St. Aloysius Gonzaga

Aloysius Gonzaga was born in 1568 into a noble house whose worldly plans for him were obvious from the beginning. His father wanted a soldier and courtier, so the child was put among troops, miniature weapons, military drill, and then the glittering and dangerous life of Italian and Spanish courts. Those surroundings did not harden Aloysius into ambition. Instead they awakened in him shame over even childish faults, intense love of prayer, and a fierce desire for purity and self-command. As a boy he was already reciting long devotions, praying on his knees, and trying to guard both himself and others from temptation with an austerity that startles modern readers. In Florence, Mantua, and later Spain, he saw enough of court life to turn from it inwardly for good. The great struggle of his life was not over whether he would be respectable, but whether he would be allowed to become wholly God's. Aloysius resolved to renounce succession to Castiglione and enter the Jesuits, while his father resisted with anger, threats, delay, political errands, and the hope that travel and public duty would cure him of what looked like religious extremity. Nothing worked. At last the succession was transferred to his brother, and Aloysius entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rome in 1585.

Under rule, he had to eat more, pray less than he wished, take recreation, and submit his own spiritual impulses to authority. He did so with real struggle but full fidelity. His health was weak, yet his joy in belonging to God only deepened. The final act came in 1591 when plague broke out in Rome. The Jesuits opened a hospital, and Aloysius begged to serve there. He washed patients, made beds, instructed the sick, and took on the lowest duties until he himself was infected. Though he partially recovered from the plague, a wasting fever followed. He asked Bellarmine whether a soul might go straight to God, received hope, learned in prayer that he would die on the octave of Corpus Christi, and at the end repeated with joy that he was going to the house of the Lord. He died at only twenty-three, but the whole life has a clean and unmistakable line: noble birth, total renunciation, hidden obedience, and costly charity.