This volume gathers several works of St. Alphonsus, all translated for this edition from the Italian. The greater part of it is his Istruzione al popolo, his complete instruction for ordinary people on the Ten Commandments and the Sacraments, with the prefatory counsels that open it and the tragic examples that close it; it appeared in English once before, in the nineteenth-century Centenary edition of the saint’s collected works, and is here translated afresh from the Italian in clear, modern English. Joined to it are the short instruction On the Mysteries of Faith, which is his Breve dottrina cristiana, and his brief catechism in questions and answers, from his Compendio della Dottrina cristiana (Part One); a Rule of Christian Life and the daily Christian Acts, from his Regolamento di vita d’un cristiano and his Eternal Maxims (Part Five); and, in the appendix, a short chapter on teaching the faith to children, from his Selva di materie predicabili (his manual for preachers and missioners), together with one of his discourses to a confraternity.
The translation
This book is translated from the Italian. Alphonsus wrote the Istruzione for ordinary people and asked in his preface for the plainest possible style, and this translation follows him. Scripture is given in English, with the reference in the text. Where Alphonsus quotes the Latin of the Fathers, we give the Latin and then an English translation. His own paragraph numbers are kept. A few Neapolitan dialect words, mostly in the second commandment, are left in Italian, since they have no English equivalent and Alphonsus explains them himself.
The Ten Commandments
The commandments, at the head of each chapter and in the questions and answers, are given in Alphonsus’s own catechetical wording, the form traditional in the Catholic catechism. Where he explains each commandment, his own words are kept.
Headings
In a few places we have supplied a heading where Alphonsus changes his subject without marking the break, for example the section on fasting within the third commandment and his Rule for a Father of a Family within the fourth. These are noted here, so that nothing may be taken as the author’s that is not his.
A word on the discipline of an earlier age
The doctrine of this book is the unchanging faith and morals of the Church, as true today as on the day it was written. The practical disciplines and observances found in these pages we have preserved exactly as St. Alphonsus wrote them, preferring to present him as he wrote rather than as he might be rewritten. The reader thus receives not an adaptation, but the saint’s own work, together with a faithful glimpse of Catholic life in his time.
On footnotes
We have added no scholarly apparatus of footnotes. Alphonsus names his authorities in his own text, and the references to Scripture are given as they occur. A fuller apparatus would suit a critical edition, but not a book meant, as this one is, for reading and for use. The one footnote in these pages is therefore not the saint’s but the editor’s: a single explanatory note, marked [Ed.], at a passage whose older moral-theology idiom could otherwise mislead a present-day reader.