Why a Catechism of St. Alphonsus?
St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787) is one of the most widely read of all Catholic authors. Bishop of Sant’Agata dei Goti, founder of the Redemptorists, Doctor of the Church, and patron of confessors and of moral theologians, he wrote more than a hundred works, and his books on prayer, on the Passion of Christ, and on the Blessed Virgin have been carried into nearly every language of the Christian world.
Yet the saint did not write only for the learned or for the already devout. Much of his life was spent among the poor and the unlettered, the people of the country towns and the mountain missions, and for them he wrote with a particular care. The work that forms the greater part of this volume, his Instruction to the People on the Commandments and the Sacraments, was composed for exactly such readers, and for the parish priests and missionaries who were to teach them. In it Alphonsus sets down, in the plainest words he can find, what a Christian must believe, what he must do, and how he is to confess and receive Communion well.
This Instruction was rendered into English once before, in the nineteenth-century Centenary edition of the saint’s collected works; but that translation, long out of common reach, is cast in the heavier idiom of its day. The present edition offers it afresh from the Italian, in clear and modern English, and places before it his short catechism in questions and answers, so that the reader has both the seed and the full flower: the doctrine a child commits to memory, and the patient explanation a pastor would give from the pulpit.
What the reader will find here is Alphonsus the teacher rather than Alphonsus the theologian. He takes the Ten Commandments and the seven Sacraments one by one; he answers the excuses people make; he presses home, again and again, the few things he thought most necessary for salvation. And he tells stories, for he believed, as he says himself, that examples make more impression on simple people than arguments do. Some of these stories are tender and some are terrible; all of them are meant to move the will, and not merely to inform the mind.
The doctrine of this book is the perennial faith of the Church, and it is as true now as on the day it was written. Whether it is taken up for instruction or for catechesis, for preparing converts, or simply for the reading of a Christian who wishes to serve God and save his soul, it carries the voice of a Doctor of the Church speaking, as he most loved to speak, to ordinary people about the things that matter most.