ST. ALPHONSUS MARY OF LIGUORI

     He was born in Marianella, near Naples, then part of the Kingdom of Naples on  September 27, 1696.  He was the first of seven children of D. Giuseppe di Liguori, a naval officer and Captain of the Royal Galleys, and D. Anna Catarina Angelica Cavalieri d’Avenia di Liguori.  Two days after he was born, he was baptized at the Church of Santa Maria dei Vergini (Our Lady of the Virgins) as Alphonsus Mary Anthony John Cosmas Damian Michael Gaspard de’ Liguori (Italian: Alfonso Maria Antonio Giovanni Francesco Cosimo Damiano Michelangelo Gasparo de Liguori).  The family was of noble lineage, but the branch to which Liguori belonged had become somewhat impoverished.  Days after his baptism, his parents took him to a holy priest, asking him to bless their son.  This priest was St. Francesco de Geronimo (Francis de Geronimo), who took the child in his arms and exclaimed, “This child will live to a very old age; he won’t die before his nineties.  He will be a bishop and a saint and will do great things for Jesus Christ.”  The mother of St. Alphonsus told the story of this prophecy to Father Antonio Maria Tannoia, the first great biographer of Saint Alphonsus.

     St. Alphonsus entered the Brotherhood of Nobility while still young, and began his intellectual training by learning Spanish, French, Greek and Latin.  He also began studies of geography, literature, mathematics, grammar, music, architecture, painting, and animated art by his father, who wanted him to be a successful politician.  He learned to ride and fence but was never a good shot because of poor eyesight.  Myopia and chronic asthma precluded a military career so his father had him educated in the legal profession.  He was taught by tutors before entering the University of Naples in 1708, being a 12-year-old adolescent, and was accepted on March 19 of that year at the College of Doctors.  As an exceptional case, at the age of 16 he obtained with outstanding marks the degree of Doctor of Civil Law and Canon Law.  He remarked later that he was so small at the time that he was almost buried in his doctor’s gown and that all the spectators laughed.  When he was 18, like many other nobles, he joined the Confraternity of Our Lady of Mercy, with whom he assisted in the care of the sick at the hospital for “incurables”.

     He became a successful lawyer.  He was thinking of leaving the profession and wrote to someone, “My friend, our profession is too full of difficulties and dangers; we lead an unhappy life and run risk of dying an unhappy death.”  To preserve the purity of his soul, he chose a spiritual director, frequently visited Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, prayed with great devotion to the Virgin, and fled from all those who had bad conversations.

     As a lawyer he had several successes since he inspired confidence in his clients, persuaded through his eloquence and a marked disinterest in money.  It is said that in his profession as a lawyer he did not lose a case in 8 years, but at the age of 27 he decided to withdraw from the profession, after having lost, unjustly, an important case, when he defended Doctor Orsini against the Duke of Tuscany.  Although he thought he had obtained the triumph of his client, they made him sign a rigged statement in which he established that he had been wrong.  Alphonsus retired to his house, began to pray and made a firm resolution to leave the profession of law.

     He then made a retreat in the Lazarist Convent and received the Sacrament of Confirmation in Lent 1722, which rekindled his religious fervor.  On August 28, 1723, he was visiting the sick at the Hospital for Incurables, when he experienced an inner call to renounce material possessions and follow Jesus Christ (the words were “Leave the world, and give yourself to me.”), an experience which moved him to leave the Hospital and renounce his knight’s sword before an image of Mary in the Church of Santa Maria della Redenzione dei Captivi (Our Lady of Mercy and the Redemption of the Captives).  Thus, he decided to become a priest by entering the Oratory as a novice.  His father, upset at the failure of the marriage plans that he conceived for his son, and at his son’s rejection of the legal profession, offered a strong opposition to his decision. He had to endure a real persecution for two months. In the end a compromise was arrived at. D. Giuseppe agreed to allow his son to become a priest, provided he would give up his proposal to join the Oratory, and would continue to live at home. To this Alphonsus by the advice of his confessor and  spiritual director, Father Tommaso Pagano, himself an Oratorian, agreed. Thus, he was left free for his real work, the founding of a new religious congregation. Finally on October 23, St. Alphonsus received the clerical habit.  He received the minor orders in December 1724, the subdiaconate in September 1725, and was ordained on December 21, 1726 at the age of 30.  He quickly gained fame in Naples as a popular preacher.  For a total of six years he devoted himself to the evangelization of Naples and its region.  He lived his first years as a priest with the homeless and the marginalized youth of Naples.  He became very popular because of his plain and simple preaching.  He said: “I have never preached a sermon which the poorest old woman in the congregation could not understand.”  He founded the Evening Chapels, which were managed by the young people themselves.  The chapels were centers of prayer and piety, preaching, community, social activities, and education.  At the time of his death, there were 72, with over 10,000 active participants.  His sermons were very effective in converting those who had been alienated from their faith.

