The Prayer to St. Anthony of Padua
"Something is lost and cannot be found." The prayers Catholics have prayed for eight centuries to the finder of what is lost — and the saint behind them.
Everyone who has ever torn the house apart for a lost set of keys knows his name. But the Prayer to St. Anthony is far older and far deeper than a charm for finding car keys — it is the cry of a soul that trusts a saint of God to help recover what is lost, whether a wedding ring, peace of mind, or faith itself. St. Anthony of Padua, the wonder-worker of the Franciscans, has been answering that cry for eight hundred years.
The Prayers to St. Anthony
The everyday invocation
For the recovery of what is lost
The Tuesday responsory — Si quaeris miracula
Who St. Anthony was
He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon around 1195, the son of a noble Portuguese family. He first became an Augustinian canon, steeped in Scripture — but when the relics of the first Franciscan martyrs passed through his monastery, he left everything to join the young order of St. Francis, taking the name Anthony. He became the greatest preacher of his age, a friar whose command of the Bible was so total that he is remembered as the "Ark of the Covenant." He died near Padua on June 13, 1231, only about thirty-five years old. He was canonized within a year of his death, in 1232, and in 1946 Pope Pius XII named him a Doctor of the Church.
Why the finder of lost things
The patronage began with a book. While Anthony was teaching in Bologna, a novice who abandoned the community took Anthony's psalter — a hand-annotated book of Psalms he used to teach, irreplaceable in an age before printing. Anthony prayed for its return. The novice, shaken by a fearful vision, brought the book back and returned to the order. From that day Anthony has been invoked for everything lost — objects, yes, but also lost people, lost peace, and lost faith. The psalter is said to survive to this day in the Franciscan friary at Bologna.
How and when to pray it
Most Catholics first learn the little rhyme said the moment something goes missing — "Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around; something is lost and cannot be found." It is not a magic formula but a childlike act of trust, asking a friend of God to pray with you. When the need is deeper, pray the fuller prayer for the recovery of what is lost above, which begs not only for the object but for peace of mind and, above all, that you never lose God.
Tuesday is St. Anthony's day: he was buried on a Tuesday amid a great outpouring of miracles, and the Si quaeris miracula responsory is still sung at his basilica in Padua every Tuesday. Many Catholics keep the Thirteen Tuesdays devotion in the weeks leading up to his feast on June 13. Whether prayed once in a panic over lost keys or faithfully across thirteen weeks, it is the same movement of the heart: turning to a saint who has never stopped answering.
Why it matters
It is easy to smile at a saint for car keys. But the reason the devotion has lasted eight hundred years is that it takes small losses seriously as a school for the great one. A man who learns to hand God his misplaced wallet is learning to hand God his marriage, his fears, his death. St. Anthony's own prayer refuses to stop at the object: "Let me rather lose all things than lose God, my supreme good." That is the Sanctum register exactly — Altar. Arms. Allegiance. — a man who guards the one treasure he cannot afford to lose, and trusts heaven with the rest.