Too many visitors, so he moved a hundred miles away

LISBON, Portugal, 1212 AD — The canons’ house at St Vincent’s stood just outside the city wall of Lisbon. It was a bit over half a mile from the cathedral in the middle of town. So anyone who wanted to see the new young canon could walk out and ask for him at the door. For two years, people did. His parents came often. So did his cousins and his friends, because they all loved him.

He is Saint Anthony of Padua, though nobody called him that yet. His name then was Ferdinand, the name he had been given at his baptism. He had been born in Lisbon in 1195 AD.

Two years before this, at fifteen, he had walked out of his parents’ house. He asked the canons of St Vincent’s to take him in. They gave him the habit. He spent his first year as a novice. At the end of it he made his vows, meant to hold for the rest of his life.

Then the visitors started coming, and they kept coming. Every visit stirred up his feelings for his family again. Those feelings were exactly what he had left home to get away from. He had come to St Vincent’s for quiet, and with people at the door he was not getting any. By the end of two years he was afraid he never would.

He could not simply pack and leave. A canon went where his prior sent him, and the prior at St Vincent’s was Dom Gonzalez Mendez. St. Anthony went to him and told him what the visits were doing to him. He asked to be sent to the canons’ house of the Holy Cross at Coimbra.

The prior said no. The request took him by surprise and it hurt him. He warned St. Anthony that a man who will not stay where he is put comes to no good.

St. Anthony asked again. He was sure he was right about the visits, and he kept asking. In the end the prior stopped arguing. He had decided that God was speaking through the young canon, and he gave him the permission. The other canons were fond of him too, and none of them wanted him to go. St. Anthony said goodbye to them. They took it hard, and he left the city he was born in.

Coimbra was a hundred miles from Lisbon. That was the point: from there his family could not easily reach him. He stayed eight years, mostly reading the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers of the Church.

Five bodies come back from Morocco

In 1220 AD five Friars Minor were killed in Morocco, where they had gone to preach. Their bodies were brought back across the sea to Portugal and received at Coimbra. St. Anthony saw the bodies, and he made up his mind to leave the canons. He said: “I will take their habit, and so will I, too, go to the fight.”

Friars from Olivares, a poor house near Coimbra, used to walk over to Holy Cross to beg for food. One day they came and St. Anthony took them aside. St. Anthony told the friars what he wanted. He asked them to take him into their order. He was twenty-five. They needed the permission of the man in charge at Holy Cross first, and that was hard to get too. Then the friars came back and gave him their habit.

He had asked them for one more thing that day: a new name. He chose Anthony, after St. Anthony the abbot, the saint the house at Olivares was named for. Nobody in Portugal knew him by it. That was what he wanted. He was hoping the people who kept coming to look for him would not find him.