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brief · COIMBRA, Portugal, about 1218 AD

St. Anthony of Padua is ordained priest at his monastery in Coimbra

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Saint Anthony of Padua
A young tonsured priest in a white tunic and black hooded cape stands at a wooden choir stall in a pale stone Romanesque church, a closed clasped manuscript beside his hand, four older canons at the stalls around him and an open book on a lectern behind.
St. Anthony of Padua stands in the choir of the monastery of the Holy Cross at Coimbra, Portugal. He was known then by his baptismal name, Ferdinand. He was ordained a priest about 1218 AD, as a canon living under the rule of St. Augustine.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Anthony of Padua, from the fragments of a double-sided dossal from San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (Master of Saint Francis (Maestro di San Francesco); photograph by Sailko, 2020, c. 1272 AD, Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia) View source artwork.

COIMBRA, Portugal, about 1218 AD — Saint Anthony of Padua, still known by his baptismal name Ferdinand, has been ordained a priest about this year. He is a canon of the monastery of the Holy Cross at Coimbra, a community of priests living under the rule of St. Augustine. He is not a Franciscan.

He joined the Augustinian canons at fifteen. At seventeen he asked to be sent here, to get away from relatives who kept visiting him. Besides the rule, the canons keep the statutes of St. Ruf: frequent fasts, long offices in choir, unbroken mental prayer, penalties for missing choir. His six years here have gone mostly to study and prayer, in the Scriptures and the Fathers.

The year is not certain. Raphael Huber’s critical life reasons to about 1218 from St. Anthony’s age; other authors put the ordination four years later, at Forli in Italy. Huber records that opinion and the answer to it, that a man ordained that day would hardly have been asked to preach the sermon.

Within two years, news will reach this house of five Friars Minor beheaded in Morocco.

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Anthony of Padua, from the fragments of a double-sided dossal from San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (Master of Saint Francis (Maestro di San Francesco); photograph by Sailko, 2020, c. 1272 AD, Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia) — see the original.

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A painted scene in which a slight, dark-haired boy in a plain belted wool tunic and hose stands on a stony road outside a small stone church, a cloth bundle in one hand and a closed clasped book under his arm, while two older canons in white tunics and black cloaks wait in the round-arched doorway and the walled city with its open gate rises behind him.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Anthony of Padua, from the fragments of a double-sided dossal from San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (Master of Saint Francis, c. 1272 AD, Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia) View source artwork.

place · LISBON, Portugal, this month, 1210 AD

At fifteen, Saint Anthony of Padua leaves home for the canons

A boy of fifteen walked out of his father's house in Lisbon this month and asked to be taken in by the priests living under a common rule outside the city walls, the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at St. Vincent's. He is St. Anthony of Padua, still known here by his baptismal name, Ferdinand, and going in cost him his place in his family and every claim on what it owned. He asked at the door more than once before the canons gave him the habit.

Edition of

A fresco-style painting of a chapter room with a stone vault: a young beardless friar in a grey-brown habit stands on a low wooden platform with one hand raised in speech and a closed clasped book at his feet, while friars sit packed on benches and on the floor, several turning towards an older bearded friar who stands in the arched doorway with his feet off the ground and his arms stretched wide.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Anthony of Padua, from the fragments of a double-sided dossal from San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (Master of Saint Francis, c. 1272 AD, Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia) View source artwork.

In the middle of a sermon to the friars gathered at Arles this year, Saint Francis of Assisi was seen in the doorway of the room, raised off the ground with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross. He was alive at the time and hundreds of miles away in Italy. Friar Monaldo affirmed afterwards that he had seen it, and St. Francis said openly that it had happened.

Edition of

Also in the edition of Tuesday, 1 September 2026

event · NIEPOKALANÓW, Poland, September 1, 1939 AD

Germany invades Poland, and a friary's daily newspaper stops

German forces crossed into Poland before dawn today, and by mid-afternoon bombers were passing over the Franciscan friary at Niepokalanów, about forty kilometres west of Warsaw. The friary's record of the first day of the war is a single line: the dispatch of its daily newspaper was stopped. Its superior, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, knows that a paper of that size has already irritated the German police.

place · NIEPOKALANÓW, Poland, September 1, 1939 AD

A friary of 762 runs Poland's largest printing works

Niepokalanów, a Franciscan friary west of Warsaw, houses 762 people and runs the largest printing works in Central Europe. Saint Maximilian Kolbe founded it on donated farmland in 1927 AD and has been its superior since 1936 AD. Its presses print a monthly magazine that reached a million copies last December and a daily paper selling about 137,000 copies on weekdays; the dispatch of that daily was stopped today.

3 min read

writings · LISIEUX, Normandy, September 1896 AD

'My vocation is love': St. Thérèse writes her answer at Lisieux

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun of twenty-three, has spent part of this month on retreat writing a few pages for her eldest sister, who asked her to set down what she had been saying about her way. Working through St. Paul's teaching that the Church is a body with a heart, St. Thérèse wrote that she had found her own place in it: "My vocation is love." Pope John Paul II read that passage aloud in 1997 AD when he proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church.

5 min read