Saint Alphonsus Liguori: the Doctor of Prayer and the Glories of Mary

Today, 1 August, the Church keeps the feast of Saint Alphonsus Mary Liguori (1696–1787) — the brilliant lawyer who walked out of the courts, the bishop who bent double under illness and never stopped writing, the founder of the Redemptorists, and one of the Doctors of the Church. He is the man who rescued moral theology from rigorism and handed it back to mercy; the man who wrote that he who prays is saved. Here is his life, his work, why the Church named him a Doctor, his famous books — and, at the end, his prayer, in Latin and English.

The lawyer who never lost a case

He was born on 27 September 1696 at Marianella, just outside Naples, the eldest son of a family of the minor nobility. He was a boy of frightening gifts. Taught at home by the best masters, he held a double doctorate — in civil and canon law — from the University of Naples by the age of sixteen, so young that he needed a dispensation to receive the degree, and so small that the gown swallowed him and the hall laughed when he stood.

He set up practice, and for about eight years he was one of the most sought-after advocates in the city. It was said he never lost a case. Until, in 1723, in a great suit between powerful houses, he overlooked one detail in a document — a clause that turned the whole law of the matter against his client. He lost, in open court. He went home, refused food for days, and said the sentence that ends a life: “O world, now I know you.” The honour he had chased so hard had shown itself, in an instant, to be the size of a sheet of paper.

The sword on Our Lady’s altar

It was not the defeat that converted him, but what came after it. Alphonsus began to spend his days at the Hospital for Incurables, serving the most abandoned sick of Naples. It was there, among those wards, that he heard within himself, with complete clarity: “Leave the world and give yourself to me.” He rose, went out, and walked to the church of Our Lady of Ransom. Before her altar he unbuckled his gentleman’s sword and laid it on the stone. The lawyer had changed courts.

Against his father’s furious will he entered the studies for the priesthood and was ordained on 21 December 1726, at the age of thirty. In Naples he gathered the labourers and the poor into “evening chapels” — small nightly circles of prayer, led by the laymen themselves, which grew into the hundreds. Everything he would become was already there: a man consumed by the souls no one else was looking for.

The Redemptorists: a mission to the forgotten

Ill health sent him to rest in the hills of Scala, above Amalfi, and there he discovered, appalled, the spiritual abandonment of the countryside: whole villages of goatherds and peasants who almost never saw a priest, died without the sacraments, and did not know the essentials of the faith. It struck him as a second vocation inside the first. On 9 November 1732 he founded at Scala the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer — the Redemptorists — with a single aim: to go after the poorest, most forgotten souls, preaching popular missions.

And he preached in a deliberately plain way. He forbade his men their flourishes: a sermon, he said, must be able to be understood by the oldest and least lettered woman in the back pew, or it is useless. “Preach,” he ordered, “so that no one need ask what you meant.” It was the eloquence of the advocate placed at the service of those who had no advocate at all. In 1762, at sixty-six, the Pope compelled him to accept the bishopric of Sant’Agata dei Goti; he governed it with reform and charity until illness forced him to resign in 1775 and return to his own.

The work: the Doctor the Church needed

Alphonsus wrote as long as he lived — some 111 works, from the highest theology to the humblest tract, later translated into more than seventy languages, which makes him one of the most widely read Catholic authors in all of history. But the heart of his work, and the reason for his doctorate, lies in moral theology.

His age was caught between two errors. On one side, a rigorism of Jansenist temper that filled the faithful with fear, delayed absolution, drove souls from Communion, and made of God a judge impossible to satisfy. On the other, a laxism that made light of sin. In his monumental Theologia Moralis, Alphonsus opened a firm and merciful road between them — a prudent method by which the confessor could lead a soul without crushing it and without deceiving it. He gave back to the sacrament of confession its face of mercy. It is no accident that in 1871 Pope Pius IX proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church, and that tradition gave him the title Doctor Zelantissimus — the “Most Zealous Doctor,” the most ardent for souls. Later, in 1950, Pius XII declared him the heavenly patron of all confessors and moral theologians.

