Prayer to St. Anthony

"Si quæris miracula" — "If then you ask for miracles" — is the great Responsory of St. Anthony, composed in the thirteenth century by Blessed Julian of Speyer (died c. 1250), a Franciscan friar and musician who was a near contemporary of the saint. In three swift stanzas it catalogues the wonders worked through Anthony's intercession: death, error, and calamity put to flight, the sick raised up, the sea calmed, chains broken, lost things restored to those who beg his help. So universal was its use that the responsory has been sung and recited for the finding of what is lost for seven centuries.

St. Anthony himself was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões at Lisbon in Portugal in 1195. He first entered the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, but, stirred by the martyrdom of five Franciscans in Morocco, he took the Franciscan habit and the name Antony, longing for martyrdom. God gave him instead a greater apostolate: he became one of the most powerful preachers of the age, the "Hammer of Heretics," whose learning and holiness St. Francis himself acknowledged.

He is invoked above all as the patron of lost and stolen things. The origin is a famous incident: a novice who left the community took with him Anthony's psalter — a precious book, annotated in the saint's own hand for teaching. Anthony prayed for its return, and the novice, troubled in conscience, brought it back repentant. From this the Church learned to run to Anthony for whatever is lost, whether an object, a cause, or a soul.

St. Anthony died near Padua on 13 June 1231, worn out at only thirty-five. So manifest was his sanctity that Pope Gregory IX canonized him within the year, on 30 May 1232 — one of the swiftest canonizations in the Church's history. In 1946 Pope Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church, giving him the title Evangelical Doctor. His tomb in the great basilica at Padua remains one of the most visited shrines in Christendom.