Novena to St. Anthony of Padua

Before he was Anthony, he was Fernando Martins de Bulhões, born around 1195 to a family of standing in Lisbon, who entered the Augustinian canons as a teenager and gave himself seriously to the study of Scripture — a formation so thorough that it would later let him preach for hours without notes. He was, by every account, a promising young man on a stable, respectable path within a well-regarded religious order. Nothing about his early life suggested he would abandon it. What it does show is a young man who took the interior life with total seriousness long before anything dramatic asked it of him — who built, quietly, the foundation that a later, harder call would stand on. Whatever season of preparation you are in now, however unremarkable it feels, ask Anthony today for the same seriousness: to build well in the quiet years, before you know what they were building toward.

In 1220, the bodies of five Franciscan friars, martyred while preaching in Morocco, were brought back to Portugal. Fernando saw them and something in him broke open — he asked to leave the Augustinians, took the Franciscan habit and the name Anthony, and set sail for Africa himself, hoping, quite plainly, for the same death. This was not a career decision; it was a young man deciding that the faith he had studied for years was worth everything he had, including his life. He never got the martyrdom he sought — illness struck him almost immediately and forced his return voyage — but the desire itself is what matters here: a willingness to hold nothing back once he understood what was being asked. Bring to Anthony today whatever costly thing your own convictions are asking of you, and ask him for that same undivided readiness to give it.

The ship carrying the sick Anthony back from Africa never reached Portugal. A storm drove it far off its intended course and put in instead at Sicily — an accident of weather that placed him, unplanned, in Italy among the Franciscan brothers gathering there, and set him on the path that would make him a preacher across Italy and France rather than a forgotten missionary who died young in Morocco. He could not have designed this outcome; he could only be present enough to recognize a door when the storm had finished closing one and opening another. Not every redirection in a life comes with an explanation attached. Bring to Anthony today whatever plan of yours has been blown off course — a lost job, a closed door, a route you didn't choose — and ask him for the trust to look for what it might be opening instead.

For a time after reaching Italy, Anthony lived quietly at a small friary near Forlì, assigned to the most ordinary work — by tradition, kitchen duty — his years of theological formation entirely unknown to the brothers around him. He did not announce his learning or maneuver for a more visible place. He was simply present, doing the unglamorous task in front of him, until an ordination where the invited preacher failed to prepare left the friars needing someone, anyone, to speak. Anthony was asked almost as a last resort — and what came out revealed a gift the community had lived beside for months without suspecting. Real capability does not always need to announce itself to be real; sometimes it only needs an occasion. Ask Anthony today for the humility to do the small work well without resentment, and the trust that what is genuinely yours to give will find its moment.

Once his gift for preaching was known, Anthony spent the remaining decade of his short life almost constantly on the move through Italy and southern France, called on repeatedly to counter the Cathar heresy that was drawing whole regions away from the Church, and to speak plainly against the exploitation of the poor by the powerful. He earned, in his own lifetime, the title 'Malleus Hereticorum' — Hammer of Heretics — not for cruelty but for the force and precision of an argument built on Scripture he knew by heart and delivered without fear of the people it offended, including usurers and the wealthy. Conviction, in Anthony, was never separated from courage; he said the hard true thing to the people least inclined to hear it. Where your own convictions are asking you to speak plainly into a situation that would be easier to leave alone, bring that to Anthony today.

Tradition holds that at Rimini, preaching to townspeople hardened against him and the faith he brought, Anthony walked to the riverbank and began preaching instead to the fish gathered in the water, who, the story says, raised their heads above the surface as if listening. It is the most famous story attached to his name, recorded in the biographical tradition that grew up in the years following his death, and it has always been understood less as a literal transcript than as a vivid way of saying something true: that Anthony's preaching carried a force that could reach even where human hearts had closed themselves off, and that no audience, however unlikely, was beneath his effort. He kept speaking the truth even when the people meant to hear it had stopped listening. Ask Anthony today for that same persistence — to keep offering what is good and true even into rooms that seem closed to it.

Another story from the biographical tradition tells of a skeptic in Rimini who challenged Anthony publicly: if a starving mule, kept without food for days, would leave a trough of grain to kneel instead before the Blessed Sacrament, he would believe. The story says the mule did exactly that, bypassing hunger for reverence. Like the sermon to the fish, this account comes down through the devotional tradition rather than the earliest sources, and it has endured for what it insists on rather than for its literal details: that what Anthony proclaimed about the Eucharist was, to him, more real and more urgent than any argument he could construct, worth staking a public test on. Whatever you hold as most real and most worth defending, even when it costs you the argument, bring it to Anthony today, and ask him for that same unhedged conviction.

One of the most beloved images of Anthony, familiar from centuries of statues and holy cards, shows him holding the infant Jesus in his arms. It comes from a tradition that grew up generations after his death — a legend, not a documented event of his lifetime — but it endured because it captured something people recognized as true about him: a man whose learning and eloquence never crowded out a plain, tender devotion, who could be a fierce public preacher and still be imagined, credibly, cradling a child with complete gentleness. Strength and tenderness were never opposites in him. If some part of your own life has made you choose between being strong and being gentle, as though only one were allowed, bring that false choice to Anthony today and ask him to hold both, the way the old image holds him holding the child.

Anthony's body finally gave out after a decade of ceaseless travel and preaching, worn down further by dropsy. He died on 13 June 1231 at Arcella, just outside Padua, not yet thirty-six years old, and was canonized less than a year later — one of the fastest canonizations in the Church's history, a measure of how immediately and widely his holiness had been recognized. When his tomb was opened decades afterward, his body had returned to dust, as bodies do, but his tongue was found perfectly incorrupt — read ever since as a sign of the gift that had defined his short life: a tongue that had spent itself entirely in proclaiming the truth in love, and had, quite literally, not been consumed by it. Small wonder that the same intercessor people ask to help them find a lost object is the one they turn to for whatever in a life feels genuinely lost — a direction, a person, a faith gone quiet. Bring whatever is lost to you today to Anthony, and ask him to help it, or you, be found.