The Mission
of
St. Alphonsus Liguori
By
Cardinal Manning
Archbishop of Westminster
Mission Church Press,
St. Alphonsus Street,
Boston, Mass.
1916
TO THE REV. REDEMPTORIST FATHERS OF ST. MARY’S, CLAPHAM.
Rev. and Dear Fathers,
Having obeyed your desire, I publicly throw on you all the blame of publishing the following pages, which appear to me not to be worthy of it. Nevertheless, it gives me the opportunity of expressing my heartfelt gratitude, and, I may say, my filial love, to your great Saint. During the happy years I spent in Rome, his larger Theology was the text I daily studied; and I have ever looked upon him as a witness raised up by God against the rigorism, the laxity, the formalism, and the pharisaism of this critical and I fear, in spiritual science, this superficial age.
Let me add also, that there is a fact in the life of St. Alphonsus, which makes him and his sons dear to us and to our house. I read in his Life, that daily at table with his household, ‘he took care to give food for the soul also; each one read in turn. It was generally from the Life of St. Charles Borromeo.”1 I hope it is by a sort of instinct that we have just ended reading, for the third time, the Life of St. Alphonsus; and I trust that this may be a pledge of union in heart and in spirit, and of the perpetuity of the same offices of mutual charity which have subsisted between us for so many years. Commending myself to your prayers and the intercession of St. Alphonsus, I beg you to believe me, Rev. and dear Fathers,
Your affectionate servant in Jesus Christ,
HENRY EDWARD MANNING.
Bayswater, Feast of St. Alphonsus, 1864.
1 Life, vol. ii. p. 390.
Mission of St. Alphonsus.
He will convince the world of sin. St. John xvi. 8.
SUCH is the work of the Holy Ghost; by the piercing and overwhelming light of His presence to show to the world its own sinfulness, and to convict it of its guilt before God. The world in sin knew not its own sin. ‘Because it liked not’ – that is, had no will or desire – ‘to have God in its knowledge, God delivered it up to a reprobate sense.’1 In the beginning the light of the Spirit of God, in the intelligence of man, revealed the perfections of God; and in that light man knew himself, and the law of sanctity written upon his heart. But when he sinned, his heart was darkened. The light of the divine perfections of purity, justice, and truth faded away; and the outline of the divine law being effaced, the consciousness of sin was lost. As in the darkness all colours and forms are confounded, and can be no more distinguished; so when sin had darkened the world, sin itself, in all its contradictions of the divine nature, passed from the sight and from the consciousness of the sinful. Certain great outlines, which the lingering light of nature ever manifests, still remained; ‘so that they were inexcusable;’ but the divine will and the divine law, in its breadth and purity, was hidden in the same darkness which veiled from the soul of man the perfections of God.
And yet, in the darkness of the world there was still a line of light, a thread of supernatural illumination, faint but clear, which, to the patriarchs and saints and penitents of the old law, revealed again the great outline of the sanctity of God, and thereby the sinfulness of their own nature. But this cast only a feeble light on either side, and did not penetrate the nations of the world.
And when this narrow stream of light spread into the revelation of God’s law to Israel, it was still faint; and the first full light of sanctity which fell upon the world came from the face of Jesus Christ.
But it was not His office to convince the world of sin. He came to die for it, and to ascend to His kingdom. It was to the Holy Ghost that the office of illuminating and convincing the world was committed. And on the day of Pentecost He came to shed abroad upon the world the light of the revelation of God. The unity, the personality, the spirituality, the purity, the truth, the justice of God were revealed to the heart of man; and in this light of the divine perfections both sanctity and sin were perceived and understood. The world was convicted of its own sins and stains in the light of the presence of God; not only judicially convicted, but convinced in its reason and conscience of the sins of which it was guilty in His sight. The coming of the Holy Ghost was as the rising of the sun upon a world which sat in darkness. In His light all became visible; not the greater sins alone, but the least, the most subtil and the most secret, in the illumination of the knowledge of God which penetrates the conscience.
