Saint Anthony of Padua

Born to silks in a noble family, he freely chose the coarse habit of a mendicant friar. He wanted to shed his blood as a martyr in faraway lands, but God kept him in the crowded streets of Europe to heal wounded souls.

In Coimbra he spent nearly ten years studying Scripture and the theology of the Church Fathers. With his extraordinary memory and deep love for God’s word, Fernando built up a vast knowledge of the Bible, the solid ground for all his later preaching.

He asked permission to move from the Augustinian Canons to the newly founded Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans. When he put on the new order’s coarse brown habit tied with a rope, he took the name Anthony, after the hermit Saint Anthony the Great, as a sign that he was leaving his old self behind for good.

On the way home, a violent storm drove his ship to Sicily, in southern Italy. From there his road took a completely different turn. He walked north into central Italy and attended the General Chapter of the Franciscans in Assisi in 1221, where he saw the founder, Saint Francis of Assisi, with his own eyes for the first time.

One day, at an ordination in Forlì attended by both Dominicans and Franciscans, the priest appointed to preach was unexpectedly absent. The superior asked the friars present to stand up and say a few words, but each one shyly declined because he had not prepared. Finally the superior told Brother Anthony to say whatever the Spirit gave him.

Yet what made ordinary people love him most was his tireless defense of the weak. In the Middle Ages, cruel moneylending was everywhere, and it drove many poor farming and craftsman families into prison and stripped them of their homes and fields. Anthony did not hesitate to stand in the pulpit and openly condemn the bottomless greed of the rich who crushed the poor.

Tradition also tells lovely stories: how he preached to the fish in the sea, who listened when the people of Rimini would not, or how a mule left hungry for three days knelt before the Eucharist instead of rushing to a bundle of fresh hay, witnessing to the Lord’s real presence before the eyes of a heretic. Such stories show the wonderful harmony between a holy man and God’s creatures.

As his health quickly failed, he withdrew to rest at a small friary at Camposampiero. There he asked for a little cell to be built for him in a large walnut tree in the woods, so that he could be alone with God day and night. It was here, tradition says, that the local lord saw the Child Jesus appear in radiant light, put His arms around Anthony’s neck and speak tenderly with him.

At the beginning of June 1231, sensing he would soon go to God, Anthony asked his brothers to carry him in an ox cart back to Padua. But when they reached the convent of Arcella on the outskirts of the city, his strength was spent.

Less than a year after his death, on May 30, 1232, Pope Gregory IX canonized Anthony, one of the fastest canonizations in the history of the Church. In 1263, when the great basilica in his honor in Padua was ready to receive his remains, Saint Bonaventure, then Minister General of the Franciscans, opened the coffin himself to move the relics. The body had returned to dust and only some bones remained, but the tongue was still intact and soft, as in life. Deeply moved, Saint Bonaventure lifted it up and exclaimed:

“This is truly a miracle! God wants us to know that Anthony was truly a messenger of God’s love.”

His tongue and jawbone are still kept in finely worked golden reliquaries in the basilica in Padua, and millions of pilgrims come each year to see the tongue that preached so many fiery sermons.

In 1946, Pope Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church with the title “Evangelical Doctor”, Doctor Evangelicus.

In Vietnamese parishes and Catholic homes, Saint Anthony of Padua is a much-loved, familiar saint, closely tied to “Saint Anthony’s Bread,” the custom of collecting bread and rice for the poor. People turn to him to find lost things, and more importantly to rekindle a faith grown cold, to find peace at home and to find their way back to an honest life.