I was also ready to dismiss St Anthony: now, one pair of lost earrings later, I am his biggest devotee!

IT was an online headline that stopped me in my tracks: ‘Go find your own stuff – fed-up St Anthony steps down.’ And, being an entirely rational, normal, logical, sensible 21stCentury human being, naturally my first thought was, ‘Aha! So THAT’S why he didn’t find my favourite earrings.’

I had been blaming the fact that I didn’t pay him the fiver up front, you see – I’d only promised it to him if the earrings turned up. And while I’d always heard that you had to pay St Anthony in advance when you asked for his help in finding lost things, I thought we’d reached an understanding, after decades of my calling on his services, where he’d work ‘on tick’. I was sure we’d agreed a ‘no foal, no fee’ arrangement where he’d only get the cash on delivery.

Miracles

Then the earrings – an irreplaceable once-off design that I got for Christmas two years ago – stubbornly refused to reappear and I was genuinely wondering what I’d done to annoy him. And then came that headline about his shock resignation, and (aside from the fact that it used an entirely unsaintly synonym for ‘stuff ’) it all made sense: he’d quit, packed it in, stepped down, walked off the job... And then I realised two things: (a) This was a Waterford Whispers News story, another of those hilarious, deadcentre hits on Irish culture, politics and traditions that the satirical site has mastered without equal.

And (b) St Anthony, really? In the ubersophisticated 21st Century, when science and technology have long since replaced superstition and ritual as the guiding tenets of our modern lives, was I actually expecting a 13th-Century Portuguese priest to find a piece of jewellery that I’d lost, and getting mildly impatient because he was taking his time about it?

We have, thanks to the dizzying progress of modern technology, learned to be blasé about experiences, incidents and behaviours that would have qualified as miracles, madness or pure black magic even a generation ago. If you saw somebody arguing aloud in the street with an unseen being in the Nineties, you’d conclude they were suffering from an insane delusion. Today, you’d simply assume they were talking on a hands-free phone.

As recently as 1989, when the second Back To The Future imagined life in 2015, sci-fi still expected that future progress would come in the area of transport, with hoverboards and flying cars, rather than communications; even the writers’ wildest fantasies never anticipated that if you wanted to speak face-to-face with your cousin in Australia, you’d just take a tiny gadget out of your pocket and press a button. If I lose my mobile phone I’ll blithely ask another device, my laptop, to find it using GPS. I can buy a fridge, today, that will notice when I’m running low on milk and text me to buy some; alternatively, it can cut me out altogether and just talk directly to the fridge in the local Centra. I don’t understand how any of this wizardry works, but I place my faith in the modern-day druids and soothsayers – Bill Gates, for example, and Tim Cook – and understand that if I subscribe to their doctrines (i.e. buy their products) and follow their teachings (read the damned instructions), then miraculous blessings and magical gifts from distant lands will be mine (once I’ve signed into PayPal and paid the delivery, of course).

Is it so peculiar then, when you consider the elasticity of our faith and even our credulity when it comes to technological advances, that part of us remains equally capable of believing in far more ancient powers we are no better able to understand or explain? That Waterford Whispers item on St Anthony resigning, in a strop over the triviality of the items he’s being asked to locate, wouldn’t have been nearly so funny if so very many of us, of all ages and beliefs and creeds and none, weren’t stricken by a surprisingly sincere relief to find it was only a joke after all.

For some reason that belies all our perceptions of modern-day Ireland as a ruefully post-religious land of ‘recovering Catholics’, you will still hear grown adults casually recommending St Anthony as a fail-safe locator of lost things. They may not have said a prayer in years, nor set foot in a church apart from weddings and funerals, and they may chuckle a little at their own gullibility, but you’d be amazed how even the most unlikely of people have their own St Anthony stories.

My granny was a big devotee of the saint, but my adult introduction to his skill set came through a friend, an eminent lawyer with a sharply rational mind. He recounted, as if it was a Rule of the Superior Courts, the precise procedure for invoking St Anthony’s help: you must exhaust all possible locations in looking for the missing item, then you ask the saint for help and pay him in advance, and, having done so, you return to the first place you searched and begin again. By this method he recovered a valuable diamond tiepin that reappeared, by magic, in the box where it always lived. Over the years I have found passports, items of jewellery, car keys, credit cards and even mislaid purses after asking St Anthony for help. A few years ago I accidentally posted an unmarked envelope full of cash in a postbox, mistaking it for a letter. My queries to An Post looked doomed until I promised St Anthony a cut of the money if he could find it. I got it back the next day – every last cent.

Just last week, a normally quite sensible senior colleague on this very newspaper mentioned that he had lost a valuable watch on the Dart that morning. As if we were discussing putting out a Facebook request or ringing the lost property office, we agreed that St Anthony was his only man. My friend wondered how soon he could get to a church to make the upfront €5 payment, and we decided that placing it in an envelope marked with the saint’s name would be sufficient evidence of his bona fides. Literally within seconds of his doing so, he got a call to say the watch had been found.

Hocus-pocus, you say – the watch would have turned up anyway, this is just fanciful thinking, a willing suspension of disbelief, and a feeble-minded conflation of coincidence and superstition. And if you wanted to be cynical, then, as the Waterford Whispers piece suggested, you’d wonder why St Anthony can’t locate the millions of euro the Church promised to compensate abuse victims. And haven’t we swallowed religious nonsense wholesale for centuries? Haven’t we spent long enough in this country cowering from priests and fairies without trailing these old ‘piseogs’ into the 21st Century?

Supernatural

And I couldn’t agree with you more. No doubt there’s some sort of rational, behavioural determinism at play when lost things appear to turn up after we have concentrated sufficiently to recommence the search, coupled with the placebo effect of convincing ourselves that we have supernatural assistance in our renewed endeavours. So that business of bribing a 13th-Century Portuguese priest with €5 – that’s all just superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder or not walking under ladders or never opening an umbrella indoors. But on the offchance that science doesn’t have all the answers, just yet, and just in case there’s more to heaven and Earth than this world dreams of, it’s probably best not to be caught on a technicality.

So after my friend found his watch, I got an envelope, tucked in a €5 note, and wrote ‘St Anthony’ on the front. When passing the local church the next day, I went in and, feeling a tiny bit silly, put the envelope under the saint’s statue. That evening I went home and, as custom directs, I began searching for my precious earrings in the first place I’d looked. And that is exactly where I found them...