Anthony of Padua

• 1. Introduction

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  Anthony of Padua, born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon, died on the 13th of June 1231 at the age of 35. He was a Portuguese priest of the Order of Friars Minor, and he left behind a book of sermons, a basilica and a reputation that spread faster than almost any in the medieval church. Within a few centuries his name was attached to a Texas city, a Californian mission, a Boston street festival and a church in the Indian village of Uvari. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a young woman even claimed that his spirit possessed her. How did a wealthy boy from Lisbon end up as a friar in the hills of Romagna? What happened in a pulpit that nobody planned for? Why do people around the world ask this saint, of all saints, to help them find what they have lost? And what was so unusual about the way the church reacted to his death?

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• 2. Fernando Becomes Anthony

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  Fernando was born in Lisbon on the 15th of August 1195 into a wealthy and noble family. Later writers from the 15th century name his parents as Vicente Martins and Teresa Pais Taveira. The historian Niccolò Dal-Gal considers that account less than certain. His family arranged for him to study at the local cathedral school.

  At the age of 15, he was received into the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross at the Abbey of Saint Vincent, on the outskirts of Lisbon. Frequent visits from family and friends distracted him. In 1212 he asked to be moved to the motherhouse of the congregation, the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Coimbra, which was then the capital of Portugal. There he studied theology and Latin.

  After his ordination as a priest, he was named guestmaster at the age of 19. That made him responsible for the abbey's hospitality. While he held the post, some Friars Minor settled at a small hermitage outside Coimbra, dedicated to Saint Anthony the Great. Fernando was drawn to their plain, gospel-centred way of life. Their order had been founded only 11 years earlier.

  Then came news from Morocco. Five Franciscans had been beheaded there, the first members of their order ever to be killed. King Afonso II of Portugal paid to have their bodies ransomed and returned. They were buried as martyrs in the Monastery of the Holy Cross, the very house where Fernando lived. Inspired by them, he won permission from church authorities to leave the Canons Regular and join the Franciscans.

  He entered the small hermitage in Olivais and took the name Anthony, borrowed from the chapel there. Almost at once he set out for Morocco to live out his new calling. He fell seriously ill, however, and sailed for Portugal hoping to recover. The ship was pushed off course and came ashore in Sicily.

  From Sicily he made his way to Tuscany, where a convent of the order received him. His sickly appearance caused him difficulty there. Because of his poor health, he was finally sent to the rural hermitage of Montepaolo di Dovadola, near Forlì in Romagna. One of the friars had made a cell for him in a nearby cave, and he spent his days there in private prayer and study. In 1222, that quiet routine was interrupted by an ordination at Forlì.

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• 3. An Unplanned Sermon

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  The ordination at Forlì in 1222 drew a number of visiting Dominican friars, and a misunderstanding soon arose over who would preach. The Franciscans assumed a Dominican would take the pulpit, since that order was renowned for preaching. The Dominicans, for their part, had come unprepared because they expected a Franciscan to give the homily.

  The head of the hermitage did not believe any of his humble friars could rise to the occasion. He turned to Anthony, whom he suspected was the best qualified. He asked him to say whatever the Holy Spirit might inspire. Anthony objected but was overruled. His impromptu sermon made a deep impression. The crowd was moved by his rich voice and arresting manner, and also by his knowledge of scripture and the eloquence of his message.

  Brother Gratian, the local minister provincial, then sent him to the Franciscan province of Romagna, based in Bologna. There Anthony came to the attention of Francis of Assisi, the founder of the order. Francis distrusted theological study. He feared it might lead his brothers away from real poverty and service. In Anthony he found a kindred spirit who shared that vision and could still teach young men preparing for ordination. In 1224 Francis placed the studies of his friars in Anthony's care.

  Anthony sometimes took teaching posts at universities, including Montpellier and Toulouse in southern France. Preaching remained his supreme gift. The historian Sophronius Clasen wrote that Anthony preached "the grandeur of Christianity". His method relied on allegory and symbolic explanation of scripture.

