St. Anthony the Abbot

Who they were

Anthony was a young Egyptian landowner who heard one Gospel line read at church, go, sell what you have, give to the poor, and did it literally and completely, then walked out past the edge of the settled world.

His decades in the desert, the combats with temptation that a thousand painters rendered, the years walled in an abandoned fort, and the wisdom that eventually drew crowds into the wilderness after him, were written down by his friend Athanasius. That Life of Antony became one of the most consequential books in Christian history. It invented the monastic movement's literature and converted readers, Augustine among them, for centuries. He emerged when the Church needed him, supporting the persecuted and backing Athanasius against the age's great heresy, and died at, the tradition says, one hundred and five. The patronages are wonderfully earthy. St. Anthony's fire, the condition now called ergotism, made him patron of skin diseases; the hospital order that treated it kept pigs, which made him patron of farm animals, and his January feast is still the day for blessing them; and the old images of the hermit beside his own grave gave gravediggers their saint.

Why people turn to St. Anthony the Abbot

Chronic skin conditions, by the old title. Farmers and keepers of animals, on his feast especially. And everyone drowning in possessions who suspects the one Gospel line was aimed at them.

How to ask their intercession

For the skin, plainly. For the animals by name, since the January blessing is a living custom. And for the harder thing: the freedom to let go of one possession that owns you.