiest Sacrament is bigger than the other services, so the sin of judging the Priests overcomes the sin of judging common people…"
They kept silent. The 'perfect' entwined himself in his habit and once again he sat. No starring light penetrated the pierced roof any longer. Night was ending, dawn was appearing.
The man dressed in black suddenly asked:
"Are you so sure that in the wafer that you raise up there is Jesus Christ?"
Anthony lifted his head. He raised his eyes to the sky.
"I am so sure that I am ready to give my life for this." he affirmed.
"But you can't prove it!" exclaimed the 'perfetto'.
"All the same the world that surrounds us is full of proof God loves us. The mother loving the son gives him all that is good, and at the end she is ready to give herself. Wouldn`t God, who has given to us such marvelous things, wouldn’t He have given at last his body as food of salvation?"
Again they fell silent.
"I envy your faith. I don’t see, I can’t believe!"
"Because you want to believe in your intelligence. But it is Him who gives faith. Ask Him to give it to you."
"Help me..."
Keeping quiet, on tip toes, at the top of incredulity, the Friars approached the place in which under the opening of the roof, from which penetrated the first light of the day, were kneeling two people, hugging, immersed in prayer.
Chapter 21
Chapter 21
It was not easy to free himself from the crowd that followed him incessantly and wanted him to keep on preaching. He entered city surrounded by the crowd. He celebrated the mass. He returned once again in the plaza of the market and continued to preach. When he was exausted of preached hundred and hundred of people wanted to be confessed. He sat at the confessional and listened till very late in the day to delivered themselves of the poison of sadness which was fossilised in their beings, who denied and espelled their heretical views, who repented the wrong doing and accepted penance.
Only after midnight the Friars minor were able to drag Anthony out of the church. The crowd followed them with hymns and with lit torches. Anthony by that time could hardly stand up because of hunger and tiredness.
"Brother, you have defeated the heretics, they don’t dare to show up any longer!" said Friar Sylvester, a young Friar with a big head and a clear beard.
"You have won! They won’t dare any longer to lift their crest! Hosanna! Hosanna!"
"They are afraid, and they ran away." assured friar Simon.
"You will see, the population will send them away from the city."
"Someone must say to the people to get them out from their dens" said Friar Corrado, who was the eldest of the group of the Friars minor in Rimini. "They have menaced us of death! We were afraid to cross the road! The time of recovery has come!"
"We can’t Friars, we can’t" said Anthony. He was so tired, his voice was breaking and his tongue could hardly move.
"Ignoble heretics! Plague of Satan!"
"It is people who have made a mistake. We have to conquer them to our cause."
"Why, do you think that kind of people can be persuaded? They are afraid only of the force!"
"In France, people as such, were sent to the pyre!"
"Our Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t allow us to fight against men. And friar Francis… Have you heard how he tried to conquer to our faith the Sultan of Egypt personally?"
Friar Conrad kept silent, but from the pugnacious expression of his face it was not difficult to guess that he was not persuaded at all.
The night was serene and warm. The moon was rising. Its silvery-green light flowed in the narrow pathways of the city just as a stream of water that flows without noise. Anthony was so much tired, that he dreamed only of throwing himself on the straw and shut his eyes. He didn’t want to eat anything, he drank greedily some water. The friars continued to converse vivaciously between themselves.
All of a sudden they heard a knock at the door. The happy chatter fell suddenly in silence. The enthusiasm turned into worry. One of the Friars went to give a glance out. He returned swiftly. With a shaken voice he whispered:
"It is a 'black'! "
"How does he dare?" Friar Conrad’s voice had suddenly lost his sense of combativeness.
"Certainly behind him there would be others... He wouldn’t have come alone." "They came to take revenge..."
"They will kill us..."
"Let's run away!" whined Friar Sylvester.
Anthony opened a way between the friars that kept on squeezing around him.
"Allow me..."
He opened the door. The newly arrived stayed in front of the door looking like a black column.
"Hello, brother" Anthony said. "Have you come to see us?"
"I have come to see you."
the voice of the man dressed in black was low and loud. "I want to speak to you."
Behind Anthony crowded the Friars. The fact that the 'perfect' was by himself had encouraged them.
"Do not talk to him, Friar" whispered Friar Conrad.
"They are full of traps and they hate us. He could be ready to knife you... For them to kill is nothing..."
"Seeing that he want to talk to me, I cannot refuse it" replied with his head turned back.
"Come in, brother" he said to the new comer.
"The time is late, but we will speak..." He was very tired and would have willingly deferred the meeting for the following day. But the other had come and Anthony, admiring his courage, said:
"Come in, please."
Their room was rather large. The Friars slept just at its extremity. From the opposite side the ruined walls formed some kind of a niche. The roof in that point was pierced, one could see the sky throbbing of stars. Anthony reached that point along with his guest. In silence he indicated to him a beam that lay along the wall. They both sat. The olive torch that was placed on the ground formed a circle of light outside of which all was in deep obscurity. Anthony wasn’t able to see the face of the newcomer. From the bottom of the room, from the dark could be heard the heavy gasping of the friars sat on the straw.
The silence lasted for a long time.
Then the man said, indicating with a gesture the poor environment which surrounded him:
"You live as a mendicant. But now that you have conquered the people you can transfer yourself in better lodging." Anthony shook his head.
"I have no intention of transferring myself in better lodgings. We, Friars minor, do not search the comforts of life."
"You do not search for them today, but tomorrow..." in his voice resounded irony.
"Today a hut with a pierced roof, but tomorrow a palace. If it is not you, it will be others."
"It is true." said Anthony "That is the nature of man. He elevates himself, but falls under the heavy weight of his desires. Because of this we have always the need to search refuge in God, since He is the only that can transform weakness to strength."