And this work of convincing the world of sin He accomplished first by the Apostles, whom He fashioned and filled with light as the instruments of His will. The same work He perpetually accomplishes by the pastors who descend from them. The Church is God’s witness against the sin of the world; and to it He has committed two great instruments or documents of divine evidence and light, by which to convince mankind of sin. The first is the science or knowledge of God and of His operations, or, as we call it, dogmatic theology — that is, the faith, with its scientific elucidation, traced out to its circumference; the other, the science of the will or law of God in its commandments, precepts, and counsels, or, as it is called, moral theology, or the science of sanctity and of sin. These two documents of the divine truth and will are committed to the custody of the Church, through which the Holy Ghost, by His perpetual guidance, teaches and convinces the world. And to this end He first creates for Himself His messengers and His witnesses, the pastors and the Saints of the Church. Upon them He first works by the infusion of His light and sanctity; and by them He works afterwards upon the world.
And this brings me naturally to the subject of to-day – to the great Saint and servant of God whom we commemorate. He was a singular example of this divine work, both in himself and in others. He was first, in an eminent degree, a creation of the Holy Ghost in supernatural light and sanctity; then a witness for God, and an instrument of conviction and sanctification to the souls of men.
It is in this respect I would endeavour to speak of him. But it is a hard task to speak of him before his sons, to whom his mind and spirit — I may say his voice and presence — are household truths, and, as it were, a daily and hourly consciousness. Still, what I can I will do. I will therefore endeavour to trace out the perfections wrought in St. Alphonsus by the Spirit of God, to fit him for the work of convincing the world of sin.
1. The first and eminent grace bestowed upon him for this end was his own personal freedom from sin. They who testify against sin must needs know it; but there are two ways of knowing sin. There is the knowledge of the sinless: such as the knowledge which Jesus had of sin; of its deformity, its baseness, its deadliness, it deceitfulness; of all that sin is and does, save only the guilt, which by personal experience the sinless Son of God could not know. There is another kind of knowledge of sin, which comes by sinning. And this the world preaches as the knowledge necessary for those who would save others from sin. This was the moral theology of Satan in Paradise: ‘God doth know, that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. ’2
The farther removed from sin, the more power the servants of God have over it. The nearer to it, the more power it has over them. To be free from it, is the chief condition of convincing and of converting the world.
Now, St. Alphonsus was in a singular manner and degree preserved from sin, from his first consciousness in childhood to the end of a life of ninety years.
In the Information laid before the Holy See for the judicial process of his canonisation, it is declared, that ‘the stole of innocence which he received in baptism he returned to his Creator without a spot.’3 Again, in the office which we have recited on this festival, it is declared that he had ‘a wonderful innocence of life, which he never sullied by a stain of mortal sin.’ And his confessors, after his death, declared their belief that he had never committed a deliberate venial sin. To the end of his life Alphonsus used bitterly to lament what he called his ‘great sins.’ And these were chiefly three. First, a disrespectful word spoken to his father when he was grown to man’s estate, and already in the profession of the law, at a time of life when sons believe themselves to be free, and less dependent on a father’s will. For this fault he received from his father, before a numerous company, the chastisement of a blow. He went to his room, and spent hours kneeling in tears and prayer; and afterwards, on his knees, asked his father’s forgiveness. The second was, that for a time he fell into a comparative lukewarmness, during which he went to theatres, though, as he said, he did not remember committing there any deliberate sin. Yet these he lamented to the end of his life. Lastly, when he had failed as an advocate in some law-suit, he fell into an excess of sadness and dejection, which he traced to his self-love, and to the wound of disappointed vanity. If such sins showed prominently upon his life of ninety years, it must indeed have been white and resplendent to give them such relief.
