Patron Saint of Lost Things

Why St. Anthony of Padua?

The story is specific, which is why it survived. Anthony had a book of psalms that he used for teaching, annotated in his own hand and, in an age before printing, effectively irreplaceable. A novice who was leaving the community took it with him. Anthony prayed for its return. The account holds that the novice turned back, returned the book, and rejoined the community. From that single incident, a patronage that now covers everything from car keys to missing persons. What keeps the devotion alive is not the miracle so much as the scale of it. Anthony is the saint people invoke over genuinely small things, and there is no embarrassment attached. A Church that only permitted prayer about grave matters would be teaching that God is interested in a shortlist. The habit of asking Anthony about a misplaced wallet quietly teaches the opposite, which is why parents pass it to children long before they explain anything else about the saints. He was, incidentally, one of the greatest preachers of his age and a Doctor of the Church. Almost nobody remembers him for that.

Who was St. Anthony of Padua?

Fernando Martins de Bulhoes was born in Lisbon about 1195 to a well-off family, and became an Augustinian canon with a serious theological education behind him. What changed his life was seeing the bodies of five Franciscan martyrs brought back from Morocco. He left the Augustinians, took the name Anthony, and joined the Franciscans intending to be martyred himself.

He never got there. Illness turned his ship back, and he ended up in a hermitage in Italy doing menial work, his learning unknown to anyone. It came out by accident: at an ordination where nobody had prepared a sermon, he was told to speak, and did. Francis of Assisi, hearing of him, appointed him the first lector in theology of the order.

He spent the rest of his short life preaching, to crowds too large for churches, and died at thirty-five in 1231. He was canonised eleven months later, among the fastest in the history of the Church, and named a Doctor of the Church in 1946.

The feast: June 13

June 13, the day he died. In many countries it is kept with the blessing of Anthony bread, given to the poor, which is the older meaning of the devotion: what is lost includes people. The rhyme most people know, Tony Tony turn around, is folklore of no particular vintage and the Church has never had an opinion about it.

How to ask their intercession

The traditional couplet is short enough to say while still looking: Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around, something is lost and cannot be found. Say it, then keep searching. The devotion has never been understood as a substitute for looking properly.