"In man struggles spirit and matter. They are enemies."
"No." He denied. "The body and the spirit are created the one for the other, to form a unity. The body is weaker, therefore must be submitted to the spirit. Man behaves well if the spirit guides the matter towards good things, behaves badly if the spirit used the matter in an improper way. The bad nevertheless is not inherent in the matter. God 'saw all the things that he had created and they all were very good.' Evil was not to take the apple from the tree of knowledge, but wicked was the will of our progenitors."
"If the subject wouldn’t burden the spirit, man would be a free man. He conquers freedom only when he frees himself of the subject."
"Men is not spirit and he always is in need of the matter. To free oneself from it means simply run away from life."
"Then the soul goes back to the good God, it unites itself with him. There is only one God, always good and merciful. However Jesus didn’t redeem us with the sublimity of the thought, but with his human blood. He has taught us that it is not dirty what we eat, but what we say and listen to. Satan is our enemy. He, however, doesn’t hide in the bread, in the whirlwind, in the animal. It is pure spirit and desire to persuade man that he too is only spirit. He induces him to despise the matter, he explains that sin passes through the matter."
"If Satan would have been only a fallen angel he wouldn’t be so powerful."
"He is not powerful. He is rebel towards his Creator, and that all the same he must obey. Even if he doesn`t want to, he has to perform the work of the Lord. All his strength consists on the fact that we agree to listen to it. All his power is in the fact that he is able to persuade man to aspire to rise above the common things."
"You are a man that possesses a big doctrine. You must admit that only when you won the body you have conquered the maximum truth of existence."
"The body remind a donkey, who is himself a creature of God, but it must be guided. The fire is a great gift of God, and we bless it when it heats us in the cold night, but we have to be careful that doesn’t burn our houses. The matter is from God, the spirit must however subdue it... "
They kept quiet for a little while. They were like two adversaries that after the first exchange of words and ideas would have stopped because of tiredness. From the bottom of the room one could here the gasping of the Friars. Certainly they were not asleep. They were listening to the conversation.
"Who are you?" asked suddenly the man. He shrugged his shoulders.
“A Friar minor. The least..."
The man dressed in black shook his head.
"No, no... You are so very similar to that Francis that burned the church."
Anthony laughed.
"You are wrong. Friar Francis doesn’t burn the church. He supports it. The Holy Father has seen him in his dream, while he was supporting with his arms the dangerous walls."
"Yet, in order to make a great restoration, one must burn the heaped refusal. The fire by burning purifies. Your Francis is accomplishing an enormous work. Many judge him as mad and stupid..."
"He is neither of them!"
"I agree. That man has confused the ideas of many philosophers. But you too... You must anyway admit that the matter is wicked, seeing that it can be corrupted."
"The plant and the body will rot, but their decomposition renders possible a life yet more blooming. Jesus said: if the seed will not die in the earth, it will not grow a new spike."
"Are you saying that according to you, not even death proves that the matter is wicked?"
"Sister death, she too obeys to the will of God. Death touches man and represents the sentence of the supreme mercy. It frees man from tribulations, it saves man from the evil that he has done..."
"And the wars? and the oppressions and the persecutions? You certainly know what has happened recently in Provenza, of which cruelty soils Montfort. The pyre that he has lit are still burning."
"Is is necessary to accuse God from every evil that man does? Jesus has never said to kill. He said to love."
"And the Church?" he suddenly stood up from the beam on which he was sitting. He raised his arms, and his ample sleeves rippled as two black wings.
"And the Church, doesn’t it invite to kill? Doesn’t the Church bless those who go to kill?"
"Man, even to the Church infer terrible wounds, even in the Church, man remains a man."
The man dressed in black bowed over Anthony that continued to stay sitting down.
"Then you admit that it was an injustice?"
"No" he denied.
"It is not an injustice. It is mercy. The union in the suffering allows some to offer their suffering for the others... God is not in a hurry to condemn. He wants a continuous re-equilibrium through love... Even in this God respects to the maximum our dignity, making us responsible the one with the others."
"You want to be responsible for those fat Bishops and Prelates who pronounce such beautiful words, and despise the poor? They despise you too."
"Jesus too, during his live knew contempt. To be treated as he was treated is a great honour. Do not judge the Priests of the Church by what some do. Francis recommends to respect them. Shouldn’t we respect those who through the word bring God on earth? If they sin, it is not up to us to judge them. God will judge them. Because just as the services of the Holiest Sacrament is bigger than the other services, so the sin of judging the Priests overcomes the sin of judging common people…"
They kept silent. The 'perfect' entwined himself in his habit and once again he sat. No starring light penetrated the pierced roof any longer. Night was ending, dawn was appearing.
The man dressed in black suddenly asked:
"Are you so sure that in the wafer that you raise up there is Jesus Christ?"
Anthony lifted his head. He raised his eyes to the sky.
"I am so sure that I am ready to give my life for this." he affirmed.
"But you can't prove it!" exclaimed the 'perfetto'.
"All the same the world that surrounds us is full of proof God loves us. The mother loving the son gives him all that is good, and at the end she is ready to give herself. Wouldn`t God, who has given to us such marvelous things, wouldn’t He have given at last his body as food of salvation?"
Again they fell silent.
"I envy your faith. I don’t see, I can’t believe!"
"Because you want to believe in your intelligence. But it is Him who gives faith. Ask Him to give it to you."
"Help me..."
Keeping quiet, on tip toes, at the top of incredulity, the Friars approached the place in which under the opening of the roof, from which penetrated the first light of the day, were kneeling two people, hugging, immersed in prayer.