Is Saint Anthony a special Galway favourite Ð and why?

THE stalls at the Solemn Novena became a stop in a little piece of research in the past fortnight as I tried to pin-down precisely the apparent devotion to St Anthony which seems to be special in some parts of Galway City and which only came to my notice recently.I have always regarded St Anthony as the saint you prayed to when something had been lost. He is mentioned colloquially most frequently in just such a context . . . my memory also is of people writing the initials SAG (St Anthony Guide) on the back of envelopes.

You still see SAG occasionally on the backs of envelopes when one of the slightly older generation is in need of some reassurance that, if all else fails, the intervention of St Anthony may see that letter safely to its destination.

As someone who loses his car keys at least twice in any one day, I have, on occasion, been known to pray to St Anthony to find them and promise to make a donation to the selfsame saint who is reputed to have a particular gift of helping people to find things.

Inevitably, the promised contribution becomes more ostentatious by the minute, as I run my hands down the sides of cushions on armchairs, and begin to feel about in the darkest nether regions of the sittingroom sofa . . . before remembering that I left the keys in my coat pocket because it was raining when I came home and I was wearing an overcoat.

However, in the past few weeks I have run into this practise during the course of the Solemn Novena, of Galway people saying they will offer a prayer to St Anthony when someone was sick, or unwell. This arose in the context of the many, many petitions which people submitted during the Novena for help for those who were unwell.

From what I can gather, it would appear to be a devotion which is particularly associated with older areas of the city such as Woodquay, Suckeen, Bohermore and in and around the city centre. While others pray to someone like Padre Pio, those districts seem to have this particular devotion to St Anthony. At least that is what I am given to understand.Other than that, I am a

t a loss to explain it. Perhaps the explanation is simple – maybe it is that those parts of the city naturally associate with The Abbey, the Franciscan church, which is in the city centre.

Hopefully, someone out there in ‘reader land’ may be able to shed some light on precisely why the name St Anthony should be associated with prayer for people who are unwell . . . but, in the meantime, I have been doing my own little bit of sleuthing into the popularity of certain saints and whether ‘fashions’ have changed in recent years.

There was surely no better place to start the investigation than at one of the stalls outside the Solemn Novena in Galway Cathedral. However, before going on with my rather sparse findings, can I say that my only definite information on St Anthony is that he was a Franciscan who died in Padua in 1231.

For more, read page 12 of this week's City Tribune.