|
| |
St. Alphonsus Liguori - Friend of the
Most Abandoned
Those who in this life
love God above all else
know that their beloved
is ever present with them
J. Robert Fenili, C.Ss.R.
How
would it feel to be abandoned by the Church? How would you feel if, over the
course of a few years, the Church pulled out of half of the parishes, churches,
and so forth, in your country? Such an occurrence is not unknown in the history
of the Church. In 1652, Pope Innocent X issued the decree "To Restore Regular
Discipline," which closed all the "little monasteries" in Italy. These small
monasteries were judged to have insufficient personnel to live up to the ideals
of their rules, such as offering the daily prayer prescribed for monasteries.
The real reason, however—since many of these small monasteries were less than
exemplary in their conduct and in their financial affairs—was to force these
small groups into larger communities that could more easily be controlled by
superiors, bishops, and the Holy See.
This well-intentioned move proved catastrophic for the Faith in southern Italy.
For example, of the 660 small monasteries in the province of Calabria, 325 of
them—almost half were closed. The majority of these small houses were located in
remote country districts and served as centers of religious life for the people
of those areas. Since many of these religious houses were not replaced with
parishes, the people were soon "abandoned" by the Church. "Christ stopped at
Eboli!" became a well-known expression; Eboli is a small town just south of
Naples. The saying expressed the religious despair of these poor people.
Less than a century later, at the same time that Pope Benedict XIV was bemoaning
the abandoned state of these people and seeking help in finding a solution, an
up-and-coming idealistic young lawyer, a Neapolitan nobleman, lost a renowned
court case. The young lawyer went into a deep depression and locked himself in
his room for a week, sobbing, "0 World, so this is what you are like!" Even
though he was a rich nobleman, he had always believed that he could live in the
world as a pious, single layman dedicated to works of justice and charity. The
city of Naples, with one priest for every one hundred people, hardly needed
another churchman! The prayerful man was a dedicated volunteer who daily washed
and comforted the dying in the Hospital of the Incurables. One day as he
extended this kindness, he heard the words, "Give up everything to follow me!"
Suddenly he knew he had to speak what was in his heart. This man to whom God had
spoken was Alphonsus Liguori.
A GRADUAL CONVERSION
Alphonsus' religious journey began with his mother.
She had helped him to feel deeply God's love in the suffering Jesus and the
tender Mary. Along with this firm belief, however, she had also passed on her
own great scrupulosity to her son. In addition, his rigid, authoritarian father
made it impossible for him to come to peace with his own weaknesses and fears.
Alphonsus became a strange paradox: a person sure of God's love yet fearful that
he would not meet its demands. Today we would call him a perfectionist. Dealing
with this fault became a lifelong battle for Alphonsus. Each day he learned to
see a little more clearly that only by sharing this sense of Christ's love with
others could he be sure his own love would remain genuine. In sharing this love,
his experience of the tenderness of God's love gradually deepened.
This ongoing conversion, along with his desire to preach this message, led
Alphonsus to the priesthood. But as his popularity grew among his own—the
nobility and the gentry—he began to see that they had plenty of churchmen and
nuns to care for their piety. On the other side of town, however, the laborers,
the unemployed, the shopkeepers, and the washerwomen had no one to carry the
message of God's love to them. So, even as a seminarian, Alphonsus and some of
his friends began to preach to these people. Since they were so numerous and
because parish structures had little concern for them, Alphonsus organized the
people into laity-led prayer groups and trained them to be catechists and
ministers.
But the constant pressure of his perfectionism always to do more drove him to
the brink of a nervous break-down. Realizing this, his friends took him on
vacation to the hills overlooking the Amalfi coast. While resting there,
Alphonsus met people who lived "on the other side of Eboli" to whom faith was
superstition and God was a merciless despot. Few of the clergy tripping over one
another's cassocks in Naples had any intention of venturing among these people.
Alphonsus was profoundly moved by these "most abandoned" and hoped somebody
would help them; he, of course, had his work in Naples.
A DIFFICULT DECISION
Shortly after his return, Alphonsus was asked to meet Sister Marie Celeste
Crostarosa and to evaluate her project to establish a new order of nuns. He felt
that her plan was
valuable, and he supported it. But when he met her again a year later for
spiritual counseling, she confronted him with the report that she'd had a
vision in which Christ had said that Alphonsus was to form a group of men to
bring Christ to the abandoned people in the countryside and that he had better get moving! Alphonsus'
friends tell us how shocked, upset, and totally shaken he was. (Alphonsus always
denounced that Marie Celeste's vision was the basis of his final decision; but
it is hard to deny that God used her to administer a needed "shock treatment.")
He went from confessor to
adviser to friend, looking for someone who would tell him this was not God's
will. But strong agreement among these people whom he trusted convinced
Alphonsus that God was sending him a message.
During the next year, Alphonsus grounded his determination to begin and to
continue a venture that would bring him a lifetime of both joy and anguish. He
could no longer be comfortable in his role of popular preacher who returned to
his monastery every evening on the other side of town. Not only would he have to
leave behind all that he held dear, but his family opposed his going, his
upper-crust friends scoffed at him, and his fellow priests in Naples thought he
was crazy—they even tried to have him thrown out of a local association of
preachers. In addition, the bishop was angry with him. Later, however, his
followers came to see his fateful decision as the basis of their own dedication
and as a precious symbol of what he stood for. A Redemptorist who lived with
Alphonsus describes his departure: "He saddled a mule on November 8 [1732] and,
leaving behind his family and his dearest friends, he rode out of Naples....It
was on that day that Alphonsus left Naples, that is to say, that he triumphed
completely over flesh and blood and over the whole world. He offered himself to
pass the rest of his days among huts and shacks and to die in these, surrounded
by peasants and shepherds."
