Saint Alphonsus Liguori

Bishop, Doctor of the Church
(1696–1787)

Saint Alphonsus Liguori was born on September 27, 1696, near Naples, the eldest son of a noble Neapolitan family. A child prodigy, he earned his doctorate in civil and canon law at the age of sixteen. He practised as a lawyer with great success until, at twenty-seven, he lost a major case through a technical oversight. This humiliation, which he accepted as a providential sign, led him to abandon the law entirely and seek ordination to the priesthood.

Ordained in 1726, he devoted himself to the moral and spiritual renewal of the poorest people of Naples and the surrounding countryside, preaching missions in language accessible to all, setting up evening chapels for the urban poor, and writing devotional works of great warmth and accessibility. In 1732 he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, dedicated to preaching the Gospel to the most abandoned souls, particularly the rural poor of southern Italy.

Against his own deeply held inclinations he was appointed Bishop of Sant'Agata dei Goti in 1762, an impoverished and neglected diocese which he transformed by thirteen years of tireless pastoral work. He resigned in 1775 due to severe illness and spent his last years at the Redemptorist house at Nocera, where he endured a prolonged spiritual desolation as well as physical suffering, which he bore with great patience.

As a moral theologian he steered a careful middle course between rigorism and laxism, developing a system known as equiprobabilism that has become standard in Catholic moral theology. He is the patron of moral theologians and confessors. His writings, which filled many volumes, were written to help ordinary priests guide ordinary sinners toward God with both truth and mercy. He died on August 1, 1787, and was canonised in 1839 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1871.