Alphonsus, like St. Augustine, had a holy mother, to whom he traces the early horror he had for sin, and his singular preservation from it. She used to inspire him with a hatred and a fear of evil, and to take him with her to confession every week. She used to say, ’ I do not wish to be the mother of children who are condemned to eternal death.’ He testifies of himself in words of beautiful simplicity, at the end of his long and perilous life of labour and responsibility: ‘I am a Bishop, and I ought to tell the truth. I do not remember ever having told a deliberate falsehood, even when I was a child.’ 4
2. From this great innocence of life sprung another perfection — his hatred of sin. This is always equal to the purity of the heart. It was this which caused such incomprehensible sorrow in the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the wilderness and in the garden. And Alphonsus, in all his instincts, abhorred the presence of evil with a supernatural hatred. He was wont to say: ‘My God, grant that I may die rather than offend Thee.’ ‘Sin is the only evil of which we need be afraid.’ ‘No sin, however slight, is a trifling evil.’ To hinder sin for a day was enough to set him in activity. When he heard of any scandal, he never delayed a moment. He would take neither food nor rest till it was corrected. Often in such times he took no food till evening. ‘Things of this sort,’ he said, ‘admit of no delays. It is an offence against God; and if there were but one single sin, we are bound to prevent it.’
His only fear for the Congregation he had founded was, lest any sin should enter into it. All crosses and persecutions from without — of which he had a multitude — were as nothing. He had no fear of them. They could not touch the sanctity of the Congregation, and therefore could not reach its life. The only thing he feared was a stain of sin; and so far did he carry this, that when some powerful person of the world, in Naples, would have befriended the Congregation, Alphonsus would not permit it, because the private life of that person was sinful. He answered, ‘I will never do such a thing; let this Congregation be destroyed, rather than become the occasion for even the shadow of any sin.’ This hatred of sin breathes through all his writings and preaching. In giving instructions as to a sermon which was to be preached on the Festival of the Holy Cross, he said: ‘Say something, of course, about the Cross, but the substance must be about blasphemy, hatred, impurity, occasions of sin, and bad confessions.’ And again, speaking of the Feast of St. Joseph, he said: ‘Let St. Joseph be praised; but I wish sin to be extirpated, that God may not be offended.’
3. From this hatred of sin sprang his zeal against it. This was the motive of his long life; to drive sin out of the heart of man, out of the creation of God. But in this he began with himself. He was not like the pharisaic world, which drinks down its own sin like water, and is indignant against the sins of its neighbour. Alphonsus began with himself, with penances so severe that he was compared to St. Peter of Alcantara. Innocent as he had been from his infancy, yet he inflicted on himself penances which to us seem excessive and intolerable. Fasts, disciplines,5 sleeping on the ground, uneasy postures, bitter herbs in his food — and all these persevered in, without relaxation, until the failure of life and its powers — were his habitual chastisement of self.
He was most exact in the custody of his senses. Even to his old age, he would walk along the streets with his eyes cast down to the ground, lest anything should enter in and stain his soul. The vigilance with which he maintained these precautions would be judged extreme, not only by the world, but also by many who have no will indeed to sin, but have not the same instincts of sanctity as Alphonsus.
Another example of his zeal against sin, is his industry in study. It was to drive sin out of the world by the most Precious Blood, and by the guidance of His divine law, that Alphonsus spent a long life in the study of moral theology. That the holy law of God might be more perfectly obeyed, and all that is contrary to it might be rooted out of the hearts of men; for this he went through a toil hardly surpassed among the Saints of God. Whensoever, in the exposition of the law of God, and its application to the details of human life and action, he had any doubt, he would pray and wait for weeks and even for months. He would also write to Naples, to Rome, and, above all, to the Sacred Congregations. Only a long life, like that of St. Alphonsus, could have sufficed for the work he did. He not only expounded the commandments, the precepts, and the counsels of God, but he examined all that had been said by others upon them. The works of St. Alphonsus are, I may say, a summary of moral theology, as the great work of St. Thomas is of dogmatic; and to compile them, he faithfully and laboriously consulted the theologians6 who had gone before him. Nearly eight hundred theologians were examined or consulted.7 The minute, laborious, conscientious industry required for such a task is not exceeded by any in the history of the Church. It was not, therefore, without cause, or with the mere ordinary confidence of an upright mind, that he said: ‘As to the sentiments I have advanced in my work, I have no reason to doubt the consequences of the account I must render to God.’ 8
The same zeal against sin he extended to his dealings, above all, with priests. What, reverend fathers, is the Congregation of our most holy Redeemer but this burning zeal against sin, incorporated and made perpetual in the Church of God? Alphonsus dealt with you as his divine Master dealt with His disciples: ‘For them do I sanctify Myself; that they also may be sanctified in truth.’ 9 He first rooted sin out of his own heart, that he might then root it out of yours; and that by you he might pursue it and destroy it from the souls of men. This is the work for which you have received such graces from the Redeemer of men, Whose name you bear. Zeal against sin, uncompromising, unrelaxing, with tenderness to the sinful, but inflexibility against evil in all its forms and disguises, is your mission, and the end for which you exist.
