Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787)

Birth and family at Marianella (1696)

Alphonsus Liguori was born on 27 September 1696 at Marianella, a hamlet at the gates of Naples, into a family of the minor Neapolitan nobility.^[7][8] His father, Giuseppe de' Liguori, a naval officer and captain of the royal galleys, dreamed of a glittering career for his eldest son.^[9] His mother, Anna Maria Cavalieri, of Spanish descent, passed on to him a deep piety and entrusted him very early to the Oratorians.^[10][11]

The child was of rare precocity. Gifted in music, painting and letters, he received a refined education that destined him for the bar, the surest path of advancement in the Naples of the viceroys.

The child prodigy: doctor of laws at sixteen

At sixteen, on 21 January 1713, Alphonsus was received as doctor of civil and canon law at the University of Naples — so young, it is said, that a gown had to be lent to fit his size.^[12] Two years later he opened his law practice and within a few years became one of the rising stars of the Neapolitan bar, pleading and winning, according to the received tradition, several hundred cases without losing a single one.^[13]

Beneath the robe of the brilliant lawyer, however, a man of prayer was already hiding: Alphonsus shunned worldly theatres, received Communion often, and kept in his heart a restlessness that judicial glory could not satisfy.

The lost trial of 1723 and the break with the world

In 1723 came the event that turned his life upside down. Entrusted with defending the interests of the Duke of Gravina in a considerable suit — half a million ducats — against the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Alphonsus pleaded with his usual mastery. But he had made one mistake: he had misread a decisive document, overlooking a single word that reversed its whole meaning. The opposing party picked up the error; the case was lost.^[14][15]

The shock was total. For this jurist reputed infallible, humiliation became grace. According to his first biographers, he left the courtroom speaking the words that have remained famous:

"World, I know you now! Law courts, you shall see me no more." — Saint Alphonsus, leaving the Naples bar after the lost trial of 1723^[16]

A few weeks later, on 23 October 1723, while praying in the church of the Hospital of the Incurables, he received, as tradition holds, an interior light that settled him: he would lay his gentleman's sword on the altar of Our Lady of Mercy and take the clerical habit, against his father's furious will.^[17][18]

Ordination and the first missions

Ordained priest on 21 December 1726, at thirty, Alphonsus threw himself into the humblest apostolate.^[19][20] He frequented the "evening chapels", those popular prayer gatherings founded in the poor districts of Naples, and discovered an immense spiritual misery: the lazzaroni of the urban underworld, but above all the peasants and goatherds of the mountains whom no one catechized.

His preaching, at first too learned, grew simpler until it became limpid. He set himself a rule that has remained famous: to preach in such a way that even an illiterate old woman would understand everything — in his eyes, a sublime and studied style converts no one.^[21]

The foundation of the Redemptorists (Scala, 1732)

It was in the mountains, at Scala, above Amalfi, that Alphonsus measured the abandonment of the countryside. Encouraged by the mystic Maria Celeste Crostarosa and by his spiritual director, he founded on 9 November 1732 the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, devoted to the evangelization of the rural poor, "in imitation of Jesus Christ the Redeemer".^[22][23]

The beginnings were harsh: divisions, departures, opposition. Alphonsus remained almost alone, but held firm. The young congregation took root, opened houses throughout the Kingdom of Naples, and gave the Church one of its great modern missionary institutes — which would soon count among its sons the wonder-working brother Saint Gerard Majella.

Bishop against his will of Sant'Agata dei Goti (1762-1775)

In 1762, despite his refusals and his tears, Pope Clement XIII compelled him to accept the episcopal see of Sant'Agata dei Goti, a poor little diocese north of Naples.^[24][25] As bishop, Alphonsus led a life of extreme austerity: he sold his carriage and his rings to feed the starving during the famine of 1763-1764, reformed the clergy, multiplied missions and himself heard confessions for hours on end.

