St Antoninus is not one of the best known Dominican saints, and in a certain sense, he’d probably have wanted it that way. In an age when the Church had huge power and influence in Italy, as well as great wealth, it was all too tempting for many clerics and friars to seek to use these for their personal advantage, living lives of luxury and seeking high ecclesiastical office in order to get involved in the often bloody politics of the Italian city-states. Antoninus, on the other hand, tried everything to avoid his election as Archbishop of Florence in 1446, knowing the secular status it would involve and preferring the life of an ordinary friar: eventually he had to be forced by the Pope on pain of excommunication to accept the appointment!
Indeed, to go a little further back in time, it was in response to the political and ecclesiastical situation in Italy that that rather more famous Dominican saint, Catherine of Siena, had left her anchorite’s cell to pursue peace between warring cities and reform and renewal in the Church, renewal that was needed even in the Dominican Order of which she was a tertiary. Though Antoninus was only a boy when she died, the ideals of St Catherine lived on in the Order, and it was to the new Dominican community at Fiesole, founded by one of Catherine’s disciples, that Antoninus sought admission at the young age of 16. Here he learned the value of a life devoted to strict observance of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience not only as a spiritual discipline but as the basis of his, and his community’s, effectiveness as preachers.
When made a bishop, he continued as far as possible to live in the manner of a simple friar, and his popularity among the citizens of Florence on account of his humility and great generosity show just how attractive that simple and genuine character was.
Today, too, we need to look for ways to get people to listen to the Christian message we have to preach, to persuade them we have something to say worth listening to: the life of St Antoninus can be an inspiration and a model, with his radical following of Christ flowing over into a profound and genuine care for others – a care which was attractive in itself as well as motivating him in his work of preaching.
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