Saint Aloysius Gonzaga (1568-1591)

The house of Gonzaga and the marquisate of Castiglione

Aloysius was born into one of the most illustrious families of the Italian Renaissance. The Gonzaga had ruled Mantua since the 14th century; their court, which welcomed Mantegna and the greatest artists, ranked among the most brilliant in Europe.^[8] The branch from which Aloysius came held the marquisate of Castiglione delle Stiviere, a small sovereign state in Lombardy held as a fief of the Empire. His father, Ferrante Gonzaga, Marquess of Castiglione, was a great lord and a man of war, in the service of Spain; his mother, Marta Tana di Santena, a very pious lady-in-waiting, came from Piedmont.^[9][10]

Eldest of the family, Aloysius was the heir to the marquisate. Everything in his upbringing destined him to reign, to bear arms and to perpetuate the lineage. It was this mapped-out destiny as a soldier-prince that he would end up breaking, at the cost of a long struggle.

A Europe of courts and of Catholic Reformation

Aloysius's childhood unfolded in the Italy of the triumphant Catholic Reformation. The Council of Trent had just closed (1563); great reforming bishops such as Saint Charles Borromeo were regenerating the Church; the young Society of Jesus, founded in 1540, was opening colleges everywhere and radiating an ardent spirituality. It was in this climate of fervour that the child grew up, tossed from court to court — Castiglione, Florence, Mantua, Madrid — amid the intrigues, festivities and dangers of 16th-century aristocratic life.^[11][12]

Birth at Castiglione castle

Aloysius was born on 9 March 1568 at Castiglione delle Stiviere castle, between Brescia and Mantua.^[13][14] First son of the marquess, he was welcomed as the long-awaited heir. His mother, a deeply Christian woman, watched over his religious upbringing from very early on.

The child of the military camps

His father, by contrast, dreamed for him of a military career. From the age of four, little Aloysius was given miniature arquebuses; at five, he was taken to a military camp to be trained in the soldier's trade.^[15] There the child picked up, from contact with the troops, a coarse vocabulary which he repeated without understanding its meaning; when it was pointed out to him, he conceived, so it is said, so keen a remorse that he counted it all his life among his gravest faults — a trait which already tells of the extreme delicacy of his conscience.^[16][17]

The conversion of his gaze

Very young, Aloysius turned away from the pleasures of his rank. He began to pray at length, to recite the Office of the Virgin, to mortify himself in secret. This spiritual precocity is no pious legend added afterwards: it is attested by all his biographers and by the witnesses at his trial. The child prince gradually became a little ascetic.^[18][19]

Florence and the vow of virginity

In 1577, at about nine years old, Aloysius and his brother Rodolfo were sent to Florence, to the court of the Medici, to complete their education as princes.^[20] It was there, in the Servite church — the Santissima Annunziata —, before the venerated image of the Annunciation, that the child pronounced a vow of perpetual virginity.^[21][22] An extraordinary act for the heir of a marquisate, made at an age when one hardly thinks of marriage yet: it sealed the direction of his life for ever.

Since Fr. Cepari's Vita, his biographers report that he never looked a woman in the face, not even his mother^[23].

This absolute custody of the eyes, which struck all his contemporaries, has its source here: at Florence, in the midst of a brilliant and dissolute court, the young prince learned to close his gaze upon the world in order to open it upon God.

Mantua and illness

From Florence, the family moved to Mantua, capital of the Gonzaga. There Aloysius was seized by a chronic kidney ailment which never left him and which, paradoxically, favoured his life of prayer: confined to bed, he immersed himself in reading the lives of the saints, the Fathers, and works of spirituality.^[24][25] Physical suffering, far from crushing him, completed the turning of his heart towards eternity.

First Communion from Saint Charles Borromeo

In 1580, the great Archbishop of Milan, Saint Charles Borromeo, passed through Brescia during a pastoral visit. Struck by young Aloysius's piety, he catechized him and found that he had not yet communicated. It was from the hand of this reforming cardinal saint that Aloysius received his First Communion, on 22 July 1580.^[26][27][28] A symbolic meeting between two generations of saints of the Catholic Reformation: the great Tridentine bishop and the child who would soon be the model of Christian youth.