     In 1729, St. Alphonsus left his family home and took up residence at the Chinese Institute in Naples.  It was there that he began his missionary experience in the interior regions of the Kingdom of Naples, where he found people who were much poorer and more abandoned than any of the street children in Naples.  In 1731, while he was ministering to earthquake victims in the town of Foggia, St. Alphonsus said he had a vision of the Virgin Mother, in the appearance of a young girl of 13 or 14, wearing a white veil.

     On November 9, 1732, he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, with the charism of preaching popular missions in the city and the countryside, when Sister Maria Celeste Crostarosa told him that it had been revealed to her that he was the one that God had chosen to found the Congregation.  Originally, the name of the congregation for 17 years was “Congregation of the Holy Savior” and began to function in the small hospice belonging to the nuns of Scala.  Although he was the founder and in fact, the head of the Institute, initially the general direction was assumed by the Bishop of Castellamare, Bishop Falcoia.  It was not until the latter’s death, on April 20, 1743, that St. Alphonsus was formally elected Superior General.  In 1749, Pope Benedict XIV approved the Rule and the Institute for men.

     The main goal of the Congregation was to teach and preach in the slums of cities and other poor places.  They also fought Jansenism, a heresy that preached an excessive moral rigorism: “the penitents should be treated as souls to be saved rather than as criminals to be punished” St. Alphonsus used to say. He also is said never to have refused absolution to a penitent.

     In 1750, the Jansenists began to proclaim that devotion to the Blessed Virgin was a superstition.  St. Alphonsus defended Our Lady, publishing The Glories of Mary.

     A gifted musician and composer, he wrote many popular hymns and taught them to the people in parish missions.  In 1732, while he was staying at the Convent of the Consolation, one of his order’s houses in the small city of Deliceto in the province of Foggia in Southeastern Italy, St. Alphonsus  wrote the Italian carol “Tu scendi dalle stelle” (From Starry Skies Descending) in the musical style of a pastorale.  The version with Italian lyrics was based on his original song written in Neapolitan, which began “Quanno nascette Ninno” (“When the child was born”).  As it was traditionally associated with the zampogna, or large-format Italian bagpipe, it became known as Canzone d’i zampognari, the “Carol of the Bagpipers”.

     In 1762, St. Alphonsus, being 60 years old, was appointed by the Pope as bishop of the small diocese of Sant’Agata de’ Goti (St. Agatha of the Goths) which had 30,000 inhabitants, seventeen religious houses and four hundred priests.  This appointment terrified him, and he wanted to immediately renounce that honor.  However, the Pope did not accept his resignation.  St. Alphonsus was consecrated Bishop of Sant’Agata dei Goti in Rome, on June 20, 1762 by Card. Ferdinando Maria de Rossi.

     Among the clergy of his diocese there were several priests who did not practice their priestly ministry or led a bad life.  Some celebrated the Mass in 15 minutes.  St. Alphonsus suspended them “ipso facto”, unless they were corrected, and wrote a treatise on that point: “At the altar the priest represents Jesus Christ, as St. Cyprian says.  But many current priests, when celebrating Mass, seem rather, acrobats who make their living in the public square.  The most unfortunate thing is that even the religious of reformed orders celebrate Mass in such a hurry and mutilating the rites so much that the pagans themselves would be scandalized.  To see the Holy Sacrifice celebrated in this way, it is to lose faith”.

