It’s not every day that you get to offer your hand to an 800-year-old saint. But hundreds of Catholics in the Chicago area took the time to offer their greetings, as well as their prayers and their veneration, when two relics of St. Anthony of Padua visited the Chicago area June 8-16. The relics — a rib and piece of petrified skin — visited nine churches and shrines in the Archdiocese of Chicago as well as making stops in Milwaukee and Rockford. The visit was part of the celebration of the 750th anniversary of the discovery of St. Anthony’s relics by St. Bonaventure. At each stop, parishioners and pilgrims lined up to touch the reliquaries, sometimes offering a kiss or kneeling for a brief prayer. That’s appropriate, said Franciscan Father Mario Conte, who traveled from Padua, Italy, with the relics. We venerate relics in order to feel a connection to those we love who are no longer with us, he said. In the case of the saints, they are people who now are with God in heaven, and we ask them to intercede for us. Conte said he imagines St. Anthony next to God, tugging at God’s sleeve, saying, “Please, help my friend here.” “Anthony is our friend,” Conte said in his homily at a June 11 Mass at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, at Noble Street and Evergreen. “If you are here tonight, it is because you love St. Anthony.” St. Anthony of Padua was born in Portugal in 1195. He joined the Augustinians as a teenager, and while in seminary excelled at theological and Scripture studies. But he was inspired to become a Franciscan after seeing the headless bodies of the five Franciscan protomartyrs, who were killed in Morocco in 1220. He was relatively unknown until he was asked to say a few words after the ordination of some Franciscans in 1222, and he became widely known for his preaching. At the same time, St. Francis of Assisi asked that Anthony take over the theological education of his friars. He died in 1231. So much devotion Resurrectionist Father Anthony Bus, pastor of St. Stanislaus, claims St. Anthony as his patron. He said he learned about the power of intercession while making a retreat at Padua while on sabbatical in Italy. He would go and spend hours watching the pilgrims approach the tomb of St. Anthony. “They all had such reverence and love,” Bus said. “I found myself just praying for their intentions.” Many of those who came to venerate the relics in Chicago spoke of their devotion to the saint, who is widely known as the patron of finding lost things. Some spoke of praying to him to find parking spaces, or gas stations. Helen Dimas of St. Philomena Parish, said she became attached to St. Anthony when she was the mother of young children and constantly misplaced things. “My mother told me he’s the saint for the scatterbrained,” she said. But friendships grow with frequent interaction, even over trivial things, and now, Dimas said, the last item on her “bucket list” is to travel to the Shrine of St. Anthony in Padua and visit his tomb and the relics that are kept there, including his tongue and lower jaw, both of which remain uncorrupted since his death in 1231. Since she’s not sure she’ll have the opportunity to travel to Padua, she was grateful for the opportunity to visit his relics in Chicago. “He’s one of the most beloved saints,” Dimas said. She stood in line to venerate the relics with Janet Back, a parishioner at St. Vincent Ferrer in River Forest, who said the saint actually helped her make it to St. Stanislaus Kostka. First she had an appointment for that evening get cancelled, then, when she found herself down in the south suburbs, in an area she didn’t know well and almost out of gas, she prayed to St. Anthony and soon found someone able to direct her to a gas station and get her on her way back to the North Side. Alice Silva took the time to come to St. Peter’s in the Loop, 110 W. Madison St., twice on June 13, St. Anthony’s feast day. She came back, she said, because she had an intention she forgot to pray for the first time. She came back to pray for a nephew, who soon will be striking out on his own, she said. She had prayed already for her children and grandchildren. “I really feel that he is going to help,” Silva said. He’s everywhere Indeed, Conte said, there are images of St. Anthony in nearly every Catholic church, whether statues or paintings or stained glass windows. In most of them, he holds the Bible, because he was a renowned Scripture scholar and the first teacher of theology to the Franciscans, and the infant Jesus, whom he is said to have encountered in a vision and held in his arms before he died. But in all of them, he looks at the people looking at him with an expression of tenderness and love, Conte said. “He wanted to share this love of God with everyone,” Conte said, adding that, as a preacher, Anthony’s gift was to make important themes understandable to the masses. The saint cared for those same uneducated people, championing what would now be called the human rights of the poor and the lowly, he said.