Page at the court of Madrid

In 1581, Marquess Ferrante was called into the service of Spain; the family made for Madrid, arriving in March 1582. There Aloysius and his brother became pages to the Infante Don Diego, son of King Philip II.^[29][30] At the heart of the most powerful court in the world, surrounded by luxury and honours, the young prince led the life of a penitent: fasts, long prayers, spiritual reading. It was at Madrid, while reading a letter from the Jesuit missionaries in the Indies, that his decision matured: he would be a Jesuit.^[31][32]

The call to the Society of Jesus

Back in Italy in 1584, Aloysius had made his resolve: to renounce the marquisate and enter the Society of Jesus. He knew what this choice cost — the abandonment of a sovereign state, of a name, of a fortune, of a prince's career — and he knew above all that he would have to wrest it through a hard struggle with his father.^[33][34]

The trial of strength with his father Ferrante

The opposition of Marquess Ferrante was long and violent. To see his eldest son, his heir, renounce everything to become a mere religious seemed to him madness and a dishonour to the lineage. He tried everything: anger, entreaties, sending Aloysius to the courts of Italy so that he might let himself be recaptured by the world. Nothing worked. The young man's gentle inflexibility ended up triumphing over paternal resistance.^[35][36] The marquess, vanquished, gave his consent.

Renunciation of the marquisate

On 2 November 1585, before the emperor — on whom Castiglione depended —, Aloysius signed the deed by which he solemnly renounced all his rights of inheritance and the marquisate, in favour of his younger brother Rodolfo.^[37][38] A few weeks later, having received the pope's blessing, he left for Rome. This total abandonment by a prince to a younger brother, freely consented for God, would remain one of the most admired acts of his life.

The novitiate of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale

On 25 November 1585, Aloysius was received into the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at the house of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, in Rome.^[39][40] The prince turned novice joyfully embraced community life, obedience, humble services. In the very place where, seventeen years earlier, the young Saint Stanislaus Kostka had died, Aloysius walked in the footsteps of his predecessor in holiness.

He pronounced his first vows on 25 November 1587, aged nineteen, then began his theology studies at the Roman College (today's Gregorian University).^[41][42]

Saint Robert Bellarmine, spiritual director

At the Roman College, Aloysius had as his spiritual director one of the greatest theologians of the Church, Saint Robert Bellarmine, a future Doctor of the Church.^[43][44] The master soon became the admirer of the disciple. Bellarmine later declared that he believed Aloysius had never committed a mortal sin in all his life, and he himself asked, at his own death, to be buried at the feet of his saintly pupil — a wish which was granted.^[45][46]

Penances to be moderated

Aloysius's austerity was such that his superiors had to restrain it. He loaded himself with chains and spur-rowels, fasted to extremes, shortened his sleep, multiplied disciplines.^[47] At the novitiate, he had to be ordered to eat more and to moderate his prayers, for fear he would ruin an already fragile health. He himself summed up his path in a striking image:

"I am a crooked piece of iron: I entered religious life to be straightened by the hammer of mortification." — A saying he repeated to those around him, reported by his biographer Fr. Virgilio Cepari, who had heard it himself^[48]

His difficulty was not to pray, but to moderate his fervour: with touching simplicity he confided the trial of having to stop praying out of obedience.

"Really I am at a loss what to do. My Rector forbids me to pray, because the attention it requires injures my head." — Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, in confidence to the novice Gaspar Alpieri, words reported by Fr. Virgilio Cepari^[49]

Custody of the eyes and purity

Purity was the dominant note of his holiness. As a consequence of his childhood vow, his custody of the eyes became proverbial: he never fixed his gaze on a woman's face. Saint Robert Bellarmine and his companions testified that the mere presence of this young man dispelled in others the most violent temptations.^[50] That is why iconography always depicts him with the lily of purity and the crucifix.

"What has this to do with eternity?"

His whole interior life was stretched towards Heaven. Tradition reports that one day, while playing with other young men, he was asked what he would do if he learned he was to die within the hour; he answered that he would go on playing — so much was his soul at peace and wholly given to God in every instant.^[51] His measure of all things was eternity: the "what has this to do with eternity?" which sums up the Jesuit spirit of Saint Ignatius's Exercises.

