In animals there is the wisdom of the Creator

fr. Luciano Bertazzo

Dear friends, I am closing with this issue the subject of Saint Anthony’s vision of the animal world, which I started three years ago and during which I concretely presented figures of animals to which he refers in his Sermons. I found that there are about 130, a real zoo. I couldn’t mention them all, it would have been a boring “bestiary” after all. However, I would like to recall, as if to summarize the path taken, some characteristics of the way Anthony uses their presence, not feeling tied to any of them in particular, just as we often see in the recurring iconography of saints, for example in the case of St. Francis connected to the wolf or birds, St. Anthony the Abbot to the pig, or St. Hubert to the deer, just as St. Romedio is always depicted with the bear, as if to say that it is the animal itself that gives identity to the saint depicted. Anthony talks a lot about animals, but there is no particular identifying link with them; rather, they serve in so far as they can be used in preaching for a reference to moral meaning in the way it is interpreted…