St. Anthony of Padua

Who St. Anthony actually was

He was not Italian, and he was not named Anthony. Born in Lisbon in 1195 and baptized Fernando, he entered the Canons Regular of St. Augustine as a young man and received a formidable education in Scripture. In 1220, the relics of the first Franciscan martyrs — five friars killed in Morocco — were brought to Coimbra, where Fernando was living. The sight undid him. He left the security of the canons for the young, ragged Franciscan order, took the name Anthony, and sailed for Morocco hoping to preach and, if it came to it, to die there. Illness forced him back almost immediately, and a storm blew his ship to Sicily instead. It is one of the quiet jokes of his story: the patron saint of finding things arrived in Italy because he was lost.

The friars, unaware of his learning, assigned him to wash dishes at a hermitage. Then, at an ordination in Forlì around 1222, no one had prepared a sermon, and Anthony was told to say whatever the Holy Spirit gave him. What came out stunned the room. Within a few years he was the most sought-after preacher in Europe — crowds in the tens of thousands, marketplaces emptying when he came to town, his confessional lines running until dark. His preaching against heresy in northern Italy and southern France was so effective that later generations called him the “Hammer of Heretics” — though his method was less hammer than clarity: he won arguments by making the Gospel more beautiful than the alternative. St. Francis himself, wary of learning that might smother devotion, made an exception for Anthony and approved him to teach theology to the friars.

He preached himself to exhaustion and died near Padua on June 13, 1231, at thirty-six. The demand for his canonization was so overwhelming that Pope Gregory IX declared him a saint on May 30, 1232 — less than a year after his death, among the fastest canonizations in the Church’s history. In 1946, Pope Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church with the title Doctor Evangelicus, the “Evangelical Doctor” — the teacher whose subject was the Gospel itself.

Why he became the patron of lost things

The tradition traces to a story told of Anthony’s own life. He owned a psalter — a book of psalms, copied by hand and, before printing, genuinely precious — filled with his own notes for teaching. A novice leaving the order took it with him. Anthony prayed for its return, and the novice, shaken by a troubling vision on the road, came back — returning both the book and, eventually, himself to the community.

That story comes down to us through tradition rather than contemporary records, and the Church presents it as such. But notice what the tradition actually claims: the recovered object mattered less than the recovered man. From the beginning, devotion to Anthony has run on that double track. People ask him for the keys and the wallet, yes — and also for the estranged son, the lapsed friend, the missing peace. Both petitions are at home with him.

“Tony, Tony, turn around” — the real prayer beneath the rhyme

Generations of Catholic children learned it before they learned the Creed: “Tony, Tony, turn around. Something’s lost and must be found.” It is easy to wince at, and easy to defend. The rhyme is not the prayer; it is the doorway to one. Beneath the nursery couplet sits an old and serious petition: the thirteenth-century responsory Si quaeris miracula (“If you seek miracles”), attributed to Julian of Speyer, which has for centuries named among Anthony’s specialties the recovery of res perditas — lost things.

There is nothing unserious about asking a saint for small help. Catholics believe the saints are living members of Christ’s family who pray for us (CCC 956) — and a family member you can only approach about catastrophes is not much of a family member. The rhyme survives because the relationship it points to is real: familiar, unembarrassed, and answered often enough that people keep teaching it to their children.

If you want the grown-up version, it exists — the Unfailing Prayer below has been prayed for generations. But Anthony, one suspects, has never once declined a petition on grounds of meter. And for those who want a longer walk with him, there is the traditional Thirteen Tuesdays devotion — thirteen consecutive Tuesdays of prayer in his honor: Tuesday for the day he was buried in 1231, when the miracles at his tomb began, and thirteen for the June 13 of his death.

St. Anthony’s Bread: the charity tradition

The oldest and best answer to “What do I give St. Anthony when he comes through?” is: nothing to him — something to the poor. St. Anthony’s Bread is the centuries-old tradition of giving alms, especially food or money for the hungry, in thanksgiving for a favor received through his intercession. The custom was renewed famously in the 1890s, when a shopkeeper in Toulon, France, promised bread for the poor if Anthony’s help came — and the practice spread worldwide from there; today many parishes and Franciscan shrines keep a St. Anthony’s Bread fund for feeding the hungry.

It is a fitting economy for this particular saint. Anthony left a comfortable, learned order for one vowed to poverty, and his sermons return constantly to the obligations of the rich toward the poor. Devotion to him has always been meant to circulate — favor received, bread given, the loop closed on someone else’s empty table.

In Their Words

Prayers