A friendship of Jesuit saints

Aloysius Gonzaga is no isolated saint. He belongs to a veritable Jesuit constellation of the late 16th century, and the Church has often gathered the three young saints of the Society under a single gaze.

The plague of Rome

At the beginning of 1591, a terrible plague epidemic ravaged Rome. The Jesuits of the Roman College opened a makeshift hospital and placed themselves at the service of the sick. Aloysius, despite his fragile health, begged to be employed there. He begged for the plague-stricken in the streets, washed them, nursed them, carried them.^[52][53]

The plague victim carried on his shoulders

One witness reported seeing him overcome his natural repugnance and shoulder a dying plague victim to carry him to the hospital.^[54] It was in performing these works of mercy that he himself contracted the disease. He fell ill at the beginning of March 1591, and slowly declined over several weeks.

The announcement of his death and the last letter to his mother

During his illness, Aloysius is said to have learned, in a long ecstasy, the announcement of the day of his death: he would die in the octave of Corpus Christi.^[55] On 10 June 1591, eleven days before his death, he wrote to his mother the Marquise Marta an admirable letter of consolation — a text which the Church reads today at the Office of Readings of his feast, on 21 June.^[56] In it he asks his mother not to weep for his departure as a bereavement, but to welcome it as a joyful blessing.

"When your letter was delivered to me, I was still in this region of the dead. But now, well, we must aspire to heaven, so that we may praise the eternal God in the land of the living." — Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Letter to his mother, 10 June 1591^[57]

Marvelling at the divine mercy, "like a sea without bottom and without shore", he ends on a song of thanksgiving:

"We shall praise him and sing his mercies for ever, enjoying eternal happiness." — Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Letter to his mother, 10 June 1591^[58]

Death in the octave of Corpus Christi

On 20 June 1591, the day of the octave of the Blessed Sacrament, Aloysius at first seemed to improve; but he insisted on receiving viaticum, certain he would die that night. He gently passed away in the night of 20 to 21 June 1591, with the name of Jesus on his lips, aged twenty-three.^[59][60] The Church would fix his feast on 21 June.

Beatification and canonization

Aloysius's reputation for holiness was immediate. He was beatified as early as 1605 by Pope Paul V — a swift and exceptional act.^[61][62] More than a century later, on 31 December 1726, Pope Benedict XIII solemnly canonized him, on the same day as Saint Stanislaus Kostka, the other young Jesuit novice.^[63][64] (Some older notices place the beatification in 1604 under Clement VIII; the received tradition and Jesuit sources retain 1605 under Paul V.)

Patron of Christian youth

In 1729, Benedict XIII proclaimed Saint Aloysius Gonzaga patron of student youth; Pope Pius XI confirmed and extended this patronage by declaring him patron of all Christian youth.^[65][66] His name became, throughout the Church, synonymous with youthful purity and total self-gift from the youngest age. In modern times, his example of heroic service to the plague-stricken led to his being chosen as patron of the sick, in particular of AIDS sufferers and of those who care for them.^[67]

Relics and cult

The body of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga rests in Rome, in the church of Saint Ignatius (Sant'Ignazio), beneath an altar dedicated to him; his head is venerated at Castiglione delle Stiviere, his birthplace, which has become a shrine in his name.^[68] Celebrated on 21 June, he remains one of the best-loved saints of Catholic youth, a model for those who, while young, give everything to God and expect nothing from the world.^[69]

"I implore for you, Madam, the constant grace and consolation of the Holy Spirit." — Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Letter to his mother, 10 June 1591^[70]

• Saint Stanislaus Kostka (1550-1568) — the other young Jesuit novice, his model, canonized on the same day as him.
• Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) — his spiritual director, who wished to be buried at his feet.
• Saint Charles Borromeo (1538-1584) — the reforming archbishop who gave him his First Communion.
• Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) — the founder of the Society of Jesus whose rule he embraced.
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) — the council which marks the age of the Catholic Reformation, his time and his world.
• The Catholic Reformation — the great movement of regeneration of which he was a figure of youthful holiness.