June 2026 - St. Anthony of Padua Novena Mass - Patron of the Lost

 

Saint Anthony of Padua has been honored since the 11th century by Catholics around the world. Anthony belonged to that first generation of the followers of St. Francis of Assisi known as the Friars Minor.

In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI gave a beautiful summary of Saint Anthony’s life and spirituality.  He said, “Anthony, in the school of Francis, always put Christ at the center of his life and thinking, of his action and of his preaching.”

Franciscan, doctor, preacher, priest. Yet, St. Anthony is of course widely invoked as the patron saint of lost things. The little jingle goes something like this: "St. Anthony, please look around; something is lost and must be found." This attribution comes from an incident from Anthony’s life.

As the story goes, Anthony had a book of psalms that was very important to him. This was in a time prior to the printing-press, so any book was of great value, but this book of Psalm in particular had notes and comments Anthony had made to use in teaching young novices of the Franciscan Order.

Upon realizing his psalter was missing, Anthony prayed that it would be found or returned to him. A novice who had decided to leave religious life had stolen the psalter. But after Anthony’s prayer, the thieving novice was moved to repentance. He returned the psalter to Anthony and returned to the Order, which accepted him back.

St. Anthony is invoked as patron of lost things, yet, this story highlights a connection with a patronage toward lost souls-- who have fallen to serious sin, like that young novice who had stolen what was not his. We rightly invoke St. Anthony for all lost souls, those who have abandoned the Church or have grown apathetic to the practice of the faith. And for this we should invoke him more often than those rare times when we lose our car keys!

When your heart is grieved over family members who have left the Church, pray to St. Anthony! For those young people who seem to be lost in a sea of sin, pray to St. Anthony! For those who are angry at the Church or preach a false Gospel, pray to St. Anthony!

Maybe some of you here were at one point lost—apathetic or hostile to religion, dabbling in the new age, or in a state of mortal sin. The Church was praying for you, the saints were praying for you. And thanks be to God, what was lost, has now been found. Stay that way!

And yet, even those in a state of grace can always use the help of the saints to find Christ in the poor, in our in our Sacred Worship, in our prayer, in our trials and crosses. For those, it would be wise to invoke St. Anthony for ourselves, to find and experience more deeply the depths of God’s love and the closeness of God’s presence.

St. Anthony himself no doubt had a great devotion to the Psalms, perhaps St. Anthony is urging you to seek Christ in the praying of the Church’s liturgy of the hours, in which the Psalm are offered to God throughout the day. Certainly, that great preacher of God’s word, St. Anthony is urging you to seek Christ in the Sacred Scriptures, through regular reading and reflection upon the bible.

May, the same light of faith and truth and charity which shined in the life of St. Anthony fill our lives, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

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For the holy Church of God, that the Lord may graciously watch over her and care for her.

For the peoples of all the world, that the Lord may graciously preserve harmony among them.

That the members of the Franciscan Order and all those consecrated religious may inspire us to strive for greater holiness.

For the priests of the diocese who begin a new parish assignment this week, especially for the newly ordained, that they may be faithful Christ in every dimension of their ministry.

For all those who have led and taken part in this St. Anthony Novena, that many graces may flow from this devotion for the good of our families, our parishes, the Church and the world.

For all who are oppressed by any kind of need, that the Lord may graciously grant them relief, especially for the sick and victims of war and terror and natural disaster.

For the repose of the souls of our beloved dead, For the deceased members of our families, friends, and parish, for the deceased priests and religious of the diocese of Cleveland, for the poor souls in purgatory, and for those who have fought and died for our freedom.

O God, our refuge and our strength, hear the prayers of your Church, for you yourself are the source of all devotion, and grant, we pray, that what we ask in faith we may truly obtain. Through Christ our Lord.

 

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 - Embracing the Lost

 This last Monday, aside from being our national celebration of Labor Day, was the feast of St. Theresa of Calcutta, known throughout the last decades of her life as Mother Theresa. 