Worn out by illness, he finally obtained in 1775, from Pope Pius VI, permission to resign after thirteen years as bishop. He withdrew to his Redemptorists at Pagani, to live out his final years there.^[26]

Between Jansenist rigorism and laxism

The 18th-century Catholic Church was torn apart by a great quarrel over the moral conscience. On one side, rigorism, hardened by Jansenism, multiplied prohibitions, kept the faithful away from Communion and laid a crushing burden on souls. On the other, laxism relaxed everything and drained the law of its force.^[27][28]

A tireless confessor, Alphonsus saw the ravages of both excesses: penitents crushed by scruples, or on the contrary lulled in a false peace. His whole moral theology was born of this pastoral experience, not of academic speculation.

Equiprobabilism: a path of truth and mercy

To guide the confessor, Alphonsus worked out a moral system that would be called equiprobabilism. The principle, inherited from tradition but refined by him, may be summed up thus: a doubtful law does not bind.

In concrete terms: when the opinions for and against the existence of an obligation are of equal or nearly equal probability, one may follow the opinion favourable to liberty; but as soon as the opinion favouring the law is notably more probable, it is that one which must be followed.^[29][30]

Alphonsus had at first, in two anonymously published writings (1749 and 1755), defended a broader position; but he abandoned this first point of view for his middle system, balanced, which refuses both the tyranny of scruple and the easiness of laxism.^[31] It is a morality of truth as much as of mercy: neither softening the law, nor crushing the conscience.

The Theologia Moralis and the merciful confessor

His theological masterpiece, the Theologia Moralis, began to appear in 1748.^[32] Starting as annotations on the manual of the Jesuit Hermann Busenbaum, the work became, through nine revised editions down to 1785, a practical summa of morals of unequalled scope.^[33]

Its influence was immense: while remaining firm on doctrine, Alphonsus steered the practice of confessors toward gentleness, against the Jansenist severity that turned the faithful away from the sacraments. It is this twofold merit — doctrinal rigour and pastoral kindness — that the Church would recognize in making him the patron of moralists.^[34]

An immense body of work

Alphonsus was not only a theologian: he was a popular spiritual writer of prodigious fruitfulness. He is credited with one hundred and eleven works of spirituality and theology, endlessly reprinted and translated into more than seventy languages — making him one of the most widely circulated Catholic authors of all time.^[35][36] Short treatises, meditations, novenas, hymns: he wrote for the Christian people, in a simple language burning with tenderness for Christ and the Virgin.

The Glories of Mary

Published in 1750, The Glories of Mary (Le glorie di Maria) is a long commentary on the Salve Regina defending and nourishing Marian devotion.^[37] In it Alphonsus celebrates Mary as Mother of mercy and advocate of sinners, gathering hundreds of texts from the Fathers and the saints. The work would become one of the great classics of Catholic Marian piety, translated throughout the world.

Prayer, "the great means of salvation"

In Prayer: The Great Means of Salvation (Del gran mezzo della preghiera, 1759), Alphonsus sums up his whole spiritual conviction: without prayer, no one is saved; through prayer, all can obtain grace. He delivers the most famous maxim of his entire work:

"He who prays is certainly saved; he who prays not is certainly damned. All the blessed — with the exception of infants — have been saved by prayer; all the damned have been lost for want of having prayed." — Saint Alphonsus, Prayer: The Great Means of Salvation, 1759^[38]

This work, which he himself regarded as the most useful of all his books, is an ardent defence of the prayer of petition, founded on the Gospel promise: "Ask, and you shall receive."

The love of Jesus Christ and the Passion

In The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ (Pratica di amar Gesù Cristo, 1768), which he held to be his most accomplished book of devotion, Alphonsus unfolds a commentary on Saint Paul's hymn to charity (1 Cor 13).^[39] The tone is that of an enkindled heart. From the very first page he lays down the principle of all Christian life:

"He that loves Jesus Christ loves sufferings." — Saint Alphonsus, The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, chapter I^[40]

A passionate contemplative of the Passion and the Eucharist, Alphonsus makes suffering love the heart of holiness: to love the crucified Christ is to accept to bear his cross with him.

