Prayer to Saint Anthony: a new text and the story of the saint
The prayer
Saint Anthony, who left your name, your house and your country to speak to people nobody else would speak to, ask God for me.
I have lost something. Sometimes it is an object, and I know its name. Sometimes it is patience, or direction, or the will to start again — and for those I have no name at all.
Get me eyes to find what is close by and courage to let go of what is not coming back. Let me search without losing myself, and find without forgetting who helped me.
And if what I am looking for is another person, let me wait without demanding and accept without making myself small.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer to Saint Anthony written for this site and signed by the person who wrote it. Most of the texts circulating under that name are modern devotional compositions of uncertain authorship, so this page publishes ours and tells the history of the devotion instead.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 6 min read
When to pray it
When something has gone missing — a document, a direction, a relationship. It is the prayer of searches: the small ones that end in half an hour and the large ones that take years.
The prayer above asks for two things at once, and the second is the one people rarely pray for: to find what is close by and to let go of what is not coming back. Anyone looking for an object knows when to stop; anyone looking for a job, a reconciliation or a child who left home rarely does. An honest prayer about loss has to fit both.
It is ours and it is signed, and that is an editorial decision rather than a detail. Publishing a text of unknown origin as a traditional prayer would leave the reader thinking they had prayed something hallowed by centuries of use, when in fact they had prayed something somebody wrote on a leaflet in the 1990s. The history of the devotion, by contrast, is old and verifiable, and it is right above.
Catholic devotion asks the saint to intercede: God grants, and what is asked of Anthony is that he ask alongside. Most Protestant and evangelical churches do not hold that practice and pray directly to God. This page describes what the devotion claims and does not settle the question — and neither the prayer above nor the commentary suggests the saint does what only God does.
The passage that best describes the subject of this page is not about Anthony at all. It is the parable of the woman who loses a coin, lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house until she finds it. Jesus tells it to make a different point, but the gesture is the same: searching methodically, in poor light, for something that is probably right there.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared A thirteenth-century devotion; this text was written for Faith Flame in 2026
Fernando de Bulhões was born in Lisbon around 1195, into a family of means, and was an Augustinian canon when he saw the bodies of five Franciscans killed in Morocco carried through the city. He changed order, changed name — he became Anthony — and set out to preach in North Africa. He fell ill, turned back, and the ship ended up in Italy by accident of weather. He was discovered as a preacher by chance, at an ordination in Forlì in 1222, when nobody had prepared a sermon and he was asked to improvise. He died in Padua in 1231, in his mid-thirties.
Devotion to him is enormous and old, and a great many of the texts circulating as “prayer to Saint Anthony” are modern novena compositions, printed on parish leaflets and holy cards, with no author declared and often owned by a publisher. Reproducing one of those would mean reproducing somebody’s text. So this page carries a prayer of our own, written for it, and reserves this space for what is actually known.
What is known is a good deal. The link with lost objects comes from an episode in the early collections of his miracles: a novice is said to have run off with the psalter Anthony used for teaching, and the book came back. Out of one recovered psalter in the thirteenth century came the patron of everything that goes missing — keys, documents, wedding rings, dogs.
Little-known details
English speakers still recite a rhyme at him
He was canonised in under a year, and nobody has beaten that
He belongs to two cities, and the naming has been contested for centuries
He was named a Doctor of the Church only in 1946
What the passages say
8Or what woman, having ten drachmas, if she will have lost one drachma, would not light a candle, and sweep the house, and diligently search until she finds it?
9And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying: ‘Rejoice with me! For I have found the drachma, which I had lost.’
10So I say to you, there will be joy before the Angels of God over even one sinner who is repentant.”
The parable of the lost coin, and the most exact image of what this page is about: light the lamp, sweep the house, search diligently. Note that the woman does not pray to find the coin — she looks for it. Prayer accompanies the search rather than replacing it.
7And going forth, preach, saying: ‘For the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.’
8Cure the infirm, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You have received freely, so give freely.
9Do not choose to possess gold, nor silver, nor money in your belts,
10nor provisions for the journey, nor two tunics, nor shoes, nor a staff. For the laborer deserves his portion.
The instruction Anthony took literally when he changed order: go without taking anything. He was a canon regular with a house and a library, and he became a mendicant friar after reading exactly this kind of text — which helps explain why Franciscan poverty was, for him, a decision rather than an inheritance.
2that you should preach the word urgently, in season and out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke, with all patience and doctrine.
The line sums up the one thing Anthony did all his life: preach, in any circumstance. The reputation for finding lost objects came centuries later; in life he was the man who filled town squares and who was asked to speak when nobody else had anything to say.
7Remember your leaders, who have spoken the Word of God to you, whose faith you imitate, by observing the goal of their way of life:
The text both traditions generally accept as grounds for remembering the saints: look at the end of their lives and imitate their faith. What divides Catholics from Protestants is not that remembering but the next step — asking them to intercede. The verse does not settle the disagreement; it shows where it starts.