St. Anthony

A friend recently lost an earring and emailed that she thought she might have dropped it at our apartment when she had come over for some computer help. When I told her we would keep an eye out for it, I suggested she try the Catholic trick of praying to Saint Anthony. "Just say, 'St. Anthony, help me find my earring,'" I suggested jokingly.

Within five minutes she called me back. As soon as she got the email she said, "St. Anthony, help me find my earring" and almost simultaneously her husband shouted from another room, "Hey! I found your earring."

It reminded me of a story from my seminary days. One of the staff, whose name was Anthony, had gone out to work on the motor of a boat pulled up on the shore of the small lake on campus. When he leaned over the engine with a wrench in his hands, a swarm of yellow jackets flew out and he jumped back, hurling the wrench into the lake, and took off running to the main building.

Shortly after that, he asked one of my classmates to go into the lake to see if he could locate the wrench. The seminarian asked if he had tried praying to St. Anthony. The priest just snorted.

So my classmate picked up a stick, prayed, "St. Anthony, help me find this lost wrench" and walked out into the lake. He poked the stick into the water and it landed on the wrench on his first try.

(Cue The Twilight Zone theme.)

Whatever one wants to make of either story, Saint Anthony of Padua, O.F.M. ( 1195 – 1231),  was a Portuguese Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order. He was born and raised by a wealthy family in Lisbon and died in Padua, Italy. Noted by his contemporaries for his forceful preaching and expert knowledge of scripture, he was canonized shortly after his death. He is the patron saint of finding things or lost people.

He is one of the most popular saints on the Roman Calendar, no doubt because we all tend to lose things and need help finding them. Almost every Catholic Church has (or once had) a statue of the saint, usually holding the Child Jesus in his arms.