St. Anthony Mary Claret

Anthony Mary Claret was born in Sallent, in eastern Spain, on Dec. 23, 1807. His father was a wool manufacturer, and Anthony himself worked as a weaver as a teen. When he was 18, he moved to Barcelona to specialize as a Jacquard loom programmer. In his spare time he studied Latin, French, and engraving.

Feeling called to the religious life, and fearing that a life in textile manufacturing would burn him out, he enter seminary in 1829 and was ordained in 1835. He was interested in missionary work, but after entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had to soon leave to poor health. He served as a priest in Spain in areas troubled by civil war and French invasion. In Catalonia he became fluent in Catalan and was known for eloquent preaching and spending long hours in the confessional. He wrote several books in Catalan and contributed to the revival of the language.

In 1848, Father Claret’s life was threatened, and he was sent to the Canary Islands for 15 months. There he gave well-received retreats and preached in the town plaza. When he returned to Spain, he founded the Congregation of the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, called the Claretians. He also founded a religious publishing house and library in Barcelona called the Libreria Religiosa, now the Libreria Claret.

In 1849, just after he began work on the Claretians and the library, he was appointed Archbishop of Santiago, Cuba. He immediately set to work, reorganizing the seminary, validating thousands of marriages, erecting several schools and a hospital, and establishing the Claretian Sisters, the first women’s religious order in Cuba. He visited missions, jails, and hospitals. He supported vocational schools and credit unions for poor families. He wrote books on agricultural methods and rural spirituality. He defended the poor and the oppressed and spoke out against racism. His work of reform and support of the oppressed earned him backlash—he faced 14 assassination attempts. One assassination did wound him, but Archbishop Claret worked to have the man’s sentence reduced from death penalty to a prison term.

As in Catalonia, he was known as an eloquent preacher. Witnesses even claimed that he would glow or levitate when he preached or celebrated Mass. His personal writings later revealed that he experienced several private revelations, including visions of Jesus and Mary and a Eucharistic miracle.

In 1857, Archbishop Claret was recalled to Spain by Queen Isabella II, who made him her confessor. He gave up the Cuban see and devoted his time to helping the poor and promoting education. He served as rector at a monastic school in Lorenzo, where he established a scientific laboratory, a museum of natural history, a library, and a school of music and languages.

On Sept. 3, 1859, Archbishop Claret said he had heard Jesus tell him that there were three great evils that were descending upon mankind: 1. a series of enormous, horrifying wars; 2. the four powerful demons of pleasure, love of money, false reasoning, and a will separated from God; 3. communism, a movement still in its infancy (The Communist Manifesto had only been published a decade earlier.).

In 1868, a revolution dethroned the queen. As her confessor, Archbishop Claret was also in danger, so he accompanied the royal family in exile to Paris. He then moved on to Rome in 1869 to prepare for the Vatican Council, where he was a strong defender for the doctrine of papal infallibility. However, poor health led to him withdrawing from participating in the council and retiring to a Cistercian abbey in Narbonne, France, where he died Oct. 24, 1870.

What I find fascinating about St. Anthony Mary Claret’s life is how much is was influenced by his time, from the boom of the industrial revolution textile industry to 19th century political turmoil and social issues to mission work to the rise in museum and library foundations to the foresight of communism’s influence. He was very much a man of the 19th century, yet he was also above the worse of the time, allowing for mystical experiences when secularism was pulling people away from faith, speaking out against racism and inequality when race and class division was rampant.

When his relics were transferred to Vic in 1897, his heart was found to be incorrupt. St. Anthony Mary Claret is the patron of weavers, textile merchants, and the Catholic press. He is also known as the spiritual father of Cuba. His feast day is Oct. 24.