(C.D. Stampley Enterprises, Charlotte, NC 2001). Used with permission.

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To make the best use of time

St. Alphonsus de Liguori (1696-1787)

Feast day: August 1

Procrastinators and disorganized persons can turn to St. Alphonsus de Liguori. He once resolved never to waste time,and he made good on his pledge. By the end of his life St. Alphonsus had founded the Redemptorist order, preached countless missions, wrote nearly one hundred books, and as bishop reformed one of the most troubled dioceses in Italy.

For a religious point of view, the 18^th century was a disappointing time that produced very few saints. One of the rare exceptions, however, was Alphonsus de Liguori. God gave him 91 years of life, and Alphonsus appears to have exploited every moment of it,bringing sinners back to God, founding and nurturing the Redemptorist order, writing classic works on moral theology and religious, and, for twelve years, reforming the wayward clergy and instructing the unlettered laity of the diocese of St. Agatha of the Goths.

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About eight o'clock in the morning on September 27, 1696, Anna Caterina de Liguori gave birth to her first child, a boy, in the family's country house at Marianella outside Naples. Two days later, the infant was taken to the Church of Our Lady of the Virgins and baptized Alphonsus Mary Anthony John Francis Cosmas Damian Michael Gaspar (it was a custom among the Catholic nobility of Europe to give children a sonorous string of names). The parish register in which Alphonsus' baptism was recorded survives. In the 19^th century, priests of the parish added these notations to Alphonsus' christening entry: "Beatified, September 1816. Canonized 26 May 1839. Declared a Doctor of the Church, 23 March 1871."

Alphonsus' father, Don Joseph Felix de Liguori, was a captain in the Royal Navy of Naples, a post from which he derived very little income. Although Don Joseph's family had been members of the lesser nobility for 500 years, by the time Alphonsus was born the Liguoris were hard up for cash. Donna Anna had brought a substantial dowry when she married Don Joseph, and the family probably lived on that. Don Joseph was anxious to have a son who would restore the family's fortune. For a while, it appeared that Alphonsus was the answer to his father's prayers.

The brutal life aboard a galley rowed by slaves and condemned criminals had made Don Joseph a tough, intractable man. He was not cruel to Alphonsus, but he was demanding. He arranged for tutors to teach his son at home, the better to keep an eye on what progress the boy was making in his studies. A squad of teachers came to the house to instruct Alphonsus in Latin, Greek, French and Spanish; mathematics, physics, and cosmology; history, philosophy, and even painting. Don Joseph had a passion for music, so he hired Gaetano Greco, who had studied with Alessandro Scarlatti, to teach Alphonsus the harpsichord. Don Joseph insisted that his son practice three hours every day. When he suspected that Greco and Alphonsus were not spending enough time at the keyboard, he locked them both in the music room. Don Joseph needn't have worried. Alphonsus' love for music rivaled his father's. In later years he would play to entertain the priests and lay brothers of his household, or to lead a congregation in hymns. Playing the harpsichord was the only worldly distraction Alphonsus permitted himself on his days of recollection.

Alphonsus' education was preparing him for what his father hoped would be a splendid and financially lucrative career. The path he had chosen for his son was the law, an almost guaranteed money-maker in litigious 18^th-century Naples. At age 20, Alphonsus completed his studies and was ready to practice. Relatives and friends sent Alphonsus a steady stream of clients. Father Pier Luigi Rispoli, one of the saint's first biographers, says Alphonsus won every time he went to court. It appeared that Don Joseph's investment was about to pay off. His next task was to find Alphonsus a wealthy woman to marry.

Don Joseph's first choice was a distant cousin, Teresa de Liguori, the daughter of a prince. The girl frustrated his plans by announcing her intention to become a nun. Don Joseph's next choice was the daughter of a duke, but by this time Alphonsus felt he had a call to the religious life. He refused to marry the young woman. Ironically, the catalyst that convinced Alphonsus to give up his life in the world arrived during a lawsuit.

Alphonsus had been retained by Don Filippo Orsini, the duke of Gravina, to sue the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de Medici, for 600,000 ducats, money Orsini said was owed him for an estate in the province of Abruzzi. Alphonsus was 27 years old when he went into court, confident that he had an air-tight argument. Actually he had overlooked a little phrase in the documents that revealed who had legal title to the land. The Medici lawyers exploited Alphonsus' oversight. They proved to the Judges that the estate was indeed the property of the Medici family and the Orsinis had no claim to it. When the court ruled in favor of the Medicis, Alphonsus was stunned and humiliated. He returned home, locked himself in his room, refused to eat, and promised himself he would never practice law again.

