Bishop and Doctor of the Church, Founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (1696–1787)
Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori was born on the 27th of September, 1696, at Marianella, just outside Naples. His father, Don Giuseppe de’ Liguori, was a captain of the royal galleys and a man of the old Neapolitan nobility: proud, devout, and ambitious for his eldest son. His mother, Anna Cavalieri, was the gentler influence, and it was from her that Alphonsus drew his first and deepest lessons in prayer. She gave her children to God before she gave them anything else, and her son would say in old age that whatever good was in him he owed, after God, to her.
He was a gifted child, almost alarmingly so. He played the harpsichord well enough to perform in public, he painted, and he kept both gifts all his life. He learned quickly, prayed early, and held back from the rougher amusements of boys his age without ever seeming proud of it. By sixteen he had taken his doctorate in both canon and civil law, so young that the university granted a dispensation for his age. The story was long told in Naples that the doctoral robes nearly swallowed the boy who wore them.
The city opened to him at once. For eight years he practiced at the bar with a brilliance that lost him scarcely a case and an honesty rare in that profession. He prepared every cause in prayer and refused any he believed unjust. Then, in 1723, came the reversal that turned his life. Pleading a great suit, he overlooked a single document that decided everything and lost in open court before men who had thought him unbeatable. He went home, shut himself away, and for three days would neither eat nor be comforted. When he came out, he was finished with the world. “World,” he said, “I know you now.” He never returned to the courts.
The decision had been forming under the surface for some time. He had given his free hours to the sick at the Hospital for the Incurables, and it was there among the wards that the call came plainly, with a light he could not mistake and a certainty he could not argue away. He laid his sword on the altar of Our Lady of Ransom and offered himself to the Church. Against his father’s furious opposition he began his studies for the priesthood, and he was ordained on the 21st of December, 1726, in his thirtieth year.
His first love as a priest was the poorest of Naples, the lazzaroni who slept in doorways and knew almost nothing of God. He gathered them into what came to be called the Evening Chapels, plain rooms where working men taught one another the catechism, prayed together, and were brought back, many of them, to a decent and Christian life. Within a few years thousands were meeting in these chapels across the city. It was the pattern of his whole ministry: to go to the people no one else would trouble to reach, and to speak to them in words they could understand.
That conviction took lasting form in 1732. Drawn by the counsel of Bishop Thomas Falcoia and by what he believed to be the will of God, shown to a holy nun at Scala above the gulf of Amalfi, Alphonsus left Naples for the mountain towns of the south, where the country poor were more neglected still. On the 9th of November, 1732, at Scala, he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, for the preaching of missions to the abandoned poor of the countryside. The beginning was bitter. Companions quarreled and left; the little community nearly dissolved within its first year; and for a time Alphonsus was almost alone. He held on. Slowly the work took root and spread.
All the while he was becoming one of the most widely read authors in the history of the Church. More than a hundred works came from his pen, written not for scholars but for ordinary souls. The Glories of Mary, the Visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the Preparation for Death, Uniformity with God’s Will, the Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, and the sermons gathered in volumes such as this one were carried into homes and pulpits across Europe and well beyond it. He wrote in Latin for theologians and in plain Italian for everyone else. Once, in the Neapolitan dialect, he wrote a Christmas carol, Tu scendi dalle stelle, that is still sung in Italy today. As a moral theologian he set himself against the harsh rigorism of his time, which frightened ordinary penitents away from the sacraments, and he taught instead a way that was firm but merciful, exact but kind. The Church would one day make him the patron of confessors and moral theologians for it.
In 1762, much against his will, he was made Bishop of Sant’Agata dei Goti, a small and troubled diocese. He was already old and ailing, and he begged to be spared, but he obeyed. As bishop he lived more poorly than his own servants. He reformed his clergy, examined and instructed his people himself, and during a famine sold what little he owned, even the furnishings of his house, to feed the starving. The weight of the office never left him. The cross on his breast, he said, was a stone.
His body was failing badly. A violent rheumatic illness bent him almost double, pressing his head down upon his chest so that in his last years he could not lift it. A wound formed where his chin met the breast. He bore it without complaint. In 1775, worn out and nearly helpless, he was at last allowed by Pope Pius VI to resign his diocese, and he went back, as a simple religious, to his community at Pagani.
His final years held a harder trial than illness. Through a deception he never fully understood, half blind and nearly deaf, he was led to sign a revised rule that split his own congregation in two. By a stroke of a pen he had not grasped, he found himself set outside the institute he had founded. With this outward sorrow came an inward one. For a long season God seemed to withdraw, and the saint passed through fearful temptations against faith and hope, the darkness of soul that the masters of prayer call the night of the spirit. He clung to God in the dark, repeating acts of trust and love when he could feel nothing, and out of that desolation he came at last to a peace that did not leave him again.
He died quietly at Pagani on the 1st of August, 1787, in his ninety-first year, as the Angelus was ringing at midday. He was beatified in 1816 and canonized on the 26th of May, 1839, by Pope Gregory XVI. In 1871 Pope Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church, and in 1950 Pope Pius XII named him patron of confessors and moralists. His feast is kept on the first of August.
From the evening chapels of Naples to the last book dictated in his old age, what he wanted never changed. He wished to bring God within reach of ordinary people, to make the way of salvation plain, and to convince a single soul that it was loved. Everything he wrote was meant for that one end, and it is best read in the spirit in which he gave it.