Who is Saint Anthony?

The search results for this name split, so it is worth ten seconds to sort them. Anthony of Padua takes most of the space. Anthony the Great of Egypt sits just behind him. Then come the parishes, the shrine in Boston, a village church in Arkansas, the monastery out in the Egyptian desert. If you came here holding an empty ring box, you want Padua.

Anthony of Padua was Portuguese, baptized Fernando, a Franciscan friar who died in 1231 and lies in a basilica in northern Italy. His feast is June 13. He is the one holding a baby and a lily in every parish statue, and he is the one the rhyme about lost things is aimed at.

Anthony the Great was Egyptian, preached to his monks in Coptic, and had never learned letters, which is how Athanasius puts it. He spent twenty years alone in a ruined fort across the Nile. His feast in the Western calendar is January 17, and the Coptic Orthodox Church keeps his memory as the founder of its monastic life. If your search was really about hermits, or about the temptations painted by Bosch and Dali, this is your man. A medieval hospital order took his name to nurse people suffering from ergotism, which they called Saint Anthony's fire, which is why so many hospitals still carry the name.

The two are tied together, and the knot is worth knowing. When Fernando left the Augustinian canons in 1220 he chose a new name, and Vatican News says he chose it in imitation of the great Desert Father who already had it. So the confusion in your search results started with the saint himself, on purpose, as a compliment.

San Antonio in Texas carries the friar's name in Spanish. Any page that melts the two men into one biography has made an error you should not copy.

No, and the arithmetic is not close. The gospels place the ministry of Jesus in Roman Judea and Galilee, ending around the year 30. Fernando was born in Lisbon in 1195, on August 15 if the traditional date holds. Eleven and a half centuries stand between them.

The world he was born into had a different shape. Lisbon had been under Muslim rule until 1147, forty-eight years before his birth, and the city he grew up in was still learning to be Christian again. He was nine when a crusading army sacked Constantinople. Francis of Assisi was alive and working while Anthony was a young man, and a letter Francis wrote him still survives. Books were copied by hand, one at a time, which is why the theft of a single book of psalms could turn into a devotion that outlived everyone involved.

So there is no gospel scene with Anthony in it. No supper table, no boat on the lake. If a page hands you one, the page is inventing it.

The closest thing to an encounter comes at the very end, when he was seen, the story goes, holding the Christ Child. That vision is why the statue in your parish shows a friar with a baby in his arms. Vatican News puts the scene at the hut in the walnut tree at Camposampiero, where he went to rest after Easter 1231. The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia reports the rival claim, that French writers place it in the Limousin at the castle of Chateauneuf-la-Foret. The 1911 critical life is blunter still: the first written mention of the vision is in a collection of miracles dated 1367, the first known painting of Anthony with the Child was made in 1459, three separate places claim the scene, and the same story is told about several other saints. Hold it the way the tradition holds it, as devotion, and not as a record of an event two people could have witnessed.

This is the part almost nobody writes, because it takes reading him. What survives is his sermons, Latin working texts he wrote for other preachers, and no transcript of anything a crowd actually heard. He preached in the language of whatever country he was standing in and wrote in Latin, the shared language of study. The last of the sermons were still unfinished when he died.

His Jesus is a body with wounds in it, and the wounds are somewhere to go. Preaching on the dove in the clefts of the rock, he said this, in the 1911 English translation by C. M. Antony, whose ellipses mark where she cut:

"Be as the dove who makes her nest in the deepest cleft of the rock. This cleft, in which the soul should hide itself, is the wound in the side of Jesus Christ. . . . There are many clefts in the rock . . . for His immaculate flesh bore many wounds, but the wound in His side leads to the Heart, and it is here He calls the soul, His spouse."

Then he asks what a dove builds a nest out of, since she gathers little bits of straw that everyone else walks over. "What are these scattered fragments which the world despises and treads underfoot? They are the virtues of our Saviour . . . humility, gentleness, poverty, patience, mortification. The world despises them as useless, but it is with these that we shall build our nest, deep in the Rock, in the Heart of Jesus."

Look at what he hands the listener. A wound to climb into, and a short list of habits to copy. He expected a thirteenth-century Paduan wool merchant to manage both before Friday.

He also turned Jesus on the lenders who had his city by the throat. Interest ran at 28 percent in Padua in his day, and a debtor who could not pay could be exiled or jailed for life. "The usurer," he says in the sermons, "is worse than Judas. That traitor, having sold the Blood of his Divine Master, brought back to the priests and princes the thirty pieces he had received, but the usurer guards and keeps his unjust gains." Elsewhere he tells the rich that the clothes they wear "are woven out of theft, larceny, usury, and illegitimate gain," and that "the garment dyed with the blood of the poor shall be the prey of eternal flames."

That preaching had a result you can date. On 15 March 1231 Padua passed a statute ending life imprisonment and banishment for a citizen who surrendered everything he owned, and the statute itself says it was passed at the friar's urging. Three months later he was dead. The better-known story, about a moneylender whose heart was found in his treasure chest, his 1911 biographer files under legend, and in her telling the man is Florentine.

Because the query is genuinely split, the Egyptian earns his own section, and his words are better documented than you would expect from a man who lived in a ruined fort.

He wrote almost nothing himself. What survives is a long address and several exchanges recorded by Athanasius of Alexandria, who knew him. Greek philosophers came into the desert to mock the cross, and he answered through an interpreter. The 1892 translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers gives his reply: "read and see that the deeds of Christ prove Him to be God come upon earth for the salvation of men." When they kept asking for proofs, he pointed at people tormented by demons, signed them with the cross, and watched them stand up whole. Then he said, "We are not the doers of these things, but it is Christ who works them by means of those who believe in Him."

