St. Anthony of Padua

St. Anthony of Padua was a Portuguese friar, preacher and theologian who was born in Lisbon around 1195 and died near Padua on 13 June 1231, aged about thirty-six. He entered the Augustinian canons, studied for years at Coimbra, then joined the new Franciscan order in 1220 and became its first teacher of theology, appointed by St. Francis himself. He was canonised less than a year after his death and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1946.

Catholics invoke him for lost things, a patronage that comes from a story about a stolen book of psalms. His feast is 13 June, and his tomb in the Basilica of St. Anthony at Padua is one of the most visited shrines in Europe. His preaching, not his miracles, is what his own century valued him for.

1. Patron of Lost Things and Lost Souls

We invoke him to find lost items because a novice once stole his prayer book, and Anthony prayed for its return. The thief returned it and returned to the order himself! So he's really the patron of lost *souls*, but he'll help with your car keys too.

The book in question was a psalter, and in the 1220s that was a serious loss. Books were copied by hand, a psalter carried Anthony's own notes for teaching the friars, and replacing it was not a matter of buying another. The account says the novice who took it left the community, was moved to bring it back, and was received again.

The Gospel behind the patronage is better than the anecdote. Luke 15 puts three parables of lost things side by side: the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one, the woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house until she finds a single coin, and the father who runs to meet a son he had given up for lost. The woman searching her floor for a coin is the picture people are unknowingly imitating when they ask Anthony for help with keys, and the point of the chapter is what God does about a person who has gone missing.

The traditional short prayer is "St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around, something is lost and cannot be found." It costs nothing and it is not magic. What it does is stop the panic long enough to look properly, and it turns a small frustration into a moment of asking God for something.

2. Sermon to the Fish

When heretics in Rimini refused to listen to him, Anthony went to the river and preached to the fish. Thousands of fish poked their heads out of the water to listen. The fish were a better audience than the people (no hecklers), but the people were so shamed by this miracle that they converted.

The story belongs to the Franciscan collections of miracles assembled after Anthony's death rather than to any account written by someone who was there, and it is best read as what it is: a preaching story that circulated because it made a point about the town of Rimini. Franciscan literature is full of episodes in which animals behave better than people, and the sermon to the birds attributed to St. Francis of Assisi is the model.

Rimini itself is historical. Northern Italy in the 1220s contained substantial communities of Cathars, who held that the material world was the work of an evil power and rejected the Church's sacraments, and Anthony was sent to preach in exactly those places. A preacher whose entire argument was that God made matter and entered it in the flesh, standing on a riverbank addressing fish, is a joke with theology in it. That is probably why the story was told.

3. The Miracle of the Mule

A skeptic challenged Anthony to prove the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. He starved his mule for three days, then placed a basket of oats on one side and the Eucharist on the other. The starving mule ignored the food and bowed down before the Eucharist.

This story also comes from the later collections, and the sources place it variously at Rimini, Toulouse and Bourges, which is a reliable sign that a good story has travelled and picked up a location wherever it was told. No account written in Anthony's lifetime records it.

The doctrine it dramatises is the Church's, and it does not stand or fall with the mule. Catholic teaching holds that by the consecration the whole substance of the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ, a change the Church calls transubstantiation, and that Christ is present whole and entire under each species (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1376 to 1377). The argument for it is made from Scripture and from the Church's constant practice, and our page on the Eucharist and the Real Presence sets it out.

It is worth adding what these legends indicate about Anthony's reputation. Nobody invents animal stories about a forgotten friar. The stories accumulated because within a generation he had become the most popular preacher in Italy and people wanted more of him than the record supplied.

4. Who Anthony Was: Lisbon, Coimbra, Assisi

He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhoes in Lisbon around 1195, into a family of some standing, and was educated at the cathedral school. In his teens he entered the Augustinian canons regular at Sao Vicente de Fora just outside the city, and then asked to be transferred to the abbey of Santa Cruz at Coimbra, which was the leading centre of learning in Portugal. He spent about eight years there studying Scripture and the Fathers, and that period is the foundation of everything he did later.