  In 1226 he attended the general chapter of his order at Arles in France and preached across Provence. He then returned to Italy as provincial superior of the north, and he chose the city of Padua as his base. Two years later, in 1228, the general chapter sent him as its envoy to Pope Gregory IX.

  At the papal court, his preaching was praised as a "jewel case of the Bible". He was commissioned to gather his sermons into a collection, Sermons for Feast Days, or Sermones in Festivitates. Gregory IX called him the "Ark of the Testament". Some of the most famous stories about that preaching come from a seaside town, Rimini.

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• 4. Miracles in Rimini

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  At Rimini, according to tradition, local heretics treated Anthony with contempt when he came to preach. He walked to the shoreline and began speaking at the water's edge. A great crowd of fish was said to gather before him. Townspeople and heretics alike hurried to see the marvel, and they were moved to listen.

  Another tale from Rimini involves a mule. A heretic challenged Anthony to prove that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, hoping to mock him. The man brought out a half-starved mule and showed it fresh fodder. Anthony held up the monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament. The mule ignored the food and bowed before it. The Tempietto of Sant'Antonio marks the spot. Other versions of the story set it in Toulouse or Bourges.

  A third account places Anthony at a dinner with heretics somewhere in Italy. He realized the food in front of him was poisoned and confronted his hosts. They admitted the plot but dared him to eat anyway, if he believed the words of Mark 16:18 about the apostles of Christ: "and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them". Anthony blessed the meal and ate it unharmed, to his hosts' amazement.

  The sermon to the fish proved the most durable. Artists adopted it, and in 1903 a composer would turn it into music. But Anthony's own story was close to its end, in a woodland retreat near Padua.

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• 5. Death, Relics and Il Santo

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  In 1231 Anthony fell ill with ergotism. He withdrew with two other friars to a woodland retreat at Camposampiero. There he lived in a room built for him under the branches of a walnut tree. He died on the way back to Padua, at the Poor Clare monastery at Arcella, which is now part of the city.

  As he had asked, he was buried in the small church of Santa Maria Mater Domini, probably dating from the late 12th century. It stood near a convent he had founded in 1229. His fame was so great that work on a large church began around 1232 and finished in 1301. The older church was folded into it as the Cappella della Madonna Mora, the Chapel of the Dark Madonna. Today the basilica is commonly called "Il Santo", meaning The Saint.

  Several stories gather around his death. One says children wept in the streets and every church bell rang of its own accord. Another concerns his remains. At the first burial, his tongue, jaw and vocal cords were chosen as relics and displayed in a large reliquary. When his body was exhumed 30 years after his death, it had turned to dust. The tongue, however, was said to glisten as if it still belonged to a living body. Observers took this as a sign of his gift for preaching.

  On the 1st of January 1981, Pope John Paul II authorized a scientific team to study the remains. The tomb was opened five days later.

  By then the church had long since made its judgment. Pope Gregory IX, who had called Anthony the Ark of the Testament, proclaimed him a saint at Spoleto on the 30th of May 1232. Centuries later, in 1946, a second honor followed.

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• 6. Doctor of the Church

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  On the 16th of January 1946, Pope Pius XII proclaimed Anthony a Doctor of the Church. He gave him the title Doctor evangelicus, the Gospel Doctor. Pope Benedict XVI later explained the reasoning. He said the spiritual teaching in the Sermons was so rich that Pius XII judged the freshness and beauty of the Gospel to emerge from these writings.

  The honor rested on the book Gregory IX had commissioned in 1228. It is also a reminder of the plain young priest from Montepaolo, whose gift for scripture surprised his own superiors. Yet to most people, Anthony is known less for his sermons than for something much more everyday, and its origin lies in a stolen book.

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• 7. Finder of Lost Things

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  In Bologna, Anthony owned a book of psalms that held his notes and comments for teaching his students. A novice who had decided to leave the order took the psalter with him. Before the printing press, every book was copied by hand, so it was a costly object. A Franciscan bound by a vow of poverty would have found one very hard to replace.

