Reflection on feast of Alphonsus Ligouri, founder of Redemptorists

Thursday of the Seventeenth week in Ordinary Time       1 August 2013

St. Alphonsus Liguori, bishop and Doctor of the Church (1696-1787)

SAINT ALPHONSUS LIGUORI

was born of noble parents near Naples, in 1696. His spiritual formation was entrusted to the Oratorian Fathers of that city, and from his boyhood Alphonsus was known as a very devout little Brother of the Minor Oratory. At the early age of sixteen he became a doctor in civil law; and entering this career with ardour, he met great success and renown. A mistake, however, by which he lost an important case, showed him the vanity of human fame and glory. He decided to abandon the legal profession at the age of twenty-seven, to labour for the glory of God alone. Alphonsus’ father long opposed his decision, but as a man of virtue consented at last.

Alphonsus was ordained a priest in 1726, and he soon became as renowned a preacher as he had been a lawyer. His father stopped in a church to pray one day, and amazed, heard his son preaching; he suddenly saw clearly how God had marvellously elevated his son, and was filled with joy, saying: “My son has made God known to me!” As for Alphonsus, he loved and devoted himself to the most neglected souls in the region of Naples. He was a very perfect confessor, and wrote a manual which has been used ever since for the instruction of those who administer the sacrament of Penance. A musician of the first rank, Saint Alphonsus gave up his instruments to devote himself more perfectly to his apostolic labours; he nonetheless composed joyous religious hymns for the poor folk he heard singing in the streets, that they might glorify God and not waste their voices and efforts in vain and worldly songs.

To extend and continue his work, he later founded the missionary Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, for the evangelization of the poor. At the age of sixty-six he became Bishop of Saint Agatha, a suffragan diocese of Naples, and undertook the reform of his diocese with the zeal of a Saint. He made a vow never to waste a moment of time, and, though his life was spent in prayer and work, he also composed a vast number of books. These volumes were filled with such great science, unction, and wisdom that in 1871 he was declared by Pius IX a Doctor of the Church. Saint Alphonsus wrote his first book at the age of forty-nine, and in his eighty-third year had published about sixty volumes; at that time his director forbade him to continue writing. The best known of his books is his volume entitled “The Glories of Mary”, by which he exalts the graces and narrates the wondrous deeds of mercy of the Mother of God for those who invoke Her.

Very many of these books were written in the half hours snatched from his labours as a missionary, as a religious Superior, and finally as a Bishop, often in the midst of unrelenting bodily and mental sufferings. With his left hand he would hold a piece of marble against his aching head, while his right hand wrote. Yet he counted no time lost which was spent in charity. He did not refuse to maintain a long correspondence with a simple soldier who asked for his advice, or to play the harpsichord in his declining years, while he taught his novices to sing spiritual canticles. He lived in times of religious laxity, and met with many persecutions and disappointments. During his last seven years he was prevented by constant sickness from offering the adorable Sacrifice, but he received Holy Communion daily, and his love for Jesus Christ and his trust in Mary’s prayers sustained him to the end. He died in 1787, in his ninety-first year.                   q

Reflection: Let us do with all our heart and attention the duty of each day, leaving to God the result as well as the care of the future.

Exodus 40:16-21.34-38.

Moses did exactly as the LORD had commanded him.
On the first day of the first month of the second year the Dwelling was erected.
It was Moses who erected the Dwelling. He placed its pedestals, set up its boards, put in its bars, and set up its columns.
He spread the tent over the Dwelling and put the covering on top of the tent, as the LORD had commanded him.
He took the commandments and put them in the ark; he placed poles alongside the ark and set the propitiatory upon it.
He brought the ark into the Dwelling and hung the curtain veil, thus screening off the ark of the commandments, as the LORD had commanded him.
Then the cloud covered the meeting tent, and the glory of the LORD filled the Dwelling.
Moses could not enter the meeting tent, because the cloud settled down upon it and the glory of the LORD filled the Dwelling.
Whenever the cloud rose from the Dwelling, the Israelites would set out on their journey.
But if the cloud did not lift, they would not go forward; only when it lifted did they go forward.
In the daytime the cloud of the LORD was seen over the Dwelling; whereas at night, fire was seen in the cloud by the whole house of Israel in all the stages of their journey.

Psalm 84:3.4.5-6a.8a.11.

My soul yearns and pines
For the courts of the LORD.
My heart and my flesh
Cry out for the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home,
And the swallow a nest
In which she puts her young?
Your altars, O LORD of hosts,
My king and my God!

Happy they who dwell in your house!
Continually they praise you.
Blessed the men whose strength you are!
I had rather one day in your courts
Than a thousand elsewhere;
I had rather lie at the threshold of the house of my God
Than dwell in the tents of the wicked.

Matt 13:47-53.

Jesus said to the disciples: “The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.
Do you understand all these things? They answered, "Yes."
And he replied, "Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old."
When Jesus finished

Commentary of the day :

Benedict XVI, pope from 2005 to 2013
Encyclical « Spe Salvi », 45-46 (trans. Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

"On the shore"

With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word “Hell”. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgment according to each person's particular circumstances...:

“If any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (3:12-15).