Anthony of Padua, Hammer of Heretics

I found Fernando of Lisbon — the name he was given at baptism — already restless in the Augustinian canonry of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, reading the Fathers with a hunger that made his superiors uneasy. Then in 1220 the bodies of five Franciscan friars came home from Morocco, martyred for preaching the Gospel to the Almohad court, and I let their blood do what argument could not: it lit something in him that all his Augustinian learning had not lit. He asked to join the Friars Minor. He took the name Anthony. He asked to be sent to Morocco himself, to die as they had died.

I did not send him to Morocco. A storm — I will not pretend it was accident, though I let the sailors call it weather — drove his ship off course and put him ashore in Sicily instead, sick, and from there he made his way to a chapter of the Order in Assisi, where nobody yet knew what I had put inside him. He kept it hidden. He asked to wash dishes. It was only when a Dominican failed to appear to give the customary sermon at an ordination in Forlì, and the Franciscan superiors, having nothing better on hand, told the quiet friar from Portugal to say whatever came to him, that I let it come. I gave him Scripture the way water is given to a channel already dug — no effort in the giving, only in the man's years of digging that channel through prayer before I ever needed to use it.

After that I did not stop. I sent him through Italy and southern France where the Cathar heresy was hardening whole regions against the Church I love, and he answered the Cathars not with condemnation alone but with such command of Scripture, such precision against their errors, that they called him the Hammer, Malleus Haereticorum, and it stuck to him better than any title he would have chosen for himself. At Rimini, the story is told, when the heretics stopped their ears and would not hear him, he went instead to the riverbank and preached to the fish, and the fish — so the record says — rose and turned their heads toward him as if they, at least, had ears. I do not need parables to be verified by a notary to have taught something true: that when men refuse the Word, creation itself remains willing to receive it. That is a truth about Me, not a trick performed for an audience.

I gave him other things that could not be argued away — the sick who touched his cassock, the blind who saw, the lost causes that still bear his name today when a rosary or a set of keys goes missing and a mother says his name under her breath. But what I loved most in Anthony was not the wonders. It was that a man who had wanted to be a martyr in Morocco instead became a preacher who wore himself to nothing — dropsy, they called the illness that took him, swollen and exhausted at thirty-six — because he never stopped believing that the next sermon might be the one that turned a single hardened heart.

I was in every one of those sermons, not as ornament but as the very breath moving his ribs. When Pius XII, seven centuries later, declared him Doctor of the Church and called him Doctor Evangelicus, the Church only confirmed in Latin what I had already written in him at Forlì: that this was a man through whom My Word could be trusted to pass unbent.

The Record

Anthony of Padua (born Fernando Martins de Bulhões, 1195, Lisbon, Portugal) entered the Canons Regular of St. Augustine as a youth and transferred to the Franciscans around 1220, taking the name Anthony, after the martyrdom of five Franciscan friars in Morocco moved him to seek missionary life. Illness prevented his own intended mission to Morocco; he instead settled in Italy, where his preaching skill was discovered, reputedly at an ordination in Forlì around 1222.

He became one of the most sought-after preachers against the Cathar and Albigensian heresies in Italy and southern France, earning the epithet "Malleus Haereticorum" ("Hammer of Heretics"). The episode of his preaching to fish at the riverbank near Rimini, when local heretics refused to listen, appears in early Franciscan hagiography, including the "Fioretti" tradition and Vita accounts compiled within decades of his death. He served as provincial minister of northern Italy and later settled near Padua, where he continued preaching and writing scriptural sermons.

Anthony died on June 13, 1231, near Padua, at age 36. He was canonized less than one year later, on May 30, 1232, by Pope Gregory IX — among the fastest canonizations in Church history, second only to Francis's own. His body, exhumed in 1263 in the presence of Bonaventure, was found to have a tongue that had not decayed, taken by witnesses as a sign of his gift of preaching; this incorrupt tongue is preserved as a relic in the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua. Pope Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church on January 16, 1946, with the title "Doctor Evangelicus." He is the patron saint of lost things. Feast day: June 13.