64 Lisbon Santo Antonio; Where did I put those keys?

 In my ongoing project to visit more churches than your average atheist, I generally find it easy on my various trips or wandering round Paris, to visit and photograph. Then when I get home I am supposed to write a little blog post about each church. But at home there is always a mountain of work, so I have quite a backlog of churches (about sixty or so). This is one I visited in Lisbon last autumn.

This church of Santo Antonio is thought to have been built on the very site that the saint was born. He is one of the patron saints of Lisbon, but is better known as "Anthony of Padua" since that is where he died (in the 13th century). He got canonized within a year of his death which is something of a record. He was also proclaimed a doctor of the Church 600 years or so later, in 1946 - everything comes to those that wait.

This is the Saint Anthony that Catholic believers pray to when they have lost something. This goes back to an event in Anthony's life when he had a hymn book stolen, apparently.

They say he once preached to a bunch of fish (really) in order to criticize his human congregation for not listening. More impressively, he is said to have been poisoned by mean people but suffered no harm with the help of the Almighty.

Saint Anthony is generally represented in statues with a small (more or less acrobatic depending on the statue) Christ child, often sitting on his prayer book. In the altar here, he looks a bit like a ventriloquist.