SEEKING THE MOST ABANDONED
Alphonsus' perfectionism was the basis of both his
greatness and his weakness. The more a person lacked the chance to know and love
Jesus Christ, the more Alphonsus felt called to help the person gain that
knowledge. To Alphonsus, the greatest happiness a person could have was to love
someone who loved you in return. And if your lover was God...
Once Alphonsus had become part of the world of the abandoned, his only serious
temptation to leave was when he found someone more abandoned. Throughout his
whole life, he
had a lingering desire to go to non-Christian lands where people were even more
abandoned and, according to the theology of the day, sure to lose their souls
because they were ignorant of Christ. Because of his friendship with a former
missionary in China, Alphonsus dreamed of going there. But his advisers
insisted: "Alphonsus, China begins right outside the city gates of Naples! These
people have as little knowledge of Christ as anyone." These words quieted his
conscience, but he never lost a nostalgia for those "more abandoned"
CONDUCTING MISSIONS
As he began this work among the country people, Alphonsus did not follow the most
obvious path of starting parishes. Instead, he adopted a style of ministry that
had developed earlier in the century and which he had found effective in Naples:
the "mission among the people." During a mission, a band of priests and brothers
would come to an area to preach and to conduct a series of religious activities.
These "revivals," which usually lasted a few weeks, totally saturated the
people with the sense of God, teaching them the basics for loving Christ and
inspiring in them the desire to do so. Their objective was to encourage the
people to make individual confessions of faith and sinfulness and thereby,
through the experience of the sacraments of reconciliation and Eucharist,
receive a new impulse for living a moral life. Missions also sought to develop
communal supports for and to deal with obstacles to such renewal. The town
leaders and members of the nobility participated in a special pro-gram designed
to help them become spiritual leaders. Nuns in the neighborhood were also
offered special guidance. Alphonsus and his followers taught the small number of
clergy how to conduct services, how to lead prayer, and how to hear confessions.
(In this era, the priests outside the cities often had very little training.)
One of the preachers served as a peacemaker. His task was to try to settle
family feuds so that, at the final
ceremony, a church-wide "sign of peace" would symbolize true reconciliation. The
missions also had a societal impact; civil authorities asked the Redemptorists
to try to restore peace in crime-ridden areas.
The missions anticipated by a century the modern movements of meditation and
contemplation in that they taught clergy and even illiterate people how to
listen to Scripture texts or writings of saints and then to reflect and to pray.
Alphonsus and other Redemptorists wrote books intended to lead people to prayer.
The gem of these writings is Alphonsus' The Practice of the Love of Jesus
Christ, a series of meditations on Paul's letter to the Corinthians, which sums
up Alphonsus' message to these abandoned people: "Some people say sanctity
consists in an austere life; others in prayer; others in frequenting the
sacraments; others in giving alms. But they deceive themselves....Perfect
sanctity consists in loving Jesus Christ, our God, our highest good, our
Redeemer."
ONE WITH THOSE HE SERVED
One of Alphonsus' most important decisions was to have his group of missionaries
live in community in strategic spots throughout the countryside so that these
revivals could be regularly repeated, thus maintaining a continuity of spiritual
support. This meant that Alphonsus and his confreres (the majority of them
educated Neapolitans) had to give up the conveniences and the excitement of city
life to be with these people. For Alphonsus, this was essential for two reasons.
First, he felt that only then would trust be established and assurance be given
the people that they were no longer abandoned. Equally important was the effect
such living had on the missionaries. Alphonsus learned that only by living with
these people could he understand how God was working in their lives and what he
could do to meet their needs.
Alphonsus was an incredibly talented man. He wrote songs for the people to sing,
through which they learned the words and feelings of love
for God. He developed a theory of moral theology—the study of right and wrong
action and behavior based on faith—that was founded on how these people
experienced God and sin. While many of his positions seem rigid by
twentieth-century standards, he was denounced in his day for being too lax. He
based his theology on respect for the conscience of the individual: no one sins
against God's law unless one grasps the value of that law in his or her own
conscience. After all, faith is a love affair between Christ and one's soul.
In return for his ardent efforts to understand the hearts of these simple
people, Alphonsus received a great gift. Although he never completely over-came
his qualms about not responding to those who were abandoned in China, one can
sense that he came to understand that ministering to the most abandoned was not
a task of logically weighing abstract characteristics but of finding one's place
in God's plan. He was called to undo the unforeseen consequences of a
well-intentioned decision that left a people abandoned. For Alphonsus, this was
the "most" that God wanted. In a letter he circulated to his Redemptorist
confreres, we can sense the excitement and joy of one who has just discovered
that he is "at home" in God's house:
"I have the most certain confidence that our little flock will always go on
gradually increasing, not in wealth or honor, but in promoting God's glory, and
in spreading by our labors a greater knowledge and love of Jesus Christ among
others. A day will come, as we may well hope, when we shall see ourselves all
united together in that eternal home, never more to be separated from one
another, where we shall find united with us hundreds and thousands of people who
at one time did not love God but who, brought to his grace by means of us, will
love him and will be for all eternity a cause of glory and gladness for us.
Should not this thought alone spur us on to give ourselves wholly to the love of
Jesus Christ and to making others love him?"
BACK
|