Such for thirty years was the work of Alphonsus, surrounded by his spiritual sons, until he was compelled in obedience to bear the episcopal office.
As Bishop, the same zeal was manifest in every action. He would ordain no man of whose fitness he had not assured himself by strict examination. The subjects of other Bishops and the members of religious orders, who came for ordination with testimonials of examination, he examined again. He used to say, ‘I do not doubt the diligence of your superiors, nor your fitness; but if I am to ordain you, I must know it myself.’ No respect of person would ever make him swerve from this, or lay hands suddenly on any man.
So likewise, in bestowing benefices, it often happened that rich, noble, powerful patrons interceded with him for their dependents, or nominated them for preferment. Alphonsus would admit none of them until he ascertained their fitness. Many he would never admit, because the proof of their fitness was wanting. He withstood the highest personages in the kingdom in this matter, with a boldness and freedom of speech which he always followed up by an inflexible refusal.
To give any idea of his zeal for the sanctification of his priests would be to transcribe the history of his Episcopate. Towards them he was in every sense a pastor and a father, a friend and a guide, to whom they could turn in every doubt and danger of their life. There was no one so near to their hearts, none to whom their hearts were so attracted, none to whom they lay so freely open. He governed them by loving them, and by drawing them to love him again. It was in this way that his mind and spirit insensibly, but irresistibly, diffused itself throughout the clergy of his diocese.
And yet his discipline over them was searching and exact, extending not only to their duties, but to their relaxations, and to the minutest points of their life. A priest is a priest always and in every place; the spirit of his priesthood must penetrate also into his recreations, and follow him wheresoever he may be. In the diocese of St. Agatha it was suspension ipso facto for any one in holy orders to play in public places “at games of chance, such as cards, dice or suchlike.”10 He forbade acting in theatrical representations, even if the piece were a sacred one, and it were done in a private house, under pain of suspension if the cleric were in holy orders, and of disability to receive them if he were still in minor orders.
The same vigilance he extended with an especial exactness to his seminary. He was wont to say: ‘Many a Bishop will be lost eternally because of his seminary.’11 The internal discipline he administered with such zeal and minuteness, that two Bishops who visited it said: ‘Mind your Bishop; for you have got another St. Charles.’12 St. Alphonsus knew, not only that if in the seminary, or seed-plot of the priesthood any sin, or laxity, or worldliness should enter, it would grow up and spread, as a moral pestilence, over the whole diocese, but that if the mind and spirit of Jesus Christ were not formed in the rising priesthood, if they were lukewarm, or lovers of self instead of lovers of souls, if they were blameless themselves, and yet without a hatred and a zeal against sin, the work of souls would not be done; sin would not be pursued and destroyed, and sinners would not be saved. He therefore used to call his seminary ‘the apple of his eye, the jewel of his diocese.’ Nothing seemed too much if it related to the young clergy. ‘All my clergy are my crown,’ he said; ‘but I depend most on the seminary to cultivate and to make morality to reign throughout the diocese.’13
I need hardly attempt to show to what labour his zeal against sin prompted him in the pastoral care of his people. His first act on entering the diocese was to give a Mission, beginning at the cathedral church, then in all the towns of his diocese, followed by the canonical visit, which he held punctually and exactly every two years. His knowledge of the state of his diocese was such, that it used to be said, that either an angel or a devil used to tell him of the sins and scandals which were committed. Even when he was bedridden, he would often know by daybreak the scandals that had been committed in the night, and the sins of those that were at a distance. Instantly he would send for the offenders. Until he had done so, he could have no rest. His attendants sometimes were too slow for him. He used to say: ‘When a sin against God is in question, we ought to leave everything to put a stop to it.’ When he spoke of any scandal, he would say: ‘This is a thorn piercing my heart.’ In his Life we are told, ‘it is incredible how many sins he prevented, how many scandals he extirpated. Volumes would not tell all.’
