Saint Alphonsus Liguori

That man was Alphonsus Maria de Liguori. Few would have guessed that this humiliating stumble was the door to one of the richest and most fruitful lives in the history of the Church: a bishop of the poor, founder of the Redemptorists, and a Doctor of moral theology revered throughout the Catholic world to this day. It was not the rash sulk of a loser wanting to take his anger out on life. It was the moment a great soul realized that all his years of talent had been poured into a game far too small for what it could do.

From childhood, Alphonsus showed an intelligence that astonished adults. Under the best tutors a noble family could hire, the boy mastered Latin, Greek, French and Spanish, while also loving poetry and painting, and became a skilled harpsichord player, the most aristocratic instrument of the Baroque age, which demands both dexterity and a refined ear. At only twelve, when most children his age were still learning their letters, Alphonsus entered the lecture halls of the University of Naples. At sixteen, in 1713, he successfully defended his doctorate in both Civil Law and Canon Law at once, something unheard of in the history of that university.

At nineteen, he began practicing as a lawyer in the courts of Naples, and for the next eight years, with a sharp mind and rare honesty (he never took bribes and never agreed to defend a case he knew to be fraudulent), he won every case he took on, becoming one of the most famous and wealthy lawyers in the Kingdom of Naples. His father, openly proud, began planning a suitable noble marriage to carry that brilliant career forward for the family.

He began to frequent the Hospital of the Incurables (Ospedale degli Incurabili), one of the oldest hospitals in Naples, founded at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a noble widow named Maria Lorenza Longo, which took in patients with diseases the medicine of the time regarded as hopeless: syphilis, chronic sores, illnesses that made even families keep their distance. Alphonsus did not go there as a lawyer paying a token visit; he rolled up his sleeves to care for them, dress their wounds and sit beside people the whole city had turned its back on.

Laying down that sword was not merely symbolic. For an eighteenth-century nobleman, the sword was the sign of his station, of the family’s honor, of the right to stand as an equal among the nobility. Giving it up meant giving up the whole place in society he had been raised for during twenty-seven years.

His father, Don Giuseppe, reacted with fury: first rage, then tearful pleading, then a long, cold refusal even to look at his son. But Alphonsus did not waver. He entered the seminary, and on December 21, 1726, at thirty, he was ordained a priest.

From there, he started a unique pastoral movement called the “Evening Chapels” (Cappelle Serotine). Every evening, after a hard day’s work, he gathered those workers on street corners and in workshop courtyards, teaching them to pray in the plainest language possible, without flourishes, without lofty theological terms. Little by little, those very people once regarded as “the dregs of society” became the ones passing on the faith to their own friends and neighbors. The movement spread quickly, with hundreds of small groups springing up all over the city, changing the moral face of Naples, a city notorious for crime and corruption around its docks.

But that extraordinary pace of work wore down his health. In the autumn of 1732, on doctors’ orders, he had to leave the city to rest in Scala, a small town in the mountains above the Amalfi coast, known for its steep stone stairways and clean air.

The members of the new congregation committed themselves to radical poverty, walking barefoot to the most remote villages to hold parish missions (long periods of preaching in country areas that had never had a resident priest). Their way of preaching, true to the spirit Father Alphonsus handed down, had to be simple and down-to-earth, avoiding empty, flowery rhetoric, so that even the least educated peasant could understand and feel God’s merciful love for him.

One of Father Alphonsus’s most revolutionary contributions lay in the confessional itself. At the time, the influence of Jansenism (an extremely rigorist current that had spread through the Church in France and parts of Italy) had turned many confessionals into places of harsh interrogation rather than forgiveness. Many priests refused absolution over small faults, so that the faithful gradually grew afraid of the sacrament of Reconciliation and stayed away from it altogether. Father Alphonsus taught his priests a completely different approach:

“The confessional is a place of mercy, not a place of execution. The confessor must be a gentle father, a physician who heals wounds, not a harsh judge. Open your arms wide to embrace the penitent, and remember that Christ Himself died for them.”

He proposed the theory of “Equiprobabilism” (Aequiprobabilismus), a system of moral reasoning that takes the truth of the Gospel and the salvation of souls as its supreme measure, instead of mechanical formulas. That work, though highly scholarly, became the standard handbook for the formation of priests throughout the Catholic Church for hundreds of years afterward.

Father Alphonsus was also one of the most prolific authors in the history of Catholic spirituality, with more than one hundred eleven works translated into more than seventy languages, nourishing the everyday faith of so many generations. “The Glories of Mary” (Le Glorie di Maria) is a masterpiece of Marian theology, explaining each line of the Hail, Holy Queen and praising the boundless kindness of Our Lady. “Visits to the Blessed Sacrament and to the Blessed Virgin Mary” became a bedside book for countless believers, teaching people to talk heart to heart each day with Jesus in the Eucharist. He also wrote “The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ” and “The Way of the Cross”, and above all he was the author of the most famous Italian Christmas carol, still sung all over the world today: “Tu scendi dalle stelle” (“You come down from the stars”).

In 1768, a cruel illness struck: severe degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine. The disease slowly bent his spine forward permanently, until his chin was pressed hard against his chest, creating a bleeding, gangrenous sore right on the skin of his chest: a dull, unending pain that no medicine could relieve in an age before modern painkillers. He could celebrate Mass only seated on a specially built wooden chair, and drank through a tube because he could not lift his head.

Yet amid that relentless physical pain, the old bishop kept reading and writing tirelessly, holding up his forehead with one hand so that he could see the page in front of him. In 1775, after thirteen years of outstanding service in a body almost completely crippled, Pope Pius VI finally allowed him to resign as bishop because of his great age and failing health.

Rejected by his own brothers in the congregation, unjustly stripped of authority by the Holy See, the eighty-four-year-old saint did not complain or try to clear his name at any cost. He fell on his knees before the Eucharist, held back his tears, and said:

“The Pope wills it, God wills it; I submit to God’s holy will in all things.”

He accepted that humiliation in complete silence, without a single word of public self-defense, to the end of his life.

Along with the pain of rejection, he also had to go through a dark night of faith lasting many years: temptations to despair and persistent fears of God’s severe judgment assailed the man who had spent his whole life preaching mercy to others. There is a bitter paradox here: the very man who had taught a whole generation of priests that the confessional must be a place of kindness was the one who had to wrestle most fiercely with his own fear of being abandoned by God.

Pope Pius VII beatified him in 1816, and on May 26, 1839, Pope Gregory XVI solemnly canonized him. In 1871, Pope Pius IX proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church, formally recognizing his broad contributions to moral theology. In 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed him patron of all confessors and moral theologians, a fitting honor for the man who spent his whole life turning the confessional from a place of fear into a place of mercy. The Church celebrates him on August 1 each year.

In Vietnam, the Redemptorists have been present since 1925, closely linked with devotion to the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, so familiar to Vietnamese believers, with parish missions in the countryside, and with accompanying the poor in remote areas, carrying on the spirit Father Alphonsus himself began on the mountainsides of Scala nearly three hundred years ago.