During my semester in Rome during college seminary, I had the honor of working alongside the Missionary Sisters of Charity—the Religious Order founded by St. Mother Teresa, at a house for destitute men near the Coliseum there in Rome. Many of those sisters had been with Mother from the beginning of the order and certainly embodied her spirit—patience and love for the poor. And at this house for the destitute, men—mostly homeless men—would come off the streets and would be fed and bathed and treated with dignity and respect.  The sisters were breathtakingly patient and gentle as they treated these men as they would treat Jesus himself.  And they did so because that was Mother Theresa’s gift to them. She modeled for them, and for us, how to love Jesus in the poorest of the poor.

When anyone met Mother Teresa, they were often shocked at the fact that no matter how busy she was and no matter how many other people were around, when she talked to you, you felt like you were the only person in the world. She gave you her total attention, her total love, her total self every moment. It was as if the whole rest of the world dropped away and ceased to exist while she was talking to you. She wasn’t looking past you to see if there was someone more important in the room. She wasn’t bothered because of the other duties she had to attend to. She wasn’t trying to get back home so she could sit on her couch to veg-out or binge her favorite television show or get home to get dinner going. She certainly was not concerned what other people would thing about her by talking to you.

Why did she do that that? How did she do that? For one, it’s because of her prayer life. She made a daily Eucharistic holy hour, and mandated her sisters do the same, no matter what. She gave Jesus her full loving attention in prayer, and was thereby able to give you her full loving attention. 

Secondly it’s because she had come to know Jesus’ love for her. She knew that Jesus died for her—not just for general, collective “humanity”; she knew that if she had been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would have done no less for her than he did for all of us. 

God loves you, each of you, every ounce of you—warts and all. And his love for you is perfect. God’s love is not divided, as if each of us only receive one 6 billionth of his love and attention. God loves each individual with the entirety of his love. 

And that’s important to keep in mind as we consider our scripture readings this weekend. In the parables of the finding of the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son in the Gospel today, we are to come to recognize that we cannot be lost to God’s attention or to God’s love. Even when we turn our backs on God, God is search for us. We cannot become lost amidst the nameless, faceless masses. None of us are nameless or faceless to God. 

It is possible to turn our backs on God—to try to hide from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden hiding from God out of shame for their sin. We can separate ourselves from the life of the flock—from the family of God, the Church. We can engage in a life of dissipation outside of the Father’s house in sin.

Like the first son in the Gospel parable—we can act on the dumb idea that we’ll be happier if we just make our own way—if we claim our independence from the Father. But, that’s what sin is, isn’t it? Claiming independence from God and his ways? I’ll do it my way, thank you very much.

But like the prodigal son, that ends in disaster—unhappiness, unfullfilment, misery. If we just trusted God—and stopped playing games with God—and his simple call to holiness—we would be so less depressed.

The real turn in the parable is when the son feels something knocking on his heart. He recognizes everything he has lost because of his choices, and decides to return to the house of his Father.

“And while he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him,” the father had never stopped looking for his son, “and was filled with compassion. The Father runs toward the son to embrace him. Similarly, God, is always knocking on the heart of the sinner, and filled with compassion, is always ready to embrace us in mercy. 

But then, in the Gospel parable, there was another son, and this second son had remained in the Father’s house. But,  there was something lost about him as well—an emptiness. He was lost because he did not share his father’s joy at his brother’s homecoming. Love for his brother had at some point died in his heart. And without love, there can be no joy.

The two sons are two different dangers for Christians. The first danger is that we justify wandering from the Church—embarking on a lifestyle of sin—that brings its own joylessness and emptiness. The second danger, is that those who remain must never lose our love for our brothers and sisters who wander. If we do, it can result in joylessness, bitterness. Those of us who lose love for the sinner, will not know the joy of the Church’s mission to reconcile sinners to God. God forbid we become like that second brother. 

To borrow an idea from Pope Francis…why would anyone become Catholic if all they encounter are scowling, bitter, joyless, complaining sour-pusses. Or the cold, silent treatment. A life-long Catholic annoyed at a stranger sitting in their seat. Someone parked in my spot. Someone is encroaching on my territory. Someone who doesn’t know the right time to sit, stand, kneel. What are they doing here? I never left. We must never harden our hearts against embracing the lost--and those trying to find their way home.