The perpetual burden of his preaching was against sin. Certainly, the love and the passion of Jesus, the glories and the tenderness of our Immaculate Mother, were abundantly in his mouth, as his writings bear witness; but we are told that, like as St. John in his last years went on ever repeating, almost to weariness: ‘Little children, love one another,’ so Alphonsus was always saying, ‘My children, cease from sin; my children, cease from sin.’
But this zeal against sin was tempered by an exceeding love of sinners. In this he followed closely the words of our divine Lord ‘I came not to call the just, but sinners to penance.’ ‘They who are in health need not the physician, but they that are sick.’ ‘I was not sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel.’ Alphonsus chose for himself the worst sinners, and desired his sons to occupy themselves about the conversion of the most abandoned. It would seem as if he regarded them as the strongholds of the enemy; that if these keys of the power of Satan could be taken, his kingdom would be destroyed. We find therefore that he was surrounded by the lowest and most desperate of the populations where he preached. He had a special attraction for them, the cause of which is evident — his singular benignity of heart. As he said, ‘It is not difficult to say to a sinner, Get you gone; you are lost; I will not absolve you: but if we remember that such a soul was bought by the Precious Blood, we shall be horrified at such a way of dealing with it.’ When he heard of the conversion of a soul, he would weep for joy. He spent a great part of his revenues in assisting the penitent, or the innocent, whose poverty exposed them to danger; so that he was insolently reproached for it by some one, who said, that ‘one must be a sinner to receive assistance from him.’ He answered ‘I wish to assist everybody; but I must begin with those that are in sin.’ When he was told that he was deceived, he said ‘It matters little, if I can thwart the plans of the devil. It is no little gain to hinder sin even for a quarter of an hour.’ Again, he said ‘If I abandon these sinners, perhaps they may fall into despair. If they commit one mortal sin less, is it not for the glory of God?’
And this benignity with sinners manifested itself especially in two things; first, in the facility with which he gave absolution, and secondly, in the lightness and sweetness of the penance he imposed upon them. He made the Sacrament of Penance an object not only of faith but of love; not a carnificina conscientiae, a torture of the conscience, but a rest, a solace, and a joy. He used to say: ‘I am ready to give my blood and my life for them; and if they are sincere, I will help them, though I go without my food.’ His Moral Theology is studiously designed to make the way of absolution open, easy, and accessible. In the spirit of the divine Lord, who forgave all who had faith to come to Him, not exacting of them more than the least of that which His sanctity inflexibly required; so St. Alphonsus drew to the fountains of the most Precious Blood all who had need, the most stained, hardened, and outcast, exacting of them the least which the Sacrament of Penance, imposes as the condition of our pardon.
5. Finally, Alphonsus, for the very love he had to sinners, had a horror of the occasions of sin. He had thoroughly detected the deceit by which Satan had confounded together what I may call the divine and the diabolical rigorism. The rigorism of Satan comes between the soul of the sinner and its absolution in the Precious Blood. The rigorism or loving severity of the Sacred Heart comes between the absolved soul and the occasions of sin by which it has fallen. When Alphonsus heard of confessors who made the way of absolution narrow and protracted, he used to cry, with a kind of anguish, ‘O poor Blood of Jesus Christ!’ But after absolution, all his efforts, by way of counsel and command, were used to keep the penitent from the occasions of falling again. To some who account Alphonsus lax, his precautions against sin will appear rigorous; so inverted and misplaced are the ideas of many. It is a spurious and miserable benignity which permits a penitent to go again into the midst of the same voluntary occasions by which he has already fallen; to stain once more the white stole of his absolution, and to forfeit the grace which has been so hardly regained. I cannot give even an outline of his counsels against the occasions of sin. They run through all his works. No subject occurs so habitually or so largely in all his writings on the spiritual life. The duty of breaking with persons, and intimacies, trades, and professions, by which men have been betrayed into sin, returns again and again.
