Saint Alphonsus Mary Liguori Feast (
meditation taken from the Liturgical Year, 1909 )
Yesterday we admired, in Saint Peter's miraculous liberation from chains and the Machabees, the substructure of the palace built by Wisdom in time to endure for eternity. Today, in conformity with the divine ways of that Wisdom, who in her playing reaches from end to end, we are suffered to contemplate the progress of the glorious building, to behold the summit of the work, the last row of stones actually laid. Now, summit and foundation, the work is all one; the materials are all priceless: witness the diamond of fine water which displays its luster today.
To this great Saint, Saint Alphonusus de Liguori ,
great both in works and in doctrine, are directly applied these words of the Holy Ghost: they that instruct many to justice shall shine as stars for all eternity (Dan. xii. 3). At the time he appeared, an odious sect was denying the mercy and the sweetness of our heavenly Father; it triumphed in the practical conduct of even those who were shocked by its Calvinistic theories. Under pretext of a reaction against an imaginary school of laxity, and denouncing with much ado some erroneous propositions made by obscure persons,
the new Pharisees had set themselves up as zealous for the law. Stretching the commandments, and exaggerating the sanction, they loaded the conscience with the same unbearable burdens which the Man-God reproached the ancient Pharisees with laying on the shoulders of men; but the cry of alarm they had raised in the name of endangered morals, had none the less deceived the simple, and ended by misleading even the best.
Thanks to the show of austerity displayed by its adherents, Jansenism, so clever in veiling its teachings, had too well succeeded in its designs of forcing itself upon the Church in spite of the Church. Unsuspecting allies within the holy city gave up to its mercy the sources of salvation. Soon in too many places, the sacred Keys were used but to open hell; the Holy Table, spread for the preservation and increase of life in all, became accessible only to the perfect; and these latter were esteemed such, according as, by a strange reversion of the Apostle's words, they subjected the spirit of adoption of sons to the spirit of servitude and fear. As to the faithful who did not rise to the height of this new asceticism, "finding in the tribunal of penance, instead of fathers and physicians, only exactors and executioners (Supplices litterae Episopatus pro concessioine tituli Doctoris S. Alphonso Mariae)," they had but to choose between despair and indifference. Everywhere legislatures and parliaments lent a hand to the so-called reformers, without heeding the flood of odious unbelief that was rising around them, without seeing the gathering storm-clouds.
Wo to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you yourselves do not enter in; and those that are going in, you suffer not to enter. . . . Wo to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you go round about the sea and the land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, you make him the child of hell twofold more than yourselves (St. Matth. xxiii. 13, 15). Not of your conventicles was it said that the sons of Wisdom are the Church of the just, for it was added: Their generation is obedience and love (Eccli. iii. 1). Not of the fear which you preached did the Psalmist sing: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom (Ps. cs. 10); for even under the law of Sinai the Holy Spirit said: Ye that fear the Lord, believe him: and your reward shall not be made void. Ye that fear the Lord, hope in him: and mercy shall come to you for your delight. Ye that fear the Lord, love him: and your hearts shall be enlightened (Eccli. ii. 8-10)
. Every deviation, whether towards rigour or weakness, offends the rectitude of justice; but, especially since Bethlehem and Calvary, no sin so wounds the divine Heart as distrust; no fault is unpardonable except in the despair of a Judas, saying like Cain: My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon (Gen. iv. 13).
Who then, in the sombre quietism into which the teachers then in vogue had led even the strongest minds, could find once more the key of knowledge?
But Wisdom, says the Holy Ghost, kept in her treasures the signification of discipline (Eccli i. 31). Just as in other times she had raised up new avengers for every dogma that had been attacked: so now, against a heresy which, in spite of the speculative pretensions of its beginning, had only in its moral bearing any sort of duration, she brought forth Alphonsus Liguori as the avenger of the violated law and the Doctor by excellence of Christian morality. A stranger alike to fatal rigorism and baneful indulgence, he knew how to restore to the justices of the Lord their rectitude, and at the same time their power of rejoicing hearts, to his commandments their luminous brightness, whereby they are justified in themselves, to his testimonies the purity which attracts souls and faithfully guides the simple and the little ones from the beginnings of Wisdom to its summits (Ps. xviii. 8-10). It was not only in the sphere of casuistry that Alphonsus succeeded, in his Moral Theology, in counteracting the poison which threatened to infect the whole Christian life. Whilst on the one hand he never left unanswered any attack made at the time against revealed truth, his ascetic and mystical works brought back piety to its traditional sources, the frequentation of the Sacraments, and the love of our Lord and His Blessed Mother.
The Sacred Congregation of Rites, after examining in the name of the Holy See the works of our Saint, and declaring that nothing deserving of censure was to be found therein (Decretum, 14 and 18 Maii. 1803), arranged his innumerable writings under forty separate titles. Alphonsus, however, resolved only late in life to give to the public, through the press, the lights which flooded his soul; his first work, the golden book of Visits to the Most Holy Sacrament and to the Blessed Virgin, did not appear till the author was nearly fifty years of age. Though God prolonged his life beyond the usual limits, he spared him neither the double burden of the episcopate and the government of the Congregation he had founded, nor the most painful infirmities, nor still more grievous moral sufferings.