How can we assure that doesn’t happen. Again, like Mother Theresa, prayer enlivens the heart. We need to lovingly gaze upon the face of Jesus in prayer, especially in the Eucharist, so that we can attend to Him in other people. That which you did for the least of my brethren you did for me.

There was a sister who complained to Mother Theresa. Mother, why do we have to waste our time with the daily holy hour. There are children dying in the streets of starvation and disease. The holy hour takes us away from the real work. To which mother replied, sister, because you believe this, you need two hours every day. She wasn’t kidding. 

May our parish always be a place where the lost are embraced and God’s love is joyfully celebrated and shared, where loving attention is given, where God’s children are serious about the sort of prayer that enlivens and emboldens charity, and where the Gospel is learned, cherished and lived out, for the glory of God and salvation of souls. 

June 13 2017 - St. Anthony of Padua - Patron of the lost

Saint Anthony of Padua has been honored since the 11th century by Catholics around the world. Anthony belonged to that first generation of the followers of St. Francis known as the Friars Minor. Unlike Saint Francis, Anthony was ordained to the priesthood.  But like Francis, he preached the Gospel, and united himself to Christ crucified. Anthony is also a doctor of the Church, and laid the foundations for the Franciscans great intellectual heritage.

In 2010, Holy Father Benedict XVI gave a beautiful summary of Saint Anthony’s life and spirituality.  He said, “Anthony, in the school of Francis, always put Christ at the center of his life and thinking, of his action and of his preaching.”

Franciscan, doctor, preacher, priest. Yet, St. Anthony is of course widely invoked as the patron saint of lost things. The little jingle goes like this: "St. Anthony, please look around; something is lost and must be found." This attribution comes from an incident from Anthony’s life.

As the story goes, Anthony had a book of psalms that was very important to him. Besides the value of any book before the invention of printing, the psalter had the notes and comments he had made to use in teaching students in his Franciscan Order.

A novice who had already grown tired of living religious life decided to depart the community. Besides going AWOL he also took Anthony’s psalter! Upon realizing his psalter was missing, Anthony prayed it would be found or returned to him. And after his prayer the thieving novice was moved to repentance. He returned the psalter to Anthony and returned to the Order, which accepted him back.

St. Anthony is invoked as patron of lost things, however more importantly is a patron of lost souls— those who have fallen to mortal sin, have abandoned the Church and have grown apathetic to the practice of the faith. And for this we should invoke him more often than we lose our car keys! When your heart is grieved over family members who have left the Church, pray to St. Anthony! For those young people who seem to be lost in a sea of sin, pray to St. Anthony! For those who are angry at the Church or preach a false Gospel, pray to St. Anthony!

In a sermon, Anthony said, “If you preach Jesus, he will melt hardened hearts; if you invoke him, he will soften harsh temptations; if you think of him, he will enlighten your mind; if you read of him, he will satisfy your intellect.”

Most importantly may Saint Anthony always help us to find Christ: in the poor, in one another, in our Sacred Worship, in our prayer, that we may know God’s help in every trial and faithfully follow the teachings of Christ, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

- - - - - -

For the holy Church of God, that the Lord may graciously watch over her and care for her.

For the peoples of all the world, that the Lord may graciously preserve harmony among them.
That the members of the Franciscan Order and all those consecrated religious may inspire us to strive for greater holiness.

For the priests of the diocese who begin a new parish assignment today, especially for the newly ordained, that they may be faithful Christ in every dimension of their ministry.

For all who are oppressed by any kind of need, that the Lord may graciously grant them relief, especially for the sick and victims of war and terror and natural disaster.

For the repose of the souls of our beloved dead, For the deceased members of our families, friends, and parish, for the deceased priests and religious of the diocese of Cleveland, for the poor souls in purgatory, and for those who have fought and died for our freedom.

O God, our refuge and our strength, hear the prayers of your Church, for you yourself are the source of all devotion, and grant, we pray, that what we ask in faith we may truly obtain. Through Christ our Lord.