Alphonsus wrote a treatise upon the danger of bad books, and involved himself in a contest with some of the ministers of government by its publication. To a mind illuminated as his, the havoc made by bad books was evident as the light. The great French Revolution, and the infidelity and impurity of the Voltairian school were then just beginning to penetrate into Italy. What would he have judged of the world at this time, and of this country, in which the plague of bad books covers the land! Evil men, evil lives, evil examples, spread a moral pestilence openly and powerfully; but nothing spreads falsehood and evil more surely and deeply than a bad book. The Sower who sowed the seed of the kingdom ordained that His Church, by its living voice and its writings, should cover the face of the earth with truth and purity. The infallible voice of the Church, and the inspired and uninspired writings of its children, have spread the knowledge of God and of His kingdom throughout the world, and sustained it to this day. But the sower had no sooner reached the end of the furrow, when the enemy came, treading in his footsteps, and sowing upon the same soil the tares and the opisons of falsehood and impurity. A bad book is falsehood and sin in a permanent and impersonal form; all the more dangerous because disguised, and tenacious in its action upon the soul. I do not know which is the more dangerous, the books which are written professedly against Jesus Christ, His Divinity, His Church, and His laws, or the furtive, and stealthy, and serpentine literature which is penetrated through and through with unbelief and passion, false principles, immoral whispers, and impure imaginations. We are told that an index expurgatorius is impossible in such a country as this. In countries where the unity of the faith still exists, it may be possible to restrain the evil; but in such a land as this, where liberty of thought and speech, oral and written, have run to the extreme of license, it is no longer possible. Who can pull up the weeds in a wilderness? A man may weed a garden; but a desert must be left to its rankness. Nevertheless, the index expurgatorius may be transcribed upon the delicate and enlightened conscience of those who love purity and truth; and the zeal of Alphonsus is a warning to fathers and mothers, and to all who love our divine Lord, and desire the sanctification of their own hearts.
Like as Job prayed for his sons while they were feasting, lest they should commit sin, so he did not fear likewise to watch over the amusement and recreation of his people. He turned a company of actors out of his diocese, lest they should corrupt his flock. He restrained to the utmost of his power balls, promiscuous dancing, masquing, the license of the carnival, theatres, private theatricals, and the like. Even religious feasts, attended by the concourse of multitudes, he regarded with suspicion. He was wont to say: ‘When there is a multitude, the occasion of sin will not be wanting.’ ‘Fire and straw do not do well together, especially when the devil blows on them.’ I quote these things, because St. Alphonsus is accused of laxity by none more than by those who would accuse him in these things of rigorism. But such was the estimate of them, which a pure soul, invested with its baptismal innocence, full of hatred against sin, and of the love of sanctity, deliberately formed and maturely acted upon in the full experience of life, and with the grave responsibilities of his pastoral charge. And we may believe that his instincts and his perceptions were not far from the judgments which the pure eyes of our guardian angels form as they hover over the multitude, who throng together in the crowds of worldly amusement, or even in the sanctuaries of religious excitement. It was not rigour, nor scruple, but the penetrating intuition of a soul full of zeal against sin, and altogether on fire for the salvation of souls, which made him jealous for the sanctification of his flock. No wonder, then, that at the end of his long and toilsome life he was overheard, when he knew not that any ear of man was near, saying: ‘Lord, Thou knowest that all I have thought, said, done, and written has been for souls and for Thee.’
From this supernatural hatred and zeal against sin two consequences flowed, on which I will add a few words.
