Tuesday, June 13, 2017

My Friend Tony


And yep, I mean St. Anthony of Padua, whose Feast is today!
How many times have people prayed some version of the prayer:
"Tony, Tony, come around.
Something's lost and must be found"?
I know St. Anthony is ALWAYS helping me find stuff.
Years ago, when I had just recently converted to Catholicism, I called
Mom at work (It was her usual break time.)
Mom said, "I can't talk right now. We're missing an important file and
we've looked all over for it."
"Okay," I said, "call me back when it turns up."
Well, within five minutes she called me. The file had been found.
"Aren't you going to thank me?" I asked.
"Thank you? What for? You're not even here."
"I know," I said, "but who do you think prayed to St. Anthony?"
More recently, I was chatting with a couple of my online friends, and
one of them was going slightly nuts because she had misplaced something, and couldn't find it anywhere. I said a prayer to St. Anthony, and then typed,
"Try looking again."
She didn't want to, but I persuaded her. And then she typed, in caps
"I FOUND IT!!!!!!"
I wasn't a bit surprised!
Does St. Anthony ALWAYS get lost articles back for me? Well, almost! One morning I couldn't find my Rosary. I looked. I prayed. To my surprise, I still did
not find it. But later that morning, I received a brand-new, beautiful Rosary from a Catholic organization. I'm almost SURE I heard St. Anthony chuckling.
BTW, the lost Rosary did turn up eventually.
Of course, there's much more to St. Anthony than just running the Lost and Found! :)

Updated in 2013 to add Fr. Anthony's very inspirational homily.

Encouraging news about EWTN's Fr. Anthony

Fr. Anthony hopes to be back on the air in the near future.  Oh, HOW I'm praying for that to happen! https://franciscanmissionaries.c...