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Hey there, Spouts.

Today is Monday, June 13th, 2020.

Today is also the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua.

Now, all week, we are going to be talking about some really fun and important saints that are celebrating feast days this month during the month of June.

And we are going to start with today's patron, of course, St. Anthony of Padua.

Now, I want to start out by saying that if you are Portuguese, then you probably know this saint

as St. Anthony of Lisbon or Lishboa because he was actually born in Portugal, although we know him mostly around the world as St. Anthony of Padua, Italy.

Regardless, St. Anthony was born in the 12th hundreds in Portugal.

And from a very young age, it was clear that he was brilliant.

Most remarkably, he had an excellent memory, almost photographic memory.

If he read a passage in the Bible, he almost instantly had it memorized. He also had a deep desire to serve

Jesus and to remain humble before Jesus. So both of these things came together. He answered a call

to the religious life and he was known as a fabulous preacher because he had almost the whole Bible memorized and he could

bring up passages from the Bible just out of his memory while preaching. Well, eventually he became

a Franciscan in the early days of the order. In fact, St. Francis was still alive when St. Anthony was alive. He ended up getting shipwrecked,

stranded in Italy, and he lived there for the rest of his life. He made a big impact when all of

the Franciscans were gathered for a big meeting once and they got there, they're getting ready

for Mass, and they realized that no one had prepared a homily. No one was prepared to preach.

And so although no one knew Anthony at the time, they kind of nominated him to preach. And he stood up

and he delivered such a powerful homily that immediately the

order recognized his skills, and they sent him out into the surrounding area to preach.

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