Saint Alphonsus Liguori

He was a prodigy: a doctorate in both canon and civil law at sixteen, by special dispensation because he was too young for the degree, and a successful practice in Naples in his twenties. At twenty-seven he lost a major case — on a technicality he had overlooked — walked out of the court, and never practised again. He was ordained three years later.

In 1732 he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, to preach missions to the goatherds and labourers of the hill country outside Naples, whom the city clergy did not reach. He insisted his preachers use plain speech. He is said to have tested his sermons on the household servants and cut anything they could not follow.

The moral theology

His century was fought over by rigorists and laxists. The rigorists — Jansenist in temper — held that in doubt you must take the safest course, which in practice meant refusing absolution, withholding communion for years, and leaving ordinary people convinced they were damned. Alphonsus had spent his life in confessionals listening to the results.

His answer was equiprobabilism: where the case for liberty is as strong as the case for the obligation, the penitent may take the liberty. It sounds like a technicality and it was a mercy. His Theologia Moralis, nine books built out of tens of thousands of real cases, became the standard manual for confessors for two centuries, and he is patron of the scrupulous because he took their misery seriously as a problem to be solved.

The devotional writer

He wrote something like a hundred and eleven works. The Glories of Mary, Preparation for Death, Uniformity with God’s Will, and above all Visits to the Blessed Sacrament — a short book of thirty-one visits that put the habit of dropping into a church before the tabernacle into the ordinary practice of Catholics everywhere.

He also composed music, and wrote the Christmas carol Tu scendi dalle stelle, which is still what Italians sing at midnight Mass.

The end

He was made a bishop against his will at sixty-six and resigned at seventy-nine, having spent the intervening years in a diocese he found in a bad state and left in a good one. Then came the humiliation: an edition of his congregation’s rule was altered without his understanding what he had signed, Rome expelled him from the order he had founded, and he lived out his last years excluded from it, in great physical pain and long spiritual darkness. He was not restored in his lifetime.

He was canonised in 1839 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1871. The Redemptorists he founded are still preaching missions — the novena to Saint Ann on this site comes from one of their shrines.