Alphonsus' parents tried to persuade him to re-enter society, but the young man refused. He began making lengthy visits to churches and nursing the sick in a hospital for incurables. In a classic medieval gesture, he laid his sword at the feet of a statue of Our Lady of Mercy. When he announced his determination to become an Oratorian priest, Don Joseph was not surprised, but he resisted anyway. For weeks, father and son were at a stalemate,neither one would back down from his position. It took the intervention of Bishop Emilio Cavalieri, Donna Anna's brother, to break the deadlock. He suggested that Don Joseph let Alphonsus become a priest if Alphonsus agreed to give up the notion of the joining the Oratorians and became a diocesan priest instead. Reluctantly, both men agreed.

After five years of study and preparation, Alphonsus was ordained. There were 1500 diocesan priests just in the city of Naples, and about 75,000 diocesan and order priests throughout the kingdom. By no means does this vast number of clergy suggest that Naples was in the midst of golden age of selfless religious devotion. Many of the priests in the kingdom exercised no pastoral function, or were entirely unsuited to the religious life, or both. At the root of the problem was the custom of passing all property to the eldest son, leaving nothing for his younger brothers to inherit. Under the circumstances, many younger sons made the Church their career: as diocesan priests they took no vow of poverty and could accumulate property. Combine this with the immunity of the clergy from taxation and one has a system ready-made for scandal, abuses, and corruption.

Yet Naples was not entirely bereft of good, holy, hard-working clerics. Alphonsus sought out some of the most active and dedicated priests in the city, including Father Matthew Ripa, who founded a college to prepare missionaries for China, and Father Thomas Falcoia, a man thirty years older than Alphonsus who conducted retreats for nuns. Father Falcoia dreamed of starting a new order for men and women that would imitate as closely as humanly possible the virtues of Our Lord. While giving a retreat at the Scala convent, he met a young nun, Sister Maria Celeste, who told him she had received a series of visions about the birth of a new religious order. She even had revelations about what type of rule the order should follow. When Sister Maria Celeste showed it to Father Falcoia, he was amazed to find that it was exactly the rule he had planned.

In 1730 Alphonsus made a retreat at the Scala convent and, authorized by the local bishop, examined Sister Maria Celeste about her visions and the rule. Rather than finding anything objectionable in either, Alphonsus was drawn to the missionary ideal of the prospective order. The nuns of Scala were the first to adopt the new rule: they were the first members of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. Another two years would pass before the male branch of the Redemptorists was founded by Alphonsus himself in a small guest house owned by the Scala convent.

The Redemptorists' mission was to bring sinners back to God and increase the fervor of practicing Catholics. They would arrive at a city parish or some remote rural village and, with the permission of the parish priest, preach for several days in the church. If the crowd was too large, they moved out to the town square and preached in the open. Between sermons, the Redemptorists heard confessions and organized devotions to the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin. Then they moved on to the next parish.

Almost from the beginning the Redemptorists flourished. By 1735, bishops were inviting the order to their dioceses, and Alphonsus was building a monastery-retreat center-seminary to meet the growing demand for his missionaries.

Until 1752, Alphonsus himself was frequently on the road giving missions. In his few spare moments he dealt with the administrative details of his order, studied moral theology, collected material for a great work he would publish years later, The Glories of Mary, and from time to time fended off efforts by Church or civil authorities who, believing there were more than enough religious orders, wanted to suppress the Redemptorists.

In 1762 Alphonsus' life received an additional complication. {ln:Pope} Clement XIII named him bishop of St. Agatha of the Goths, a small rural diocese between Naples and Capua. It proved to be Alphonsus' greatest challenge. There were 35,000 souls in the diocese, few of whom had a command of Catholic doctrine. In too many cases, natural devotion had degenerated to superstition. Religious festivals often ended in drunken brawls. Alphonsus' biggest problem, however, were the priests: there were about 350 in the diocese and perhaps 100 more who had gone to Naples to pursue others careers. Alphonsus found priests who squandered their time drinking and gambling in taverns, semi-literate priests who could barely say Mass, priests who had gotten lucrative posts through bribery, priests who flouted shamelessly the rule of celibacy.

Within three weeks of his arrival, Alphonsus sent a letter to every priest in his diocese. They were to say Mass reverently, following the rubrics, and they were to preach to the people in a plain, simple style their congregations would understand. Furthermore he warned them against trying to use any outside influence to win from him lucrative benefices or important posts in the diocese. Alphonsus himself climbed into the pulpit to preach, bringing all his rhetorical firepower to bear. One Sunday, wearing a black stole and carrying a flaming torch in one hand, he preached a hair-raising sermon on Hell.