“He who prays is saved”: the Doctor of prayer

If one sentence sums up Saint Alphonsus, it is this: “He who prays is saved; he who does not pray is damned.” He wrote it in his treatise The Great Means of Prayer, and he said that, if he could, he would print that book in enough copies to place one in the hand of every person on earth. His thesis is simple and cutting: the grace to persevere and be saved, God ordinarily grants to those who ask for it — and not to ask is, in the end, to refuse it.

So for Alphonsus prayer is no ornament of the devout life but the necessary means of salvation: the rope thrown to a drowning man. It is the same conviction that runs through the spiritual-direction texts on this site about offering the day to God — begin early, begin simply, and never stop asking.

The Glories of Mary

Alphonsus loved Our Lady with the love of a son and of a doctor at once. In the Glories of Mary he defended, with all the authority of his learning, that Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces — that God, having given us everything in Christ, willed those gifts to reach us through the hands of the one who is Full of Grace. And he left a promise that has consoled millions: it is impossible for a faithful servant of Mary to be lost, one who honours her and has recourse to her. When the weight comes, Alphonsus’s remedy is always the same — to turn to her.

From the Glories of Mary to Gratia Plena

Every Marian book written after 1750 is, in some way, a child of the Glories of Mary. My own Gratia Plena is no exception: it is an unhurried meditation on why the Angel called a young woman of Nazareth full of grace, and there, among the saints who loved her, Saint Alphonsus stands named, beside Bernard, Augustine and Louis de Montfort.

If this piece has made you want to know Our Lady better, it may be a good place to go on.

See Gratia Plena →

The dark night and a holy death

Alphonsus’s last years were one long passion. A fierce rheumatic arthritis bent his spine and drove his chin into his chest — the deformity art has fixed forever — so severely that a hollow had to be cut in his collar and, at last, his beard shaved because the skin was raw. To all this were added years of scruples and a true dark night, in which the man who had taught half the world to trust in mercy saw himself at the edge of the abyss.

And there was added the hardest humiliation of all: the affair of the Regolamento in 1780, when, nearly blind and deaf, he was manoeuvred by others into signing an altered version of the Rule of his own congregation — and ended, by decree, excluded from the order he had himself founded. He accepted it all in silence. He died on 1 August 1787 at Pagani, aged ninety, at the noonday Angelus, his eyes fixed on an image of Mary. He was canonized in 1839 by Gregory XVI. From the loss of a lawsuit to exclusion from his own religious family, his life was a long lesson in what he most preached: to give oneself over and to conform one’s will to God’s.

• Prayer is necessary. Not a pious extra, but the means by which the grace of perseverance is asked for and received.
• Mercy is greater. Against the rigorism that drives away, the confessor must lead the soul to God, not lock it outside.
• Do the will of God. All perfection consists in uniting our will to His — in health and in sickness, in honour and in humiliation.
• Love Jesus Christ. The whole holiness of a soul comes down to a single verb: to love.
• Have recourse to Mary. Mediatrix of all graces, sure refuge of those who entrust themselves to her.

The prayer of Saint Alphonsus

No practice is so bound to his name as the Spiritual Communion: the act by which, when we cannot receive the Eucharist, we ask Jesus to come at least spiritually into the heart. The form below is the one Saint Alphonsus left in his Visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and which the Church has prayed in his words ever since.

And this second is the prayer with which the Church honours him on his feast — the collect of today’s liturgy, 1 August, which asks, by his example and his counsels, the grace to come safely to the end.

Words of Saint Alphonsus

Some of his sentences are now kept in this site’s collection of the quotes of the saints:

You can read them beside Augustine, Teresa, the Curé of Ars and many others in the collection of the quotes of the saints here on the site.

Sancte Alphonse, ora pro nobis. Saint Alphonsus, pray for us — and win for us the grace you most preached: never to stop praying, and to trust, to the last day, in the mercy that does not tire.