Thirteen Tuesdays Devotions to St. Anthony
Join us March 14 thru June 6 for Eucharistic Adoration at 7:00pm with recitation of the St. Anthony Chaplet.
Origin of the 13 Tuesdays Devotion
In 1231, our beloved patron, St. Anthony, was like a modern day celebrity. Thousands of faithful would journey miles to hear him preach. The churches could not contain the throngs of people, some waiting all night to hear him speak, so he would move his sermons to the open fields. All day he would spend hearing confessions. He had body guards to prevent crowds from snipping lockets of his hair and fragments of his brown cassock.
So on the day of his burial, Tuesday, June 17, the people of Padua lined the streets as his body was carried to its last resting place in the church of Our Blessed Lady which was attached to the Franciscan Friary at Padua. The “Hammer of the Heretics” and worker of miracles was gone but everyone knew he was destined for Heaven. The cortege moved through the city to the music of bells and joyous hymns. The day was marked, too, by an extraordinary number of miracles. The biographers of the Saint tell us that “the blin d regained their sight, the deaf their hearing, and the lame the use of their limbs. Every grace and favor asked for in faith and confidence was granted.”
The people were so impressed by the wonderful things they had witnessed that they began to observe Tuesdays as days of special devotion in honor of their saint. However, as time went on the practice fell into disuse until, in 1616, St. Anthony himself revived it in the form of a novena of nine consecutive Tuesdays.
In that year – 1616 “there lived at Bologna a noble and pious couple, who after twenty two years of married life were childless. One day the lonely wife, kneeling before the altar of St. Anthony in the Franciscan church, laid before the saint the sorrow of her life and begged his intercession. And lo! the saint himself appeared before her and bade her to visit his altar and pray before it on nine consecutive Tuesdays. This she did, and in the course of time became a mother. But to the bitter disappointment of theparents, the infant was found to be horribly deformed. This new sorrow, however, proved to be but a further trial of their faith. The mother brought the baby to the altar of the saint, and on touching it to the stone, all trace of deformity immediately disappeared.”
The devotion grew to Thirteen Tuesdays in honor of the day he died and his entrance to Heaven, June 13, 1231.
Here is a link to an online version.