A particular embarrassment was the scandal of Father Marco Petti, a member of Alphonsus' own cathedral clergy. Petti had lived with his mistress, a married woman, for sixteen years, he did not blush to been seen with his three illegitimate children, and he had the effrontery to still say Mass. In a face-to-face meeting, Alphonsus invited Petti to move into the bishop's residence, the better to avoid temptation. Petti said he would prefer to build a little hut for himself on his estate and live there as a hermit. Alphonsus replied he had no trouble with Father Petti becoming a hermit; but he did worry that the priest might be joined there by a hermitess.

When Petti showed no sign of changing his life, Alphonsus turned the case over to the civil authorities. Petti was jailed for public immorality, then sent to a monastery to do penance for his sins. Some years later, Alphonsus restored to Father Petti the privilege of saying Mass, but only in private. He also brought about the return of Petti's mistress to her husband and arranged for the support of her illegitimate children.

For thirteen years Alphonsus labored in his diocese. He reorganized the seminary, reformed the convents, brought religious orders,including his own Redemptorists,into the diocese to raise the quality of preaching and religious education, and encouraged the study of moral theology among the clergy. Throughout that time he wrote so many books that some of his critics complained that any bishop who wrote so much must be neglecting his diocese.

During this time Alphonsus suffered severe bouts of rheumatic fever which produced the acute curvature of his spine we see in so many portraits of the saint. Since he could no longer lift his head, he had to drink through a straw. At Mass he needed the support of an Acolyte so he could drink from the chalice. In 1775, in consideration of Alphonsus' declining health, {ln:Pope} Pius VI permitted him to resign the bishopric of St. Agatha. Alphonsus returned to Pagani, his favorite Redemptorist house, and made writing his full-time occupation. He imagined that he would die soon. In fact he had twelve more years to live, and one final crisis to face.

In 1779 the king of Naples issued a long-delayed royal decree recognizing the Redemptorist congregation and granting them the right to open a novitiate and a house of study. But the king did not want another religious order in his realm, so he insisted that the Redemptorists must be secular priests. It was not all that Alphonsus had hoped for, but royal recognition was still a step in the right direction. Whether the Redemptorists were religious or seculars could be hammered out later. Then Alphonsus made a serious error in judgment.

Founders of religious communities look to Rome, or at least the local bishop, to approve the rule of their order. In 1779 the king of Naples and the {ln:Pope} were at odds. Rather than risk irritating his royal ally, Alphonsus agreed to submit his Rule to the king for approval. It was a tragic mistake that nearly destroyed the Redemptorists.

Alphonsus could not manage the negotiations himself. At age 83 his mind was still clear, but he tired easily, was hard of hearing, and his eyesight was so poor he could only read a few sentences at a time. He entrusted the task of getting approval for the Rule to two Redemptorists, Fathers Angelo Maione and Fabrizio Cimino. When they presented him with the Rule as approved by the king, Alphonsus could not read it. He gave it to his confessor, Father Andrew Villani, to review. Alphonsus had no idea that all three of his brother Redemptorists had betrayed him.

To please the king, Fathers Maione and Cimino had so altered the Rule that the Redemptorist community could barely be said to exist at all. The authority of the Rector Major,in this case Alphonsus himself,was restricted and the bulk of power given to two priests known as consultors; unlike other religious orders the Redemptorists would be under the authority of the local bishop; worst of all, the solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were rejected in favor of nebulous oaths.

Mislead by Father Villani into believing that the Rule approved by the king was the Rule he had written, Alphonsus signed the document. Publication of the new Rule provoked Anger and outrage among the Redemptorists. A few blamed Alphonsus for permitting himself to be duped. Others took out their frustration on Fathers Maione, Cimino, and Villani. Many priests and lay brothers were certain that if Alphonsus signed such a mutilated rule he must be senile. Sadly, the affair was not settled and the original Redemptorist Rule was not restored until after Alphonsus' death.

During his last months, Alphonsus suffered periods of dementia. Sometimes he thought he was on a mission, hearing confessions. In his final days he was afflicted by severe dysentery, gangrene, and uremia. At one point someone at the bedside held up before his face a picture of Gerard Majella, already renowned as a miracle-worker. Alphonsus muttered, "Even he cannot cure me now."

On the evening of July 31 it became clear that Alphonsus was dying. The entire community crowded into his room, the overflow spilling out into the hall. Over and over they recited the prayers for the dying and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. Sometime before noon on August 1, Alphonsus de Liguori passed away so peacefully that even those kneeling closest to his bed did not know he had died.

{tab=About Book}

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