Saint Anthony of Padua Feast Day: June 13, Life & Traditions

On the thirteenth of June, the streets of Lisbon fill with paper garlands, grilled sardines, and small altars set up outside front doors, each one holding a candle, a handwritten petition, and a picture of a young friar in a brown habit. This is Saint Anthony of Padua's day, and it has been kept this way, with small variations, for close to eight hundred years.

When is the Feast of Saint Anthony of Padua?

Saint Anthony of Padua is celebrated on June 13, the anniversary of his death in 1231 near Padua, Italy. The Roman Catholic Church keeps it as an obligatory memorial on the universal calendar, which means Mass may include his proper prayers wherever it is celebrated, though attending is not required in the way a holy day of obligation requires. The date has never moved and never will, since it marks the day he died rather than an event tied to a movable feast like Easter.

Eastern Orthodox and other Eastern Christian calendars do not keep this feast. Saint Anthony lived and was canonized after the schism between East and West, and his cult grew entirely within the Latin Church, so his day belongs to Western Christianity rather than to the shared calendar of the first millennium's saints.

Who Was Fernando Martins de Bulhões?

Saint Anthony of Padua was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon around 1195, into a family with means enough to give him the finest education Portugal could offer, and he died at thirty-five having become the most sought-after preacher in Europe. He entered religious life as a teenager among the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, trained for years in Scripture and the Fathers, and seemed set for a quiet life of scholarship until a public execution changed everything.

Five Franciscan friars were killed by Muslim rulers in Morocco, and their bodies were brought home to Portugal as relics. Fernando, moved to the point of no return, asked to join the young and unlettered Franciscan order himself. He took the name Anthony after the desert father Anthony of Egypt, and he set out for Morocco hoping for martyrdom. Illness turned his ship back, and a storm blew him instead to Italy, where his real life's work was waiting without his knowing it.

At an ordination in Forlì, no friar had prepared a sermon, and Anthony was asked, almost as an afterthought, to say a few words. What came out revealed a mind formed by years of hidden study and a voice suited to move crowds no church could hold. Francis of Assisi himself, hearing of it, gave Anthony charge of teaching theology to the friars, and within a few years he was the terror of heretics and the delight of the poor across Italy and southern France. The full arc of that transformation, from Lisbon canon to Franciscan preacher, is told in The Boy from Lisbon, the opening volume of his life.

His preaching years brought the stories that have never left popular memory: a sermon delivered to fish gathered along a riverbank when the townspeople refused to listen, a starving mule that knelt before the Blessed Sacrament rather than eat, a vision of the Christ Child resting in his arms. Whatever one makes of each account, they were told by people who had heard him preach and could not otherwise explain what they had seen. That ministry, and the miracles remembered alongside it, fill Tongue of Fire.

How Is the Feast of Saint Anthony Kept?

Catholics keep June 13 with bread for the poor, blessed lilies, prayers for what is lost, and in Portugal and parts of Italy, whole neighborhoods given over to festival. The oldest and most distinctive custom is Saint Anthony's Bread, the practice of donating loaves or alms for the hungry in thanksgiving for a prayer answered, a habit that grew directly out of the countless small graces people attributed to his intercession and that Franciscan friaries still collect on his feast.

Saint Anthony's patronage of lost things traces to a specific story from his own lifetime. A novice left the Franciscan community at Bologna and took with him a psalter Anthony had annotated for teaching, a book of real value to a poor order that copied everything by hand. Anthony prayed for its return, and the novice, troubled in conscience, brought it back. That book is preserved in a friary to this day, and it is why, eight centuries later, people whisper some version of Tony, Tony, turn around, something's lost that must be found over missing keys and mislaid papers.

Many parishes hold the Tredicina, thirteen Tuesdays of prayer leading up to the feast, since Tuesday was the day his body was buried after his death, with many miracles reported at his tomb, and his tongue, the instrument of his preaching, was later found still incorrupt among his relics thirty years afterward, the rest of his body having long since returned to dust. That tongue is venerated still in the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, where pilgrims process past his tomb every June 13.

Lisbon keeps the day as a civic festival as much as a religious one. Streets in the old Alfama and Mouraria quarters are strung with lights and paper decorations, sardines are grilled on every corner, and the city holds mass weddings called the Casamentos de Santo António, since Anthony is also invoked as patron of marriages and of finding a spouse. Fado is sung late into the night, and the saint's statue is carried in procession through crowds that have gathered for this exact evening every year of their lives.

What to Read for His Feast

Anthony earned the title Doctor of the Church for a reason that gets lost in the prayer cards: he was a serious theologian and Scripture scholar whose sermons still repay reading. The Tongue That Did Not Decay takes up his teaching and his ongoing intercession together, the mind and the mercy in one volume, and rounds out the Il Santo series. Readers who want to begin without cost can start with the free Invitation volume, and anyone drawn to lives like his will find the whole shelf of saints through membership.