Catholic Heroes… St. Aloysius Gonzaga

By DEB PIROCH

“A Franciscan Friar of the strict Observance went through the exorcisms. . . . Suddenly the devils began to cry out, pointing . . . to the Saint [Aloysius as a child]: ‘See that boy,’ they explained, ‘he it is who will go to Heaven, and will have great glory’ ” — The Life of St. Aloysius Gonzaga by Fr. Virgilio Cepari.

• + + The name means warrior and this was the will Aloysius Gonzaga’s father had for him. His given name was Luigi, the Italian form of Aloysius, and he was the eldest son, due to inherit his title, just as wealth and nobility were also his due. He was born in 1568 in a castle in Italy. Aloysius’ father was the Marquisate of Castigliore and his mother had served as lady of honor to a wife of King Philip II of Spain. Marta, his mother, had prayed when expecting him that she would have a son who could devote his entire life to God.
  The birth was difficult; it was unclear whether mother and son would live, so the midwife baptized the boy conditionally before he was completely out of the womb.
  But they both lived and Aloysius would be the answer to his mother’s prayer. This was nothing trivial in an age that had very rates of infant mortality.
  When Aloysius was age five, his father first took him away from his mother, along with an even younger brother, to do “military exercises” with men in Florence. This may not have been the wisest thought a father ever had, but he wished to expose his son early to his future career. Small Aloysius already had little toys modeled after guns and mortars, and must have felt like he was living the exploits of a grown man. He had a tiny suit of armor and was allowed to be at the front of the military parades.
  His mother would have fainted, though, had she known about the near misses that occurred when the child was left supervised among soldiers, such as when he somehow managed to find a bullet and powder, and load and shoot a gun on his own. (Nobody was harmed.)
  Once he returned, Aloysius had learned too much, he had picked up the salty language of some of the soldiers and, on being reprimanded, was heartily ashamed for many years. This boy of seven, barely the age of reason, experienced a “conversion” of sorts. He began saying more prayers in addition to morning and evening ones, kneeling on bare, hard floors, devoting some even to our Lady or memorized from the Psalms.
  When at age nine he was taken next to Florence, to improve his studies and serve at court, he was shocked to see how vulgarly and horribly people turned away from God in living debauched lives at court. He learned about chastity and began to study custody of the eyes, never raising his face to a woman if she were present. It was during this same time that the devils in the quotation above recognized that Aloysius would be a future saint.
  Also, St. Charles Borromeo met the family and, in Aloysius, recognized the holiness in him and asked to give the boy his First Holy Communion.
  After less than two years in Florence, he and his brother were next sent to the Duke of Mantua’s court, and finally to the Spanish Court, in service to the King’s heir apparent, Diego. When Diego sadly died at age seven of smallpox, they returned to Italy. At this time Philip II was very powerful, for he ruled Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Milan, parts of the Netherlands, and, for a time, England and Ireland. He married four times, but out of eleven pregnancies, that is six sons and six daughters (one pregnancy was of twins), only four children even lived to adulthood and two died quite young. Such was life in the sixteenth century. When his older son died, he commanded the Church to pray for his family’s health henceforward.
  Aloysius experienced an illness which left it hard for him to eat much at a time. The timing was convenient because it allowed him more time for prayer and less time at court. He also had begun fasting on bread and water, scourged himself, and prayed at midnight three days a week. When the family returned home to Spain, he and his father quarreled, when he told his father — not for the first time — that his calling was to religious life, and he wished to be a Jesuit. And the idea of his son entering this new order which included a vow to poverty was very difficult to swallow.
  In the end, it was his son’s mother, Marta, who eventually won Aloysius’ father over. But not before running him by many relatives and churchmen, hoping he would instead become a diocesan priest, in the hopes of using their influence to allow him to be a bishop and claim some family inheritance.
  His father, Ferrante, was not a bad man, but he had dreams for his son. In the end, he parted with them, signing over the title and wealth to his next eldest and Aloysius entered to study for the priesthood at 18. Ferrante died six weeks later, his life reformed. And his son? He found that joining the Jesuits was easier than his previous life had been, because he was ordered to curtail many of his self-imposed penances. On entering, his biography states he chose to utter the words of the Psalmist, “This is my rest for ever and ever: here I dwell, for I have chosen it.”
  Perhaps St. Aloysius is aptly named a saint for the youth, for he never made it through the seminary, experiencing only about four years of religious life. A mystic, he had been the recipient of frequent ecstasies and at least a few visions. Some were apparently very inconveniently timed, such as during class! His confessor, Robert Bellarmine, was also later canonized. Aloysius would then have a vision that he would not have long to live.
  Overjoyed, he continued to study in the seminary and practice every virtue to the utmost. When his superiors refused him a penance, he would make up something, like an extra task or prayer, to do instead. If a professor told him to read from the top paragraph to the bottom of the page, he would not even turn the page, out of rigid obedience.
  In 1591 Rome began experiencing another resurgence of the plague — these epidemics had begun in the 1300s in Europe. The Jesuits had their own hospital dedicated to these patients, and knowing Aloysius, his weak health and keen will to overdo, they forbade him to work there. Instead, he was allowed to serve in another hospital without plague patients. On one occasion, he had revealed to his confessor that washing, bathing, caring for plague victims due to the stench near them from bodies was very hard for him, and he had to fight to overcome his revulsion. But from the outside, one saw only an eagerness to minister to the weak and infirm.
  Sure enough, a patient was brought in and Aloysius took care of him. The patient turned out to have the plague, which he caught. Thinking he was dying, he prematurely asked for the viaticum — so keen was he to receive it. Then he seemed to recover and was bedridden with some fever about three months. At one point he queried Bellarmine, “Do you think it’s possible to go straight to Heaven without stopping in Purgatory?” When told it was possible, he begged it might be so.
  The entire night before he died was spent in ecstasy. He knew he would die on the Octave of Corpus Christi. As it got closer to midnight, he asked Fr. Bellarmine to say final prayers, although he did not seem weak enough. But then he began to fail. He died with the words, “Into thy hands [I commend my spirit],” not having completed the sentence. We might be permitted to hope that his soul bypassed Purgatory.