St. Alphonsus de Ligouri

Today the word ‘Mission’ could refer to nearly anything at all. It could be an important diplomatic mission for peace in international politics or it could be the word used by the employees of a supermarket to sell as many items of a product as possible. Sometimes chapels without a resident priest are called ‘missions’ and we use it also to describe an installation of the Church in a foreign land. Our use of the word ‘Mission’ is different yet again. For us a Mission is the term employed to mean ‘a time and an outpouring of extraordinary grace over a signified parish, city or district.’ The previously unknown Mission priests arrive in the place of the Mission and solemnly announce to all this time of extraordinary grace, they erect a Mission Cross and exorcise the devils from the place. Then begins the earnest mission preaching: the voice of God; calling the wayward to repentance and the love of Jesus Crucified; calling the faithful to a marked increase in the fervour of their lives. Because the Holy Mission is indeed a time of extraordinary grace, and God’s call is pressing and actual, many souls mercifully receive the grace of conversion back to God; and, sometimes, the stubborn are made the examples of God’s justice. This account of St Alphonsus’ Holy Mission at Amalfi in 1756, written by Fr Augustine Berthe, C.SS.R. (pictured above) was one such Mission to remember.

In the month of November of 1756, before he had well recovered from his severe illness, St Alphonsus was to be seen journeying with 14 companions to a mission in the beautiful city of Amalfi. The Saint was moved to pity by the deplorable state of a place which had been endeared to his heart by many touching memories. Was it not on the rocky hills behind Amalfi that he had placed the cradle of his Congregation 24 years before? How often had he turned his eyes from his solitary grotto on the heights of Scala towards the towns and villages of the coast, begging God for their conversion, and with a special petition frivolous and licentious Amalfi? He was now broken down by toil and sickness, but, even so, he would preside over this most difficult and important mission.

Alphonsus knew that penance would have more effect than eloquence on the people of a town hardened by self indulgence. He and his companions therefore began to do penance from the very day of their arrival. Canon Casanova, an eye-witness, gives us some instances. “The servant of God and his companions,” he says, “practised great mortification while the mission lasted, so that they might preach by example rather than by words.”

The influence exerted by the power of virtue was soon to be intensified by the prestige of supernatural gifts, prophecies, and miracles. At the process of canonisation Canon Francis di Stefano related three predictions made by Alphonsus during this mission, all of which were fulfilled. He told a certain Maria Anastasio, who was seriously ill, that she must be resigned, for God did not mean her to recover from her sickness, that God would also before long call her son to Himself, and that her daughter would become a religious. All of which came to pass. During the same Mission Alphonsus told a lady who went to confession to him: “You will have a son who will be a priest and a canon.” “This son,” Casanova adds, “is Don Angelo Proto, who is today canon of the metropolitan church.” “I had a brother younger than myself by three years,” continues the same witness, “who had frequent epileptic fits. My mother carried him to the servant of God, who made the sign of the cross on his forehead saying: ‘Have no fear, your son will get better; he will become a priest and win many souls to God.’ From that day forth my brother never had an attack of his malady; he is at present dean of the church of San Pancras at Conca in the diocese of Amalfi.”

Canon Casanova again recounts a very strange fact. “A fellow townsman of mine, named Matthew Colavolpe,” he says, “went to confession to the servant of God in the house where Padre Alfonso was living. After confession Colavolpe proceeded to the church where the evening sermon was about to begin, leaving the confessor surrounded by a number of penitents. On reaching the church he beheld a man in the pulpit addressing the people. It was Alphonsus. Utterly dumbfounded at the sight, for the servant of God could not have reached the church by any other road or through any door but those by which he himself had passed, he began to cry out at the top of his voice: “The father is hearing confessions in his house and preaching in the church at the same time.” The incident created a great commotion among the whole congregation. Yet this was to be but the prelude to a still more moving scene. “On the day set apart for the sermon on the Blessed Virgin,” says Casanova, “Alphonsus was exciting his hearers to recommend themselves to Her in all their wants, spiritual and temporal, when suddenly, as if inspired, he exclaimed: “You have not sufficient confidence in your Mother! You do not know how to pray to Her with all your heart, but I am going to pray for you!” Then while he was putting his whole soul into ardent supplications a ray of light from the picture of Mary on the right of the pulpit darted upon the preacher’s face. We beheld him then with his countenance aflame, his eyes fixed in ecstasy, raised two feet above where he stood, as if about to wing his flight to the skies. The rapture lasted more than five minutes, during which an indescribable emotion seized on the congregation, whose sobs mingled with the exclamation, ‘miracle! miracle!’ from all parts of the church.”

