The Mess Tin

MILLIONS of pilgrims throng the Basilica each year to pray at the Tomb of Saint Anthony. They entrust to him their sufferings, anxieties, and hopes, and leave with a sense of peace in their hearts.

Those who cannot come to the Basilica address their prayers to him from their own homes or light a candle in front of his statue in the nearest local church. Then there are those who invoke the Saint from places associated with suffering, such as hospitals, prisons, refugee camps, or from countries plagued by wars and famine.

In his Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Anthony writes, “To raise one’s face to God means to elevate the heart to contemplate the sublime reality. Pray to Him and He will hear you.”

“I prayed to Saint Anthony, and the Lord did indeed listen to me,” Alfonso told me some time ago. Alfonso is a very old man from Oderzo, a small town about 50 kilometres from Padua. He had come to the Basilica to honour his beloved Saint, and that was where I met him.

“The events I have to relate happened a long, long time ago, during the Second World War, but the conclusion to this story came only recently”.

The story of Alfonso began in September 1943, when he was captured by the Germans as a soldier in the Italian army and taken to work in an aeroplane factory in Nuremberg, Germany. Life and conditions in the industrial prison-camp were harsh and brutal, but at least there prisoners were given something to eat because they were considered to be useful to the German war effort.

From this grim experience Alfonso learned that a soldier must never part from his mess tin, for after waiting hours in a food queue, where will you put your meagre soup without a mess tin?

Alfonso is highly devoted to Saint Anthony and prays incessantly: Saint Anthony, please get me home! That invocation becomes his constant prayer; he says it along with every breath until he gets to the stage of engraving it on the only precious thing left to him: the mess tin.

By the Spring of 1945 the Germans are at the end of their tether. The Wehrmacht (the German army) is in disarray, and Alfonso, along with a group of fellow inmates, manages to escape from the camp, and make his way home. Alfonso crosses the Alps, walking all the way from Nuremberg to Oderzo – a total 1,200 kilometers! During the trip he loses his mess tin, but despite the loss he is overjoyed by his return home: Dear Saint Anthony has granted him the aid of his powerful intercession!

Among the hundreds of thousands of disillusioned, tired and hungry German soldiers routed by the overwhelming power of the Allied armies is Jospeh, who in his flight stumbles across a mess tin with a sentence in Italian engraved upon it – it is Alfonso’s. Now that peculiar mess tin becomes a precious aid to the German soldier when it becomes his turn to experience the harsh life of a war-prisoner in Poland.

The war, however, ends for the Germans as well, and finally Joseph is allowed home. From Germany, Joseph later emigrates to Canada, but not without taking that mess tin along with him. The object has, in a strange sort of way, helped him survive his own terrible ordeal, and he has grown fond of it.

Flash-forward to our own days. A now elderly Joseph feels the desire to return the mess tin to its original owner. Next to the prayer to the Saint are also engraved the owner’s name, rank and service number. With this information Joseph delivers the mess tin to Italian authorities in Canada, which, after a long search, are able to relay it to Alfonso in Italy.

During a moving ceremony, Alfonso received the mess tin in Verona in the presence of a major general of the Italian army.

The story, however, is not quite finished yet. Thanks to a journalist, Alfonso and Joseph make contact with one another and finally meet in Oderzo. It is an encounter between two men that had been made enemies by a war, and reconciled by a mess tin and an humble prayer – Saint Anthony heard that prayer and helped them.

I do hope that the true story of Alfonso and Joseph may bring you, dear readers, some comfort and hope in this month of June when we celebrate the feast of our dear Saint. Let us always remember that God really does love us as a Father, and let us also follow the Saint’s advice: Pray to Him and He will hear you!