The reading
How it began
The medieval life of St. Anthony places this at Rimini, where he was preaching against Cathars and others who denied the Sacrament. Bonvillo, or a man the lives leave half-named, offered a test: his mule had been starved. If it ignored a basket of oats and knelt to the Host, he would accept the faith. Anthony held the Blessed Sacrament. The mule knelt.
The day itself
It is not a bleeding Host. No cloth is kept from the hour. The church of St. Anthony in Rimini and the Franciscan memory keep the scene. It belongs in this list because the exhibition of Eucharistic signs has always included it: a public act in front of a crowd, about what the Host is, witnessed by an animal that wanted to eat.
Reading
How to read Rimini
The Church does not ask mules to teach doctrine. She asks whether a man who set the terms of his own conversion kept them. The story says he did. The doctrine does not rest on the mule. It rests on the Last Supper, which Anthony was defending.
Pray this
Prayers that sit with the story
Church status
How this sign has been received
Long veneration
Received in the medieval lives of St. Anthony and in the cult at Rimini. Not a laboratory case.
Sources
- Liber miraculorum and the Franciscan lives of St. Anthony
- Rimini, church memory of the sermon
For the classroom
Rimini (1227, Rimini). Grade in this encyclopedia: Long veneration. A heretic said he would believe if his mule knelt before the Host rather than eat. The animal left the oats and knelt. St. Anthony of Padua was holding the monstrance.
