For 9 centuries, Santo Antônio has maintained its reputation as a matchmaker unabated

He was born Fernando de Bulhões, in Lisbon, 825 years ago, in 1195. Son of a wealthy and very religious family, Fernando preferred to follow a religious vocation and dedicated his life to the Catholic Church. Even before his death in Padua, Italy, in 1231, he was already considered a saint and adored by thousands of believers. It is no surprise that he is still one of the most popular in the world today. In Brazil alone, there are five archdioceses and 10 dioceses having him as patron saint or holder. In addition, there are 24 cathedrals dedicated to the saint and 13 Brazilian municipalities that have him as their patron saint. There’s no way to count how many images of you there are around the world, but it’s hard to walk into a church and not find one.

Saint Anthony’s Day, as Fernando became known, is celebrated on June 13, the date of his death. For single women, it is a day that they always remember fondly, playfully and faithfully. Yes, because Saint Anthony is known as the matchmaker saint and this fame, which has been alive for seven centuries, has helped to create legends about its influence on true love unions. So much so that, while the whole world celebrates Saint Valentine – the priest who officiated marriages in secret – as the patron saint of love, in Brazil the devotion to Saint Anthony means that here he is the protector of lovers. For this reason, only Brazilians celebrate love on June 12th, the eve of Saint Anthony’s Day and not on Valentine’s Day, February 14th. Love yields profit and for commerce, Valentine’s Day is one of the three most important of the year, second only to Christmas and Mother’s Day. One of the many reasons that make Saint Anthony the patron saint of lovers is because, even in a time when marriages were business transactions, he preached the importance of love in his sermons. While obvious today, it was a different position at the time. Thus began the association of san antonio with brides and grooms.

The life story inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi

Santo Antônio entered religious life at the age of 15, when he went to study at the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora, in Lisbon. A few years later, he graduated in philosophy and religion in Coimbra. When he was already a priest, young Fernando became sensitive to the history and work of Franciscan friars killed on a mission in Morocco. The Franciscan order defended the extreme simplicity of churches, clothes and customs and he decided to join them. That’s when he left the name Fernando and became Antônio.

The trip to Morocco was hard and irremediably weakened his health. After a year of work in Africa, he was transferred to Italy for better medical care. Despite being a polyglot, Antonio kept quiet and did the basic work in the monasteries, without his superiors even suspecting his academic training and great oratory talent. Therefore, when he had to stand in for another priest at a meeting of the Order of Franciscans in 1221, it was a huge surprise that that shy and dull friar was a communicative gentleman with a deep knowledge of history and the Bible. He became popular almost immediately.

San Francisco de Assis himself invited him to teach theology at the University of Bologna. He then went to France, where he taught at the universities of Toulouse, Montpellier and Limoges. According to historians, Saint Anthony spoke simply and directly, gaining fame as a preacher and great popularity. He returned to Italy at the end of 1227, where he settled in Padua. His health was fragile and on June 13, 1231, he died, aged 36.

The faithful already attributed miracles to Saint Anthony in life, so just eleven months after his death he was canonized by Pope Gregory IX. Of all the miracles – which include healing the sick and raising the dead – it was precisely the ‘matchmaker’ that marked the saint. Although the official reason does not have a unified version, there are two that are accepted. The first is financial🇧🇷 Although he defended love, the saint understood that women depended on marriage to survive and therefore helped those without dowries to have an opportunity to marry. It is irrelevant now, however, to ‘negotiate’ with san antonio for a union of love, it is valid because it was what he stood for.

The other version is that a woman got tired of asking him and threw the image out of the window, only for it to land on the head of the very man who would become her husband (the version used in the film “The Marvada Meat‘, from 1985). From then on, mistreat or blackmail the image of san antonio became a practice adopted with humor. Just in case, in difficult times, praying to Saint Anthony is always an option. As he already speaks Portuguese, he doesn’t even need a translation!