St. Anthony of Padua

St. Anthony of Padua was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões around 1195 into a noble family at Lisbon, Portugal, and died on 13 June 1231 near Padua, Italy, aged only thirty-five. He first became an Augustinian canon, but after the relics of the first Franciscan martyrs were brought to Portugal he was so moved that he joined the young Franciscan order, longing himself for martyrdom. Illness turned him instead toward a hidden life until his extraordinary gift for preaching was discovered by chance.

He became one of the most celebrated preachers of the Middle Ages, drawing vast crowds by his eloquence and profound knowledge of Scripture, and combating heresy in Italy and France; St. Francis himself entrusted him with teaching theology to the friars. Beloved traditions surround him — preaching to the fish when men would not listen, and a vision in which the Christ Child rested in his arms. Canonized less than a year after his death, he was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1946, and is universally invoked as the patron of lost things and of the poor.