1. The first was, his great power over souls. It was his special endowment in all the aspects of his life. As a confessor, he spoke with such horror of sin, that the most hardened sinner could not resist his words. He loved the confessional as the chief function of his priesthood, the deepest, most interior, and vital work for souls. He used to say, a priest who does not love the confessional does not love souls. He was the first to enter it in the morning, and the last to leave it at night. So long as his health and strength endured, he seemed to spend his life in the confessional and in preaching. His way of dealing with souls will be best expressed in his own words: ‘The deeper the soul is plunged in sin, the more we must endeavour by kindness to pluck it from the arms of Satan, and cast it into the arms of God.’ The fewest words from him had a supernatural power of conviction. A hardened sinner, who had poured out a terrible history of sin, with every sign of unconcern, was roused in a moment, at the end of his confession, by these words: ’ My child, what has Jesus Christ done against you?’ Such was his power of softening the most hardened, that at the close of his life St. Alphonsus one day revealed that he did not remember ever sending away a sinner without absolving him.
As a preacher the effect of his words was, if possible, more supernatural. In Amalfi were two suburbs, inhabited by abandoned women, who were the pestilence of the town. St. Alphonsus gave a mission there.15 Every one of them was brought to repentance; and the missionaries who visited the town some years after, found that every one of them had persevered in her repentance. At Nardo, during his preaching in the church, a person fell dead from the grief of contrition; and in the night following, three others died.16 This wonderful power over the consciences and souls of men came from the energy of his simplicity. He abhorred what is called eloquence, and counted it the plague of the Church, and the sin of preachers. When he heard a priest preaching rhetorically, he used to say: ‘Poor Jesus.’ And ambitious preachers he called ‘the enemies of Jesus Christ.’ Though most eloquent, those who heard him thought not of him, but of what he uttered. They were as unconscious of the preacher’s eloquence as he was himself; for the thought of God, of sin, and of judgment, absorbed both him and them.
His power over souls as a Bishop could not be expressed without writing the history of thirteen years; but it may, in the fewest words, be described by three testimonies which were borne to him while he yet lived. An official, who was always about him, and knew all his works and his labours, said: ‘A hundred Bishops would not do what he did alone, notwithstanding his infirmities.’ Clement XIV., in refusing the resignation of his bishopric, said: ‘He can govern his diocese from his bed;’ and again: ‘His shadow is enough to govern the diocese.
As a theologian, his power over the hearts of men has been ever expanding. While he was yet alive, he did more than any other to destroy and to root out for ever the two opposite plagues of Jansenism and of laxity, and, by the fervour of piety which he infused into moral theology, to destroy the formalism of the careless and mechanical. And this power has been ever extending itself from nation to nation and church to church, from diocese to diocese, from seminary to seminary, from confessional to confessional. The mind of Alphonsus, and the benignity of his pastoral love of souls, has entered and conquered in every Catholic country, and at this day reigns throughout the Church.
And he reigns, too, as a patriarch over the tribes of his spiritual children. In his lifetime they were comparatively few, and his last days were full of sorrow; but now, in Italy, in Belgium, in Holland, in France, in Germany, in England, in Ireland, in America, and in the islands of the West Indies, he reigns over the hearts of multitudes, by his sons and his sons’sons, who are the object of their veneration and their love.
2. The other consequence of his ardent zeal against sins is, the special enmity with which the world pursues his name. Surely in this a prophecy is fulfilled. ‘I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed;’ for who is more conspicuously the son of Mary than Alphonsus? His book ‘The Glories of Mary,’ which unites him with St. Bernard and St. Bernardine of Sienna, has marked him out for the happiness and the honour of sharing the enmity which is levelled against the Mother of God. The world will not endure those who witness for Jesus, whom it crucified; nor against sin, which it loves; nor for sanctity, which it hates. In every way Alphonsus is marked out for its enmity. How could it endure the presence of a soul full of the Holy Ghost — all illuminated, to know the sin of the world; all inflamed with the love of God, to be jealous for His honour; all dilated with an indignant contempt of the world’s pretensions, and with an inflexible and fearless zeal against the world’s pride and sin? They were natural antagonists. They are so still.
