Finding us
The Church is on the Farnham Road (A355), just north of Slough.
The A355 runs between M4 J6 (Slough/Windsor) and M40 J2 (Beaconsfield).
The church is just over 2 miles north from the M4, and about 4½ miles south from the M40.
Map
Saint Anthony of Padua
(1195-1231)
Saint Anthony was born Ferdinand de Bouillon in Portugal in 1195 AD.
At the age of fifteen he joined the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine.
Several years later he met five young Franciscan friars
on their way to Morocco to preach Christ to the Moslems.
There they were martyred,
and the return of their bodies to Portugal for burial moved Anthony
to seek entrance to their radical new order, to change his name, and to aspire to the missions himself.
Soon he too set off for Morocco but he became ill on the way and had to return.
His ship was driven off course to Sicily from where he made his way to Assisi,
and there he attended the last great gathering of Franciscans at which Francis himself was present.
At its conclusion he was assigned to the priory at Forli
to say Mass for the brothers and to serve in the kitchen.
At an ordination where no one was prepared to preach,
Anthony was chosen to speak extemporaneously,
and his sermon so astonished his hearers with its brilliance and theological wisdom
that he was made preacher to the province of Romagna.
The learned heretics of that area met their match in him at last,
and soon Anthony's reputation was spread throughout all of Italy and France.
Wherever he went, people crowded the churches to hear him.
Merchants closed their shops, and women stayed up all night in the pews waiting for him.
When the churches could hold no more, they moved him out to the street.
When the city squares overflowed, they took his platform to the hillsides.
As many as forty thousand at one time went to hear this short, stocky, swarthy young Portuguese
with the incredible voice who preached like a recording angel.
Called "The Wonder Worker," it was his sermons which worked most of the wonders,
inflaming the hearts of sinners, reconciling enemies, converting heretics.
But there were other marvels as well and two of many such stories,
often thought of as legends, are attested to by witnesses.
At Rimini one time when Waldensian heretics, angry at his charges against them, had marched off,
Anthony was walking alone by the sea reflecting aloud on how often the fishes are mentioned in Scripture.
Suddenly those who followed him noticed that fishes had gathered and were lifting their heads above water
and appearing to listen.
Another story about Saint Anthony and a mule was also occasioned by a dispute with heretics,
this time the Albigensians of Toulouse.
A man named Bonvillo argued publicly against the real presence in the Eucharist and demanded a sign of its proof.
Anthony must bring the host to the square, he said, and display it before his mule.
If the animal, having gone without food for three days, bowed to it before eating,
Bonvillo would be convinced. The mule did exactly that.
Needless to say, Saint Anthony is invoked as the protector of donkeys.
In addition to his preaching, Anthony was also known for his love of the poor.
He denounced usury, persuaded the state to exempt from prison debtors who could pay with other possessions,
and pleaded, although unsuccessfully, with a local duke of Padua for the release of captives.
He was only thirty-six when his health broke.
Swollen with dropsy, he retired to solitude in a wood
where he lived the last months of his life in a tree house built for him by his brothers.
He died on the 13th June 1231 en route from Camposanpiero to Padua.
He was canonized only one year later which is the fastest canonisation on record,
and was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XII in 1946.
The representation of Saint Anthony standing with the Christ Child in his arms
dates from a seventeenth-century claim of a devotee who was said to have seen him with such an apparition.
Saint Anthony is the patron saint of Portugal,
patron saint of people searching for lost items
and also one of the patron saints of travellers.
