Pascal summed it up long ago: “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, Falsehood beyond.” What is true in the Piazza of St. Peter grows false as you pass the Swiss Guards. Catholic truth, like the Vatican, is extra-territorial. Why should it concern itself with what is believed outside? Even the Averroist philosophers taught that their results were true only in philosophy, and that in the realm of Catholicism what the Church taught was true. And though “impugning the known truth” be one of the sins against the Holy Ghost, the known truth and the Church truth show scant promise of coinciding. And the triumph of St. Thomas continues, as saint no less than as teacher. “Divus Thomas Aquinas” I found him styled in Perugia. His _Festa_ is on March 7, as I read in a placard in the Church of S. Domenico in Ferrara.
“Festa dell’ Angelico Dottore S. T. d’Aquinas San Patrono delle Scuole Cattoliche.”
On the day of the Festa there is plenary indulgence for all the faithful. There was another indulgence “per gli ascritti alla Milizia Angelica.” But whether the Angelic Militia are the pupils of the Angelic Doctor I am not learned enough to say.
His even earlier saintship, St. Antony, not only continues to dominate Padua from his vast monumental Church, and enjoy his three June days of Festa in his nominal city, but his tutelary grace extends far beyond. In the Church of San Spirito in the Via Ariosto of Ferrara, the famous preacher to the fishes was—after the earthquake of 1908—the target of three days of prayer. The house Ariosto built himself in the fifteenth century stands in the same street, but Ariosto’s world of mediæval chivalry is shattered into atoms while St. Antony still saves Ferrara from earthquake.
Yes—allowing Messina and Reggio to be annihilated—the Saint in 1908 said to the seismic forces, “So far and no farther,” and ’tis not for me, whose umbrella he recovered on the very day I mocked at his pretensions, to resent his preferences. Three days of thanksgiving (mass in the morning at his altar and prayers and Benediction in the afternoon), “per lo scampato flagello del Terremoto,” rewarded his partiality for Ferrara. The town keeps doubtless a morbid memory of earthquakes, for from an old German book printed at Augsburg by Michael Manger, I learn that the terrible _Terremoto_ of 1570, “in Welschland am Po,” started in Ferrara on a 16th in the night and lasted till the 21st, during which time two hundred people perished, and many houses with a dozen churches, monasteries and nunneries were destroyed in Ferrara alone. Why St. Antony nodded on that occasion is not explained. Nor why he should have limited his protection to the Jews, not a man of whom was injured. Perhaps he had not yet recognised the claim of Ferrarese Christianity upon him. There is a wistful note in the prayer placarded in the Ferrarese church of San Francesco. “O great saint, commonly called the saint of Padua, but worthy to be called the saint of the world. . . . You who so often pressed in your arms the celestial Bambino!”