Anthony Mary Claret

Anthony Mary Claret, born Antonio María Claret y Clará, was a Spanish Catholic archbishop, missionary preacher, and founder of the Claretian congregation. He was born on 23 December 1807 in Sallent, Catalonia, then in the Kingdom of Spain, the son of the weaver Juan Claret and Josefa Clará. Raised in a devout family of modest means, he learned the weaver’s craft and as a young man worked in the textile industry in Barcelona, where he also continued his studies and showed skill as a designer of fabrics. A growing sense of religious vocation drew him away from a commercial career. After considering the Carthusians, he entered the diocesan seminary of Vic in 1829 and was ordained a priest on 13 June 1835. An attempt to join the Society of Jesus in Rome was cut short by illness. He then returned to Catalonia and devoted himself to itinerant popular missions, preaching in Catalan in towns and countryside.

In July 1849 at Vic he founded, with five companions, the Congregation of Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, later known as the Claretians, dedicated to missionary preaching, catechesis, and the apostolate of the printed word. Claret was a prolific writer, producing more than a hundred works including catechisms, ascetical treatises, and practical manuals, and he established a Catholic publishing house to circulate inexpensive religious literature. He also supported the foundation of a congregation of women religious, the Religious of Mary Immaculate Claretian Missionary Sisters, with María Antonia París. His preaching and writing were marked by strong Marian devotion, especially to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and by insistence on the Eucharist, frequent communion, and moral reform. In 1848–1849 he had already conducted an extensive preaching mission in the Canary Islands.

Appointed Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba by Pope Pius IX in 1850, he arrived on the island in 1851 and remained until 1857. He carried out a thorough pastoral visitation of a vast and neglected diocese, sought to reform clerical discipline, founded schools and charitable works, and established a savings bank (Monte de Piedad) to assist the poor. He worked for the evangelization of enslaved people and rural laborers in a slaveholding society, which brought both support and fierce hostility. In 1856 he survived an assassination attempt at Holguín, in which he was wounded in the face. Recalled to Spain in 1857, he was named confessor to Queen Isabella II and later given charge of the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, which he tried to restore as a center of ecclesiastical education and missionary formation.

After the revolution of 1868 he accompanied the deposed queen into exile in France. He took part in the First Vatican Council in 1869–1870 and spoke in favor of the definition of papal infallibility. Exhausted by travel, controversy, and declining health, he took refuge at the Cistercian Abbey of Fontfroide near Narbonne, where he died on 24 October 1870. His remains were later transferred to Vic in Catalonia. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 25 February 1934 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on 7 May 1950. The Catholic Church commemorates him on 24 October. He is remembered as a missionary bishop, a religious founder, and a pioneer of the Catholic press in the nineteenth-century Spanish-speaking world.