     A short time later a terrible epidemic broke out in his diocese, which St. Alphonsus had prophesied two years earlier.  People died by the thousands.  The saint, to help the victims, sold everything he had including his carriage, the Holy See authorized him to use funds from the diocese, and he incurred large debts.

     He wrote sermons, books, and articles to encourage devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin Mary.  In the last years of his life, he suffered a painful sickness and bitter persecution from his fellow priests, who dismissed him from the Congregation that he had founded.

     In June 1767, St. Alphonsus suffered a terrible attack of rheumatism that almost brought him to death.  At the end of celebrating Mass on September 21, 1774, he fainted and was unconscious for 24 hours.  When he came to, he said to those present: “I went to attend the Pope, who has just died.”  Pope Clement XIV died on September 22, 1774.

     By May 1775, St. Alphonsus was “deaf, blind, and laden with so many infirmities, that he had no longer even the appearance of a man,” and his resignation was accepted by the recently crowned Pope Pius VI, who allowed him to return to the Redemptorist house of Pagani, where his bitterest years awaited him.  Indeed, the last twelve years of his life would be even more difficult and painful, because of the acute physical sufferings, the spiritual torments, the exhausting efforts to gain recognition for the congregation, and the existence of bitter strife within it.

     Along with the need for Vatican approval of his rule, it also required obtaining the approval of the reigning monarch in Naples, at that time under the control of Spain.  St. Alphonsus felt that his project was caught in the midst of tensions between Church and State.  Virtually blind and unable to personally lead his group, he was expelled from the order he had founded as a result of not having read a vitally important document before signing it.  Not even his virtual blindness and his declining health were accepted as mitigating.  Thus, he went through extremely bitter ecclesiastical circumstances due to the irregular canonical situation of the Redemptorists in the kingdom of Naples, and he was estranged from his own congregation by the wrong decision of Pope Pius VI in 1780.

     But God had an even harsher test in store for him.  Between 1784 and 1785, the saint went through a terrible period of a “dark night of the soul”, underwent temptations about his faith and his virtues.  He was overwhelmed by his scruples, fears, and diabolical hallucinations.  This period lasted 18 months, with intervals of light and rest.  It was followed by a period of ecstasy, prophecies, and miracles.

    St. Alphonsus continued to live with the Redemptorist community in Nocera dei Pagani, Italy, where he died on 1 August 1787.  Shortly after his death, the divisions in his congregation ceased, and the mistakes made against him were acknowledged.  The Redemptorists gained full recognition and spread, first throughout Europe and North America.

     St. Alphonsus Mary of Liguori acquired a reputation for holiness already in life, and a few months after his death began the process of analysis of his life by the Church.  During the beatification process, Father Cajone said: “In my view, his characteristic virtue was purity of intention.  He always and in everything worked for God, forgetting himself.  On one occasion he told us: ‘For the Grace of God, I have never had to confess to having acted out of passion.  Perhaps it is because I am not able to see deeply into my conscience, but, in any case, I have never discovered that sin clearly enough to have to confess it.’”  This is truly admirable, considering that St. Alphonsus was a Neapolitan with a passionate and violent temperament, who could have been an easy prey to anger, pride, and haste.

     He wrote more than 111 works, among which are the Treatise on Moral Theology, written between 1753 and 1755, and The Glories of Mary, one of the most renowned books on Marian themes, written between 1734 and 1750.

     On February 20, 1807, the Catholic Church declared the heroic virtues of St. Alphonsus, and on September 15, 1816, he was beatified by Pope Pius VII.

     He was canonized on May 26, 1839 by Pope Gregory XVI, and on March 23, 1871, was declared “Doctor of the Church,” by Pope Pius IX (it is the only case in which a person received that title less than a century after his death).  He was made patron of confessors and moralists on April 26, 1950, by Pope Pius XII.

     His body is enshrined at Pagani.

     Most Blessed Father Saint Alphonsus, pray for us.