Uniformity with the will of God

Brief but of exceptional spiritual density, Uniformity with God's Will (Uniformità alla volontà di Dio, 1755) sums up in a few pages the doctrine of holiness according to Alphonsus.^[41] All perfection, he says, lies in the union of our will with God's:

"Conformity means that we join our will to the will of God. Uniformity goes further: it makes the will of God and our will one will alone, so that we will only what God wills, and the will of God alone is our will." — Saint Alphonsus, Uniformity with God's Will, 1755^[42]

"Perfection is entirely founded on the love of God: 'Charity is the bond of perfection'; and the perfect love of God consists in the perfect union of our will with His." — Saint Alphonsus, Uniformity with God's Will, 1755^[43]

This spirituality of trusting abandonment joins, by other paths, the great tradition of spiritual childhood that would blossom in the following century with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

Tu scendi dalle stelle: the poet of the crib

A musician at heart, Alphonsus composed around 1732, during a stay at the convent of Deliceto, an Italian Christmas hymn, Tu scendi dalle stelle ("You come down from the starry skies"), printed at Naples in 1755.^[44] Having become the most popular Christmas carol in Italy, it tells with heartrending simplicity the mystery of God made child, poor and numb with cold for love of men — proof that the loftiest theology could, with Alphonsus, become a lullaby.

Withdrawal to Pagani, arthritis and scruples

Withdrawn at Pagani after 1775, Alphonsus went through a long Passion. A deforming arthritis bent his head until it bruised his chest; he could scarcely celebrate Mass any more.^[45] To the trial of the body was added that of the soul: this master of confidence was himself assailed by scruples, temptations against faith and hope, and an interior darkness that the mystics call the dark night. The patron of scrupulous souls thus knew, in his flesh and his spirit, what he had treated in so many others.

Death (1 August 1787)

He died peacefully at Pagani on 1 August 1787, at nearly ninety-one years of age, to the sound of the midday Angelus, his gaze turned, it is said, toward an image of the Virgin.^[46][47] His remains rest in the Redemptorist basilica of Pagani, now a place of pilgrimage.

Beatification (1816) and canonization (1839)

Alphonsus was beatified on 15 September 1816 by Pius VII, then canonized on 26 May 1839 by Gregory XVI.^[48][49] In him the Church recognized not only heroic sanctity, but the doctrinal sureness of a guide whose writings already carried authority in every confessional.

Doctor of the Church (1871)

On 23 March 1871, Pius IX proclaimed him Doctor of the Church, ranking him among the small number of great Doctors whose teaching enlightens the universal Church.^[50] He is recognized above all as the doctor of moral theology and of prayer.

Patron of confessors and moralists (1950)

Finally, in 1950, Pius XII declared him heavenly patron of all confessors and moral theologians.^[51] By this gesture the Church consecrated Alphonsus's central intuition: morality is not a code of prohibitions, but the art of accompanying souls toward God with truth and tenderness. His influence remains considerable on the practice of confession and the pastoral care of mercy.

Three centuries after his birth, the Neapolitan lawyer turned beggar for God's graces remains one of the most beloved masters of Catholic spirituality: doctor of prayer, of confidence, and of the suffering love of Christ.

• Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) — a contemporary of Alphonsus and another great apostle of Marian devotion and popular missions.
• Saint Gerard Majella (1726-1755) — the wonder-working Redemptorist brother, spiritual son of Alphonsus Liguori.
• Gregory XVI (1765-1846) — the pope who canonized Saint Alphonsus in 1839.
• Pius IX (1792-1878) — the pope who proclaimed him Doctor of the Church in 1871.
• The Doctors of the Church through history — the list of the great Doctors to whom Saint Alphonsus belongs.
• Confession — the sacrament which Saint Alphonsus, patron of confessors, helped to renew.