St Aloysius Gonzaga

Aloysius Gonzaga is born in 1568 into a noble house whose worldly plans for him are obvious from the beginning. His father wants a soldier and courtier, so the child is put among troops, miniature weapons, military drill, and then the glittering and dangerous life of Italian and Spanish courts. This life makes the contrast sharp. Those surroundings do not harden Aloysius into ambition. Instead they awaken in him shame over even childish faults, intense love of prayer, and a fierce desire for purity and self-command. As a boy he is 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 sees enough of court life to turn from it inwardly for good. The great struggle of the life is not over whether he will be respectable, but whether he will be allowed to become wholly God’s. This life follows the family conflict closely. Aloysius resolves to renounce succession to Castiglione and enter the Jesuits, while his father resists with anger, threats, delay, political errands, and the hope that travel and public duty will cure him of what looks like religious extremity. Nothing works.

At last the succession is transferred to his brother, and Aloysius enters the Jesuit novitiate in Rome in 1585. It then shifts from renunciation to obedience. Under rule, Aloysius must eat more, pray less than he wishes, take recreation, and submit his own spiritual impulses to authority. He does so with real struggle but full fidelity. His health is weak, yet his joy in belonging to God only deepens. The final act comes in 1591 when plague breaks out in Rome. The Jesuits open a hospital, and Aloysius begs to serve there. He washes patients, makes beds, instructs the sick, and takes on the lowest duties until he himself is infected. Though he partially recovers from the plague, a wasting fever follows. This life gives the death scene with special tenderness: Aloysius asking Bellarmine whether a soul may go straight to God, receiving hope, learning in prayer that he will die on the octave of Corpus Christi, and at the end repeating with joy that he is going to the house of the Lord. He dies at only twenty-three, but the whole life has a clean and unmistakable line: noble birth, total renunciation, hidden obedience, and costly charity.