The other line worth carrying around came when Constantine and his sons wrote him letters and the monks were impressed. Antony was not. "Do not be astonished if an emperor writes to us, for he is a man," he told them, "but rather wonder that God wrote the Law for men and has spoken to us through His own Son."

That is a working theology of the Incarnation from a farmer's son who sold the family land after hearing one sentence read aloud in church.

Both did the thing Jesus told the rich young man to do. Jesus said to go, sell, give, and follow. Antony of Egypt heard that sentence read aloud and sold his inheritance on the spot. Fernando of Lisbon walked out of an Augustinian house that had a library and a career waiting for him and put on a coarse habit under a new name.

Both drew crowds out of the towns and into open ground. Mark describes Jesus landing at a lonely place and finding the people already there. Anthony spent the Lent of 1231 preaching and then sitting for hours and hours in the confessional, and the year is remembered in Padua as his testament.

Both withdrew from the crowd on purpose. Luke shows Jesus leaving the healings behind for a quiet place. After Easter 1231 Anthony asked for a shelter to be fitted over a large walnut tree at Camposampiero so he could spend the daylight up there and come down only at night.

Both left their words in other people's hands. Jesus wrote nothing that survives. What we have of Anthony are Latin sermon texts, and even those were still unfinished when he died.

Both died young, on the road, outside the walls of the city they were headed for. Anthony asked to be carried to Padua, was laid in an ox-drawn wagon, and got as far as Arcella. The friars around him asked what he was looking at. He said, "I see my Lord."

Jesus is worshipped. Anthony is not. The tradition keeps separate words for the two acts so the line cannot blur: latria, the adoration owed to God alone, and dulia, the honor given to a saint. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 put that distinction in writing, separating the reverence paid to saints and their images from the adoration that belongs to God, and Catholic teaching has repeated it since. Asking Anthony for help means asking him to pray, the same thing you would ask of a friend standing next to you.

Anthony needs a mediator. Jesus is the mediator. Catholic teaching does not seat Anthony beside Jesus in that role; it puts him in the queue of people praying through Jesus, which is where every Christian stands.

Anthony was canonized. Nobody canonized Jesus. Canonization is the church recognizing what it believes God has already done in a person, and the church never claimed to confer anything on Jesus at all.

Anthony's body decayed. When his tomb was opened in 1263 the flesh had gone to dust, and the tongue was found whole; it is still shown in Padua as a relic. The Egyptian went further and made his own grave a secret, asking the two disciples who buried him to tell nobody, so that his body could never become an object of reverence. The Christian claim about Jesus runs the opposite direction. The tomb was known, it was public, and it was empty.

Protestants draw the line in a different place, and they are not being rude when they do it. Most Protestant churches decline to ask any saint for prayer, on the grounds that scripture never shows anyone doing it and that a single mediator makes the detour unnecessary. Lutheran and Anglican calendars still keep Anthony as a person worth remembering, without the request. Orthodox Christians do ask the saints to pray, and the Anthony they name first is the Egyptian, whose monastic descendants still live in the desert he settled. All three readings are held by serious people who have read the same Bible.

The searches sort into a few kinds. Somebody lost a wedding ring down a drain. Somebody lost a passport two days before a flight. Somebody lost the last photograph of a parent. And somebody lost a person, and typed the word lost because it was the only word that would go through.

For the first three, do both things. Say the rhyme if it slows your pulse: Tony, Tony, come around, something's lost and must be found. Nobody claims that couplet is liturgy, and Catholic writers are the first to call it folk. Then do the unglamorous work. Retrace the last hour out loud, and check the pockets of whatever you were wearing. Call the place you left second to last, because the last place is the one you have already searched four times.

The older formal prayer is more interesting than the rhyme, because of what it asks for second. It opens by calling Anthony a perfect imitator of Jesus and asks for the object back, then asks for peace of mind, and says the loss of that peace has cost more than the loss of the thing. Whoever wrote it understood that the panic outgrows the object within about ninety seconds.

For the fourth kind of search, the object was never the point. If what went missing is a marriage, a son who stopped calling, a year you cannot account for, no saint is going to hand it back across a counter. What the tradition offers there is company, and a claim that the searching itself is something God is doing in the story.

One boundary worth naming. This site is software. It has no priesthood and no standing to tell you whether your prayer worked. For anything heavy, talk to a person with a name and a phone number.

Born Fernando in Lisbon in 1195 to a family with money and standing. Entered the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine at fifteen, moved to the monastery of Holy Cross in Coimbra two years later, and was ordained at twenty-four. In 1220 the bodies of five Franciscans killed in Morocco were carried into his church, and he changed orders and his name within months. He sailed for Morocco hoping to be martyred there, fell ill, and a damaged ship put him ashore in Sicily instead.

In September 1222, at an ordination at Forli, the Dominican guests were invited to preach and each begged off unprepared. The superior turned to the young Franciscan who had been washing dishes at the hermitage. The room found out what he was. The following year Francis of Assisi wrote him a letter authorizing him to teach theology to the friars, with the condition that study must not put out the spirit of prayer.

He preached across northern Italy and southern France, argued with Cathar teachers, was made superior of the northern Italian friaries at thirty-two, and pushed Padua into a debtor relief statute on 15 March 1231. He died that June at Arcella. He was thirty-five if the traditional birthday of 15 August 1195 is right, and thirty-six by the count the older encyclopedias print.

Gregory IX, who had heard the man preach and called him the Ark of the Testament, canonized him on 30 May 1232, inside a year of the death. Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1946. In Padua they mostly do not use his name. They call him il Santo, the Saint.