The sermons in this volume are offered in a fresh English dress, with two ends always in view: that the reader should meet St. Alphonsus in clear, living English, and that what he meets should be, as nearly as we could make it, what the saint actually wrote.
For more than a century, English-speaking Catholics have known these discourses chiefly through the nineteenth-century translation associated with Bishop Grimm and the house of Benziger. That labor was a real gift to the Church, and it is the foundation on which this edition is built. We have honored it gratefully. But a translation is a window, and over a hundred years even a good window clouds. The English had grown stiff and inverted where the saint is plain and quick; and, more seriously, in many places it had drifted from, softened, or quietly dropped what St. Alphonsus set down in his own Sermoni compendiati.
And so every Sunday sermon in this volume has been read line by line against the saint’s original Italian. This surfaced and corrected hundreds of places—small and large—where the old English had wandered. A few will show the reader the kind of thing we mean:
- Of the saints it was said that they “fortified their bodies by works of penance”; the saint wrote that they mortified them—the very opposite of the ascetical sense.
- A consoling passage was credited to “Jesus Christ” that is in truth God speaking through the prophet Sophonias.
- The canticle of Anna the prophetess (1 Kings 2) had been laid at the feet of the high priest Heli, who never sang it.
- The prophet whom the people rejected was named Eliseus, where St. Alphonsus names Samuel; and a charitable deed was assigned to St. Catherine of Genoa that belongs to St. Catherine of Siena.
- The angels do not merely “attend” the last judgment; in the original they assist at it. The soldiers showed our Lord “the other instruments of the passion,” where the saint wrote only “the other signs.”
- The Scripture itself had slipped: “Give not thy ears to the cruel” should read “Give not thy years to the cruel” (Prov. 5:9), a single letter that overturns the verse. And the sinner is borne on “waves of eternal pleasures”—a startling phrase, until one sees that St. Alphonsus wrote “waves of carnal pleasures.”
None of these is a quarrel for its own sake. Each is a place where a reader, trusting the page, would have been told something other than what the saint preached—now a wrong name, now a softened image, now a whole clause the old translators had let fall. Where St. Alphonsus is vivid, we have tried to keep him vivid; where he is exact, exact; where he names a father, a Scripture, or a date, we have set it right against his text.
A note on the feast-day discourses. Besides the Sunday sermons—each of them a single discourse of the saint—this volume keeps sermons for the great feasts that fall within the year: St. Joseph, the Annunciation, the Sorrows of Mary, and the Passion of our Lord. The discourse on the Passion is St. Alphonsus’s own, entire; those for St. Joseph, the Annunciation, and the Sorrows of Mary have been gathered and arranged from his own writings on those mysteries, so that the reader may keep the feast in his company. In all of them the words are his.
What the reader holds, then, is the old translation renewed and corrected, not displaced—the same fire, trimmed of the smoke. The English has been brought near to the way we speak, while the saint’s Latin tags, his Scripture (in the Douay), and his great chain of patristic witnesses stand as he left them. Our hope is a simple one: that nothing here should stand between the reader and the heart of a saint who wrote, always, to be understood, and to save souls.