  Anthony prayed that the book would be found or returned. According to the story, the thief was moved to give it back, and also to return to the order. The psalter is said to be kept in the Franciscan friary in Bologna. The custom of asking Anthony's help to find lost or stolen things is traced to this incident.

  The custom now reaches across the world. He is invoked everywhere as the patron of lost items and is credited with miracles involving lost people, lost things and even lost spiritual goods.

  In Portugal, Spain and Brazil he has a second role as a marriage saint, because legends tell of him reconciling couples. His feast day, the 13th of June, is a municipal holiday in Lisbon, celebrated with parades and weddings. In Brazil it belongs to the Festa Junina, shared with John the Baptist and Saint Peter. Devotion rises in the days before the feast, a period called the Trezena de Junho. He is patron of at least 105 Brazilian cities across 10 states.

  The devotion has travelled far beyond Lisbon, carried by Franciscans, sailors and immigrants.

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• 8. A Saint Across the World

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  On Anthony's feast day in 1692, Spanish missionaries met a small Payaya community on the Yanaguana River. The Franciscan chaplain, Father Damien Massanet, renamed the river in the saint's honor, with the agreement of General Domingo de Teran. A mission followed, and around it grew San Antonio, Texas, which became the seventh-largest city in the United States. Another Franciscan foundation, Mission San Antonio de Padua, was dedicated in California in 1771 as the third along El Camino Real.

  Immigrants brought their own traditions. Boston's North End holds a feast on the last Sunday weekend of August, called the "Feast of All Feasts". Italian immigrants from Montefalcione began it in 1919. In Brusciano, near Naples, a feast dating from 1875 began when a man promised to build and dance a giglio if his sick son recovered. A giglio is a tall tower topped by a statue of the saint, carried through the streets in choreographed maneuvers that resemble a dance. The town's celebration now features six towers, and immigrants from Brusciano carried the custom to East Harlem in New York.

  In Asia, the Portuguese carried the devotion. At Uvari in Tamil Nadu, legend says a Portuguese crew was cured of cholera through his intercession. In the Philippines, Franciscans built the first church in the country dedicated to him in 1581, in Pila, Laguna. At Siolim in Goa, he is always shown holding a serpent on a stick, recalling a snake that disrupted the building of the church until his statue was placed on the site.

  In Albania, the Franciscans arrived in 1240, and the church at Laç draws a yearly pilgrimage that includes many Eastern Orthodox and Muslim Albanians. In Oxford, the parish church built in 1960 in Headington counted J.R.R. Tolkien among its parishioners.

  The most dramatic chapter comes from the Kingdom of Kongo. Between 1704 and 1708, a young woman named Beatriz Kimpa Vita said she was possessed by Saint Anthony. She became known for healing and miracles and founded Antonianism, a Bakongo Catholic movement that did not deny the pope's authority. King Pedro IV of Kongo suppressed it, and she was burned at the stake as a heretic.

  In 1511, Titian painted three large frescoes in the Scuola del Santo in Padua showing miracles from Anthony's life. One of them, The Miracle of the Jealous Husband, depicts a husband murdering a young woman.

  As Franciscan saints multiplied, artists struggled to tell Anthony apart from the rest. Some used the fish of Rimini as his sign. Others gave him a white lily stalk for purity, or a flaming heart for his visionary fervor. The mule of Rimini sometimes appears beside him. A later pattern shows him meditating on an open book in which the Christ Child appears, as in the El Greco painting. Over time the child grew larger than the book, and some images dropped the book entirely.

  In music, Gustav Mahler set the fish sermon in his song "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt", from the cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The song later became the basis for the scherzo of his Symphony No. 2. Mahler wrote that he was amused his winding music might suggest that Anthony was drunk while preaching to the fish.

  Film has returned to him many times, from Giulio Antamoro's silent Saint Anthony of Padua in 1931 to Antonello Belluco's biopic Anthony, Warrior of God in 2006. João Pedro Rodrigues made The Ornithologist in 2016, a modern allegory of his life.

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