A mission given by a saint so visibly aided by God could not fail to produce extraordinary fruit, even in a town so corrupt as Amalfi. “I was present every evening,” says Father Deodato Criscuoli, “at the mission of Amalfi - a mission which will be always dear to me because it was the immediate cause of my entrance in the Congregation. I remember particularly the complete transformation of two quarters of the town which used to be filled with bad characters. All those poor creatures, whose lives had been given up to vice, were completely converted by the sermons of the servant of God.” The town was thus freed from an evil which had been the cause of ruin not only to the inhabitants of Amalfi but to a multitude of strangers. This unexpected result, said the parish priest, Joseph Panza, may of itself be regarded as a miracle of the highest order, even though Alphonsus had worked no other by his mission.

But he did work other moral miracles almost equally surprising. Every day the tambourine and the guitar used to be heard in the streets, inviting the inhabitants to immoral dances. Alphonsus inveighed against these disorders with such effect that the young men and women made a great pile of their musical instruments in front of the cathedral, and set fire to it before all the people. The Saint’s voice was also raised against the conduct of the women, among whom ladies of the better classes were to be found, who were not ashamed to appear in church with uncovered head and improperly low dresses. His words had their effect, and henceforth reformation is this respect was complete.

The special characteristic however of this mission at Amalfi was less the conversion of the city than its perseverance in good. Alphonsus knew the fickleness of the people, and the knowledge made him spare no means to remove the causes of relapse or scandal. On the last day of the mission he warned them against their unbridled love of games and amusement, and at the end addressed them with prophetic warning: “To save you we have spared neither labour nor pain. Well, tomorrow a demon will come down from the mountain to the town to destroy the fruits of the mission. Take care not to assist at the spectacle; if you do I predict for you that you will be chastised by an earthquake.” Next day at one o’clock in the afternoon a buffalo was let loose in the square for the amusement of the people. They had always been passionate lovers of bull baiting, and crowds flocked from all sides for the sport, not thinking that the animal in the present case typified the demon of pleasure to which Alphonsus had referred. But the game had scarcely begun when a violent shock of earthquake struck panic into the multitude. In terror they fled to the cathedral. The Archbishop joined them there, and proceeded to remind them of the prediction made by Alphonsus and the contempt they had shown for the warning, when another shock, more powerful than the first, overturned the candlesticks on the altar. All fell on their knees, asking pardon for their sins. A great disaster seemed to be imminent, and the Archbishop ordered the priests dispersed among the multitude in the church to give absolution to all around them.

The earthquake ended without further harm, but the fear of the chastisements of God was the beginning of wisdom for the inhabitants of Amalfi. A permanent change came over the spirit of the city.

Five years later the fathers of the congregation of Pii Operarii went to Amalfi to give another mission. They found the town just as Alphonsus had left it, and one of them proclaimed from the pulpit: “We have been in many places, but have never found a city so moral as yours. For this you have to thank, after God, Fr de’ Liguori, whose zeal has been the means of putting you in the way of virtue and devotion.” †

But some one may say, “What harm is there in reading romances and profane poetry when they contain nothing immodest?” Do you ask what harm? Behold the harm: the reading of such works kindles the concupiscence of the senses, and awakens the passions; these easily gain the consent of the will, or at least render it so weak that when the occasion of any dangerous affection occurs the devil finds the soul already prepared to allow itself to be conquered. A wise author has said that by the reading of such pernicious books heresy has made, and makes every day, great progress; because such reading has given and gives increased strength to libertinism. The poison of these books enters gradually into the soul; it first makes itself master of the understanding, then infects the will, and in the end kills the soul. The devil finds no means more efficacious and secure of sending a young person to perdition than the reading of such poisoned works.”