The turn came in 1220. The bodies of five Franciscan friars who had been killed in Morocco were brought back to Coimbra, and Fernando, having seen them, asked to leave the canons and join the Franciscans in order to go and preach in Morocco himself. He took the name Anthony, after St. Anthony of Egypt, from the small hermitage he joined. He sailed for Morocco, fell seriously ill almost at once, and was sent home. The ship was driven off course and he landed in Sicily.

From Sicily he made his way north and was present at the general chapter of the order at Assisi in 1221, where he saw St. Francis. Nobody knew what to do with him, and he was assigned to a hermitage at Montepaolo near Forli, where he worked in the kitchen and said nothing about his education.

He was discovered by accident. At an ordination at Forli, the expected preacher failed to appear, the superior told Anthony to say whatever the Holy Spirit gave him, and the friars in the room heard a trained theologian. He was preaching publicly within weeks.

5. The Preacher: What He Actually Did

Anthony had ten years of public life, and he spent them on the road in northern Italy and southern France.

He preached in the open air because no church could hold the crowds, and contemporaries record that shops closed and towns emptied when he was expected. His targets were specific: usury, which was ruining ordinary families; the treatment of debtors, who could be imprisoned indefinitely; and the Cathar teaching that the physical world and the body were evil. He is credited with persuading the city of Padua to change its law so that a debtor who surrendered his property could not also be jailed, which is the kind of result a preacher rarely gets.

He was made provincial minister of Romagna and was sent to preach in Languedoc, the centre of the Cathar movement. The title malleus haereticorum, hammer of heretics, was attached to him later. His actual method, so far as the sermons show, was to teach the Scriptures to people who had never heard them explained, on the assumption that the alternative teaching would lose its hold once the Catholic account was intelligible.

St. Francis wrote him a short letter permitting him to teach theology to the friars, addressed to "brother Anthony, my bishop", with the condition that the spirit of prayer and devotion should not be extinguished by the study. That letter survives and it settles a question people still ask about the early Franciscans, which is whether learning had a place among them. Francis allowed it, with a guard on it.

6. Doctor of the Church and the Sermons

Pius XII declared Anthony a Doctor of the Church in 1946 and gave him the title Doctor Evangelicus, the Evangelical Doctor, meaning a teacher whose doctrine is drawn straight from the Gospel. There are only a few dozen Doctors of the Church, and the title is given for teaching that has lasting value for the whole Church.

What survives of his writing is two collections of sermon material: the Sermons for Sundays and the Sermons on the Saints. They are working texts, written for preachers rather than transcripts of what he said in the squares, and they are dense with Scripture. His method is to take the liturgical readings of the day and draw the moral and spiritual sense out of them, in the manner of the Fathers, and the proportion of Bible to commentary is very high.

The line most often quoted from him is a description of preaching: that actions speak louder than words, so let your words teach and your actions speak. It is repeated so often in paraphrase that the original is usually lost, and it is a fair summary of his own practice, since the sermons on usury were preached in a city where he had no money.

7. The Tomb at Padua and the Relics

Anthony fell ill in 1231 and asked to be taken back to Padua. He died on the way, at Arcella, on 13 June, aged about thirty-six. Gregory IX canonised him on 30 May 1232, less than a year later, which is among the fastest canonisations on record and reflects the scale of the popular demand.

Construction of the great basilica at Padua began soon afterwards, and Italians still call it simply il Santo. In 1263 the body was moved into the new church, and the exhumation, at which St. Bonaventure was present as minister general of the order, reported that the tongue was found preserved when the rest had decayed. The relic is kept in the Chapel of the Relics in the basilica and can be seen there. The report is a matter of tradition rather than an article of faith, and Catholics are free to take it as they find it.

Padua remains a major pilgrimage site, and the practice of writing petitions and leaving them at the tomb continues on a large scale.

8. Feast Day, Devotions and St. Anthony's Bread

The feast of St. Anthony falls on 13 June and is a memorial in the Roman calendar. In Lisbon and across Portugal and Brazil it is a public festival with street celebrations, and in Padua the day fills the city.

Three devotional practices are attached to him.

