St. Alfonsus Liguori (Aug 1st)

This week has been a busy one with regards to the Saints.

On July 29, we remembered St. Martha, to whom in recent years, the Church also added her sister Mary and brother Lazarus.  Poor "busy bee" St. Martha, she's never gotten the respect that she really deserves ;-). 

On July 30th, we remembered St. Peter Chrysologus, a Church father who lived in the 5th Century, a time of a good deal of confusion with the first and then repeated sacking of Rome.  He functioned as the Bishop of Ravenna which became the capital of the region for a time.

On July 31st, we remembered St. Ignatius of Loyola, a favorite saint of mine, the founder of the Jesuits, a religious congregation that became famous for its learning, missionary work and spiritual direction all finding root in a man, the future St. Ignatius, who began life hoping to find "glory on the battlefield" as a soldier.  An excellent recent movie about him was Ignatio de Loyola (produced in English by the Jesuits of the Philippines and available for streaming via ROKU.com).

But here I'm going to focus on St. Alfonsus Liguori:

Born in 1696 near Naples, Italy, when it comes to religion, the future St. Alfonsus became something of a "jack-of-all-trades."   The Liguori family had been of noble origin, but by his time his branch of the family needed to find work to support itself.  With the resources that his parents did have, he was able to become a lawyer, and a rather successful one at that.  But he found it unfulfilling.

So against the wishes of his father, he entered into the Seminary and became a priest. 

His previous education proved useful in a multitude of ways.

He became a canonist, a moral theologian, founded a religious congregation, the Redemptorists, wrote numerous works of Mariology, including his most famous The Glories of Mary, and perhaps most sweetly, he became the author of the most famous Italian Christmas carol "Tu Scendi dalle Stelle"

His impact in moral theology is important even today, as it was he who challenged in Catholic thinking someone as great as St. Augustine on a critical legal matter.

St. Augustine had maintained that while there are matters / actions that are always immoral, they shouldn't necessarily be illegal.  (Interestingly enough, St. Augustine proposed the example of Prostitution, which he obviously found to be clearly immoral.  Yet, he appreciated that the circumstances of the people driven to prostitution may be such that it should not necessarily be always illegal).

St. Alfonsus Liguori argued instead that actions that were always immoral should also be illegal.

This question or course is of great importance to this day regarding all sorts of matters ranging from prohibition of recreational alcohol consumption, to legalization of recreational drug use, to legalized gambling, to legalized abortion.  

With regards to matters that were "always immoral," St. Alfonsus Liguori maintained that they should also be illegal.

And this of course remains the clear presumptive teaching of the Catholic Church since his day to ours.