Saint Anthony of Padua

Priest and Doctor of the Church

Feast Day

June 13

Life

1195–1231

Canonized

1232

Doctor of the Church

1946

Order

Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans, OFM)

Born

Lisbon, Portugal

Saint Anthony of Padua was born Fernando Martins de Bulhoes in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1195, of a noble Portuguese family. About 1210 he entered the Augustinian Canons Regular, first at Lisbon and then at the great house of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, where he received his theological training and was ordained priest.

In 1220, profoundly moved by the relics of the five Franciscan protomartyrs slain in Morocco that year, Fernando transferred to the Order of Friars Minor and took the religious name Anthony, after the desert father whose hermitage stood near his new friary. He set out as a missionary to Morocco, but illness forced his ship to Sicily, and he made his way to the General Chapter of the Franciscans at Assisi (1221), where he met Saint Francis.

Discovered to be an extraordinary preacher and theologian by chance at an ordination at Forli, Anthony was sent to teach the Friars Minor and to preach against the Albigensian and Cathar heresies in northern Italy and southern France. Saint Francis personally licensed him to teach theology to the friars, the first such commission in the Order's history. He was Provincial of Romagna (1227) and a Doctor of the Friars Minor.

His extant Sermons (Sermones Dominicales et Festivi), preserved in critical edition, demonstrate a thoroughly biblical and patristic theology marked by allegorical scriptural exegesis. He died near Padua on June 13, 1231, aged thirty-six. Pope Gregory IX canonized him at Spoleto on May 30, 1232, less than eleven months after his death, one of the swiftest canonizations in Church history.

Pope Pius XII declared Anthony a Doctor of the Universal Church on January 16, 1946, by the apostolic letter Exulta Lusitania felix, with the title Doctor Evangelicus, the Evangelical Doctor.