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

LISBON, Portugal, this month, 1210 AD — A boy of fifteen walked out of his father’s house in Lisbon this month, through a gate of the old city wall, and asked the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at St. Vincent’s to take him in. They took him, and it cost him his place in the family and every claim he had on what the family owned.

The boy is Saint Anthony of Padua, still known by his baptismal name, Ferdinand. He was born in this city in 1195 AD and baptised in its cathedral, and his parents are nobles whose house stands a short walk from it. From about the age of ten he was taught at the cathedral school of St. Mary, a few streets from that house.

The canons at St. Vincent’s were known for their discipline and their strict observance, and that is what drew him out to them. He had decided that the world and its pleasures would not last, and that he wanted a religious life. He acted on the Gospel counsel that a man must “hate father and mother” to take service with Christ. He told his parents what he meant to do before he left.

The walk was short. St. Vincent’s stood about a kilometre out from the cathedral, on the far side of the wall, and the house took its name from where it was: São Vicente de Fora (St. Vincent outside).

It had stood there sixty-three years. Lisbon was under siege in 1147 AD when King Afonso Henriques promised that he would build a monastery for St. Vincent of Saragossa if the city fell to him, a saint the city’s Mozarabic Christians already kept. The city fell, and he built it. The first canons came down from the mother house of the order, Holy Cross at Coimbra.

The men St. Anthony was walking toward belonged to that same order, the Canons of the Holy Cross, and their life was hard. They kept the rule of St. Augustine and, with it, the statutes of St. Ruf. That meant frequent fasting, long offices sung in choir and unbroken mental prayer, with heads and eyes kept down. A man who broke the rule of choir was punished severely.

He went up to the door and presented himself to the superior. The canons warned every man they admitted what he was asking for. The house was poor and uncomfortable, and nobody was excused any part of the discipline or given an easier version of it. He asked to be received, and asked again, and kept pressing them, and then they gave him the habit. The superior judged that he was genuinely called, and the rest of the canons agreed to take him.

Then his relatives and his friends came out after him. They could not bear to see him in a canon’s habit, and they tried to talk him back into the world. He was fifteen years old, and he stayed.

The house he walked into is gone. It was pulled down and built again after 1580 AD, under the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, and what stands on the ground now is that later house: the offices of the Patriarch of Lisbon and a royal burial place.