The best panegyric, St. Alphonsus says, is to imitate the virtues of a Saint; and the lessons he teaches us may be briefly spoken. The festival of today may teach us that the world is never convinced of its sin by compromise, but only by the contrast which sanctity opposes to sin. This lesson is to be learned indeed from all the servants of God, but in an especial manner in these later ages from three who may be called the standard-bearers in the warfare of the Church against the world: St. Ignatius, St. Charles, and St. Alphonsus. Reverend Fathers, I do not venture to speak to you, but to your flock, who in my words will recognise that which they see in you, the example of your Saint and founder. To them, then, I would say, if we would convince the world of sin, we must do as men who would lift a heavy mass. They do not rest upon it. So long as they are upon it, they are powerless. As soon as they are detached from it their power revives. They find a fulcrum to a distance and the longer the lever and the farther they are, the greater the purchase obtained. So it is with those who would convince the world of its follies, stains, and its sins. It is by contrast and by separation, not pharisaical separation, but as our great High Priest, who was ‘innocent, undefiled, and separate from sinners,’ that you must work upon the reason and the conscience of men. It is by love and patience, visible sincerity and tender compassion, that you must work upon the will of the sinful and the worldling. Do not hope to win the world by courting it. Do not fear to lose your hold by provoking it. Cast in your lot with the Saints who have renounced it, and laboured for it; opposed it, but spent themselves for its redemption. Be Christian, Catholic, and Roman in the fullest, deepest sense of these three titles of our faith. Be unworldly and inflexible, benign and gentle as Alphonsus was: to be this, try to live as he lived, in union with God, in the fellowship and service of our divine Lord and of His Immaculate Mother. Bear your witness for the sanctity of God in the world which is around you. Fear nothing but to be found on the world’s side, when He who redeemed us from it shall appear.
1 Rom. i. 28
2 Gen. iii. 5.
3‘Innocentiae stola in baptismo accepta candida Creatori reddita.’ Informatio super virtutibus Ven. Servi Dei Alphonsi de Ligorio. Romae, 1806. ‘Miram vitae innocentiam, quam nunquam ulla lethali labe foedavit.’ Officium de Festo S. Alph.
4 When some objector invited him to change a statement in his Moral Theology, he said: ‘It would be to make me tell an untruth. I would rather have my head cut off than tell a lie.’ Life of St. Alphonsus, vol. iv. p. 238.
5 Vol. ii. p. 316.
6 Life, vol. ii. p. 53-4. His work on Moral Theology is well described by his biographer: ‘It is but an extract from the ecclesiastical (i. e. divine) and civil laws. Where their foundations were wanting he adopted the doctrine of St. Thomas and supplied the remainder by the authority of theologians generally approved.’ St. Alphonsus therefore acts as an expositor chiefly of others, and of the general judgments of the multitude of writers, weighed, analysed, and expressed with great patience, and exactness both of moral perception and of spiritual discernment.
7 F. Heilig, in his edition of St. Alphonsus published at Malines gives the authors quoted by St. Alphonsus as 744, excluding heretical and pagan authors.
F. Haringer, also of the Congregation of the Redemptorists, published a later edition of the Theology of St. Alphonsus, at Ratisbonne, in 1846, and gives an ‘Index auctorum qui a S. Alphonso in sua Theologia Morali et in dissertationibus moralibus citantur.’ Vol. i. cap. iv. Introductio Editoris. He gives 761 names of authors quoted. From this number he excludes the anonymous and pagan authors. Cardinal Villecourt has just published a Life of St. Alphonsus in French, which has been revised by the Redemptorist Fathers in Rome. His Eminence says in a note to vol. iv. u. 421, ‘Dans sa Théologie Morale S. Alphonse cite près de huit cent auteurs.’ Of those whose country is given about one-third are Italian. St. Alphonsus cites also French, German, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swiss, Polish, Greek, Asiatic, English, Scotch, Irish, African writers, and one American. This gives to the work a special character for breadth; as representing his own final judgment indeed, but based upon the mind of theologians of all Catholic countries.
8 Life, vol. ii. p. 80.
9 St. John xvii 19.
10 Vol. iii. p. 72.
11 Ib. p. 95.
12 Ib. vol. ii. p. 72, 353.
13 Life, vol. ii. p. 362.
14 Life, vol. iv. p. 43-6.
15 Vol. ii. p. 92.
16 Tannoid, book i. c. xvi Turin edition.