A Book Thief’s Confession

Praying to St. Anthony may lead to conviction as readily as restitution.

As a collector of Catholic trivia, I could tell you that St. Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of lost objects. (That’d probably be a 200-point answer on hypothetical Catholic Jeopardy.) But I didn’t know the origin story of this saint/patronage pairing until recently.

According to the hagiography, Anthony was teaching young Franciscans at a Bologna monastery in the 1220s. One day, a jaded novice who was done with the Franciscan life left it all behind —left it all, that is, except for Anthony’s hand-annotated book of the Psalms, which the novice stole. These were the days before the printing press, so books were hand-copied and especially valuable.

Anthony realized the book was missing and began to pray. He asked God to have mercy on the erstwhile novice and for the return of the book. And here’s the most outrageous part of the legend: God, apparently, commanded the devil to intervene, who appeared to the young man in the form of a horrible monster. “Go back and restore immediately that which you have stolen,” the monster says in one retelling of the story, “otherwise I will kill you and throw you into the river.” The novice, petrified and ashamed, returned the book to Anthony, apologized, and reentered the religious life.

Two things strike me about this legend: First, hagiographies are often utterly wild, and any inclination to tame the saints (or the Lord, for that matter) with soft-focus theology is misguided. Second, the only situation dire enough I’ve ever heard of that prompted God to command the devil to appear as a murder-threatening monster was about a lost, stolen book. As a bibliophile, the central role a book has in this dramatic story heartens me. As a book borrower who is bad at returning volumes to my friends and family members who lend them to me, I sit in fear and trembling.

I don’t even need Satan-as-a-monster to feel bad about my poor borrowing habits. When I catch sight of someone else’s book on a shelf at home, I’m hit with a pang of guilt. And as a corollary to this guilt, I know exactly which books belong to whom: there’s my brother’s “Blessed Are the Organized,” my neighbor’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” my colleague’s “The Wager.” “Ah, I have to read that and get it back to them,” I say to myself. But I haven’t read any of them yet, and I don’t want to let go until I’ve read them. The idea of returning a borrowed book unread is admission of ungrateful failure that’s hard to stomach: “I know recommending and lending a specific book to someone because you think they’d like it is one of the most generous, thoughtful things a person can do. Here’s your book back, which I couldn’t be bothered to read.” No way I’m doing that.

Read: Who You Gonna’ Call?

The easiest solution here would be to make a stack of borrowed books and force myself to read through them before opening anything else. But I am an inveterate book buyer and serial non-finisher. I usually have three or five bookmarked reads sitting on my nightstand at the same time. I’m more likely to procrastinate and let the guilt simmer than to take decisive action and clear the deck.

But this scenario feels different when I look at it from the other direction: I’m a happy and willing book lender and maintain no illusions about the slim chances of getting my volumes back. I certainly don’t keep a mental list of what books I’m missing the way I do for the borrowed ones on my own shelves. I’m sure some of my lenders don’t care or have forgotten what I owe them, too. My sins here are probably venial. And the novice’s big problem in the St. Anthony story, of course, is that he didn’t ask to borrow the book. He just stole it and ran. Maybe Anthony would’ve lent it to the novice had he just asked.

Ultimately, I like participating in an economy of book lending and borrowing that includes no money changing hands nor a firm expectation of the book’s return. I might like it even more than giving books as gifts, because gift giving usually has an expectation of reciprocity built in, and you generally only exchange gifts with people you know well. Book lending, on the other hand, can happen between you and anyone. The act of lending a book while assuming you probably won’t see it again might even be seen as bravely subversive in our capitalistic system, in which private property rights are near-absolute and gifts are only given on special occasions to the people in your tightest social circle.

The next time I think about asking St. Anthony for help finding a book I swear I had, I’ll try to keep in mind the possibility that I lent it to my neighbor and forgot all about it. To paraphrase Tolkien, not all books that wander away from your shelf are lost.

Mike Jordan Laskey is the director of communications for the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States in Washington, D.C. He is the author of “The Ministry of Peace and Justice” (Liturgical Press). His writing has appeared in National Catholic Reporter, America magazine, US Catholic, and elsewhere. Laskey also is a co-host of the AMDG Jesuit podcast. Laskey’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.