Who was St. Alphonsus Liguori?
Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori was born on September 27, 1696, at Marianella, near Naples, the son of Don Joseph de' Liguori, a naval officer and captain of the royal galleys. On January 21, 1713, at sixteen, he took his doctorate in civil and canon law; Franciscan Media says the degree was given "by acclamation." Benedict XVI said that for eight years he won every case he argued.
In 1723 he left the law, and the sources give two reasons. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells of a lost case. He was leading counsel in a suit over property worth 500,000 ducats, and in open court the other side showed that a document he had read many times meant the opposite of what he thought. "You are right," he said. "I have been mistaken. This document gives you the case." He walked out, refused food for three days, and never went back. Benedict XVI names a deeper cause: he left "indignant at the corruption and injustice that was ruining the legal milieu." He was ordained a priest on December 21, 1726, at thirty.
He gave himself to preaching missions among the rural poor and to hearing their confessions. On November 9, 1732, at Scala, he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists. He wrote constantly, 111 distinct titles by the count of the Redemptorists of the London Province, among them Visits to the Blessed Sacrament and The Glories of Mary. His Moral Theology first appeared in 1748 as notes on the Jesuit moralist Busembaum and was recast as the Theologia Moralis of 1753 and 1755; counting that first sketch, the Catholic Encyclopedia lists nine editions in his lifetime.
In 1762, at sixty-six, after trying to refuse, he was made bishop of Sant'Agata dei Goti, a small diocese he governed for thirteen years. A rheumatic fever that lasted from May 1768 to June 1769 left him, the Encyclopedia says, paralyzed to the end of his days. It bent his head so far forward that his chin opened a dangerous wound on his chest; afterward he drank at meals through a tube and could say Mass only with help. He was allowed to resign in 1775 and went home to his congregation at Pagani. Then came betrayal. In 1780 a royal official altered the Redemptorist rule, and Alphonsus, old and nearly blind, signed it without knowing. Rome recognized only the houses in the Papal States, and the founder, the Encyclopedia says, found himself in disgrace with the pope and deprived of all external authority. He died at Pagani on August 1, 1787, as the midday Angelus rang, not quite ninety-one. Pius VII beatified him on September 15, 1816; Gregory XVI canonized him on May 26, 1839; and Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church on March 23, 1871.
Why Catholics pray to St. Alphonsus Liguori for scruples and guilt
The Church has given Alphonsus one patronage by decree. On April 26, 1950, in the apostolic brief Consueverunt omni tempore, Pius XII named him heavenly patron of all confessors and moral theologians, on what the brief calls the second centenary of the first edition of his Moral Theology.
People with scruples turn to him for a different reason. He had them. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that "from his earliest years he had an anxious fear about committing sin which passed at times into scruple," and that the man who directed so many others had, "where his own soul was concerned, to depend on obedience like a little child." The Redemptorists put it in their own words: he was "plagued with spiritual afflictions, scrupulously fearing he hadn't done enough to serve the God he loved so much." At the end of his life the fear came back as a storm. About three years before his death, the Encyclopedia says, he went through a "Night of the Soul" of temptations against every virtue and "terrible scruples and impulses to despair which made life a hell," until at last peace came. Franciscan Media puts the dark night in his final eighteen months, with intervals of relief.
He knew the disease from inside, and his moral theology was written against the spirit that feeds it. Benedict XVI said he opposed a Jansenist mentality that "fomented fear" instead of trust in God's mercy, and urged confessors to be "charitable, understanding and gentle." For the scrupulous his remedy was obedience: a conscience that cannot reach certainty on its own may rest on the confessor's judgment. His most famous sentence, the pope added, is "He who prays is saved."
How to pray to St. Alphonsus Liguori
Pray to him on any night the same sin is going around in your head for the tenth time. His feast is August 1, an obligatory Memorial on the General Roman Calendar; in 2026 it falls on a Saturday. The nine days before it, July 23 to 31, are a natural time for a novena.
Say the prayer below once, then stop. Do not say it again to be sure. A prayer made once is made, and a sin confessed once is confessed. Go to Confession at a regular rhythm, tell the priest you struggle with scruples, and then do what he tells you. Receive the Eucharist. And if the guilt has become a loop you cannot break, thoughts that return all day, rituals you cannot stop, sleep you cannot get, see a doctor or a therapist as well as a priest. His own Redemptorists call scrupulosity an illness, and an illness is treated. Prayer accompanies that treatment. It does not replace it.
If what you carry is not a scruple but a real wrong, Alphonsus is still your saint. He made a mistake in open court and thought his career was finished. God used the end of that career to make him a priest.
St. Alphonsus in old age
He is also a saint for people afraid of growing old. He lived to nearly ninety-one, and old age brought him most of what people dread: a failing body, a wheelchair, the Redemptorists say, in his final years, betrayal, and fear for his own salvation. He kept working. The Redemptorists of the London Province record that he had vowed to preach about Mary every Saturday and did so even at eighty, after leaving his diocese. When the pope learned of his death, Benedict XVI recalled, he exclaimed: "He was a saint!" Old age took almost everything from Alphonsus except the thing that mattered, and that is what Catholics ask him to guard in them.