Prayers to St. Anthony of Padua, for Lost Things and Every Need

Why St. Anthony, for lost things? Because of a book. As EWTN tells the widely accepted story, Anthony had a psalter, a book of the Psalms, in which he had written the notes he used for teaching; before printing, a book like that was irreplaceable. A novice who had decided to leave the community took it with him. Anthony prayed that it would turn up, and it did, returned by the novice, who came back to the order as well. The novice is the point as much as the book: what was lost and found was a person.

Jesus told the same story three ways, and one of them is about a housekeeper: a woman who loses one of her ten coins will “light a lamp, sweep the house, and seek diligently until she found it”, and then call her neighbors: “Rejoice with me, for I have found the drachma which I had lost!” (Luke 15:8–9). Praying about a lost thing is not too small for God. Sweeping the house is still part of it.

Nothing is wrong with it. Saints are friends, and people speak to friends in the shorthand of friends; the Catechism says the saints “constantly care for those whom they have left on earth” and that “we can and should ask them to intercede for us” (CCC 2683). What the rhyme is not is a spell. It does not work by rhyming, or by being said three times, and it does not oblige anyone to produce anything. The Church’s word for expecting results from the mere saying of words is superstition (CCC 2111). Say the rhyme, then look in the coat pocket.

When it is sung, the second verse, “The sea obeys…”, comes back as a refrain after the third verse and again after “To Father, Son”. “Whilst treasures lost are found again” is the line behind his patronage of lost things, eight centuries old. And notice where the power lies in it: “All dangers vanish at thy prayer.” The miracles are God’s answer to a saint’s intercession, which is what the Church means when she says the saints “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us” (CCC 956). The last two lines give the glory to the Trinity.

“Unfailing” is a devotional title, not a guarantee. No prayer to any saint is guaranteed to produce the thing asked for, and the Church attaches no such promise to this one. If a card adds that the prayer “has never been known to fail”, or tells you to say it a set number of times, it is adding something the Church does not teach; treating the words as though their saying forced an outcome is what the Catechism calls superstition (CCC 2111). What does not fail is narrower and better: God hears every prayer, and a saint’s intercession is never wasted, even when the answer is not the one we wanted. The prayer for lost things above already knows this: “At least restore to me peace and tranquility of mind.” The same honesty applies to the saint of desperate cases; see the prayer to St. Jude.

Away from Padua, begin with “Oh dear Saint Anthony, I come to you in spirit” instead of the first line; a daughter may say “a worthy daughter”. The shape is the Church’s: “become my intercessor before God”. For work, family and a happy death, many turn in the same way to St. Joseph.

Worn out after preaching every day of Lent 1231 in Padua, he withdrew to rest, and died at Arcella, just outside the city, on June 13, 1231, aged about thirty-six; Vatican News records his last words as “I see my Lord.” Pope Gregory IX, who had heard him preach and called him the “Ark of the Testament”, canonized him on May 30, 1232, less than a year later. In 1946 Pope Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church, the Doctor Evangelicus, for the Gospel that runs through his sermons.

He is pictured with a lily, for purity, and with the Child Jesus in his arms, recalling a vision mentioned in several literary sources. Some parishes bless loaves on his feast and give them away, “St. Anthony’s bread”, a sign of his charity to the poor. He is the patron saint of lost things, and of much else; that side of him is on the patron saint of lost things.

Two longer devotions grew from that. The Thirteen Tuesdays are thirteen Tuesdays in a row of prayer to St. Anthony, thirteen like the date of his feast; the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, for one, begins them on the first Tuesday after June 13. The Tredicina is a thirteen-day novena: the Basilica in Padua publishes a short prayer for each day, asking God, through St. Anthony’s intercession, for faith, peace, healing and more. Neither is required, and neither is a formula: they are ways of keeping company with a saint for a while. If what you are carrying is heavier than a lost ring, the communion of saints is the doctrine underneath all of this: the saints pray with us, and we are not asking alone.