• The Thirteen Tuesdays. Prayer on thirteen consecutive Tuesdays in preparation for his feast, a devotion of long standing in Italy and Portugal.
• The responsory Si quaeris miracula. A medieval Latin responsory, "If then you seek miracles", listing what is asked of him and ending with the recovery of what is lost. It is still sung at his shrine.
• St. Anthony's Bread. A custom of giving alms for the poor in thanksgiving for a favour received, which supports feeding programmes run in his name in many countries. It is the most substantial of the three, and it puts money where the saint put his preaching.

In art he is shown in a Franciscan habit holding the child Jesus, a lily, or a book, and often all three. The child comes from a late account of a vision seen through a window by his host, and it is the reason his statue is recognisable at a glance in any Catholic church in the world.

9. What a Reader Can Take From St. Anthony

Ask about the small thing. The habit of asking Anthony for help with something trivial is defensible precisely because it is trivial. A person who will ask God about car keys will ask him about a diagnosis.

Do the hidden years. Anthony spent about eight years studying at Coimbra and some months washing dishes at Montepaolo before anyone asked him to speak. The preparation was invisible and it was the whole of his usefulness.

Preach where it costs something. He attacked usury and debtors' prison in the towns whose business depended on both, and he got a law changed. Christian speech that never inconveniences the speaker is not what he modelled.

Go after the person as well as the object. The psalter came back and so did the novice, and the second is what the story is actually about. Luke 15 is the chapter to read on his feast.

10. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Anthony of Padua?

St. Anthony of Padua was a Portuguese friar and preacher, born Fernando Martins de Bulhoes in Lisbon around 1195 and died near Padua on 13 June 1231. He was an Augustinian canon who studied for about eight years at Coimbra, joined the Franciscans in 1220, and became the first teacher of theology in the order at the appointment of St. Francis. He preached across northern Italy and southern France and was canonised less than a year after his death.

Why is St. Anthony the patron saint of lost things?

The patronage comes from an account of a novice who took Anthony's psalter, a hand-copied book that carried his own teaching notes and could not simply be replaced, and who then returned both the book and himself to the community. The Gospel behind it is Luke 15, where Jesus tells three parables about lost things: a lost sheep, a coin a woman sweeps her house to find, and a son his father had given up for lost.

When is the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua?

The feast of St. Anthony of Padua falls on 13 June, the anniversary of his death in 1231, and is a memorial in the Roman calendar. It is kept as a major popular festival in Lisbon, where he was born, across Portugal and Brazil, and in Padua, where his tomb is. A devotion of thirteen consecutive Tuesdays leading up to the feast is traditional in Italy and Portugal.

Did St. Anthony really preach to the fish?

The story of Anthony preaching to the fish at Rimini comes from Franciscan collections of miracles assembled after his death rather than from any account written by a witness. It belongs to a genre in which animals behave better than people, of which the sermon to the birds attributed to St. Francis is the model. The historical background is real, since Anthony was sent to preach in northern Italian towns with substantial Cathar communities.

What is the prayer to St. Anthony for lost things?

The traditional short prayer is "St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around, something is lost and cannot be found." Praying it is asking a saint to pray to God for you, in the same way you would ask a friend to pray, and it carries no automatic power over God. Longer prayers to St. Anthony exist, including the medieval responsory beginning "If then you seek miracles", which is still sung at his shrine in Padua.

Why is St. Anthony a Doctor of the Church?

Pope Pius XII declared St. Anthony a Doctor of the Church in 1946 with the title Evangelical Doctor, meaning a teacher whose doctrine is drawn directly from the Gospel. The title rests on his surviving Sermons for Sundays and Sermons on the Saints, working texts written for preachers, which are unusually dense with Scripture and follow the method of the Fathers in drawing the spiritual sense out of the readings of the day.

Is the tongue of St. Anthony really incorrupt?

When Anthony's body was moved into the new basilica at Padua in 1263, at an exhumation attended by St. Bonaventure as minister general of the Franciscans, the tongue was reported to have been found preserved while the rest had decayed. The relic is kept in the Chapel of the Relics in the basilica and can be seen there today. The report is a matter of tradition rather than an article of faith, and no Catholic is required to believe it.