Os autem quod mentitur occidit animam. “The mouth that belieth killeth the soul.” — Wisdom 1:11
I. A saint of one sentence
Some saints are converted by a vision, some by a catastrophe, some by the slow pressure of many years. St. Andrew Avellino was converted by a sentence of Scripture, read on an ordinary evening, after a small sin committed in the course of an ordinary day’s work. He was a priest and a successful lawyer. He told a lie in court. That night he read in the Book of Wisdom that the mouth that lies kills the soul, and he believed it. Everything else in his long life follows from that act of belief.
He lived for eighty-seven years, through nearly the whole of the Catholic Reformation in Italy. He was a religious of the Theatines, the first order of clerics regular, founded by St. Cajetan to reform the clergy by example. He was a novice master, a superior, a founder of houses, a director of souls whose letters ran into the thousands, a friend and counsellor of St. Charles Borromeo, and the spiritual father of Lorenzo Scupoli, the author of The Spiritual Combat. He is remembered above all for two things: the vow by which he bound himself to grow in holiness every day, and the death that came to him at the foot of the altar. The Church has made the first the subject of his Collect, and the faithful have made the second the reason for their prayers to him.
II. Castronuovo, Venice, and Naples
He was born in 1521 at Castronuovo, a hill town of the Basilicata, in the kingdom of Naples, near Potenza. The town is called today Castronuovo di Sant’Andrea, after him. His family was of the minor nobility and comfortably off. At baptism he was named Lancelotto. Some accounts say that his baptismal name was Lorenzo and that Lancelotto was the name his mother used; the older lives give Lancelotto, and that is the name under which he was known until he entered religion.
He received his first schooling at home, and was then sent to Venice to study the humanities and philosophy. The tradition of his life records that he was a handsome young man, and that the attentions he received in Venice so troubled his resolve to live chastely that he took the clerical tonsure as a protection and left the city. Whether or not the story is exact, it shows what the early biographers believed about him: that he had chosen purity young, and guarded it by flight.
He returned to the kingdom of Naples and studied civil and canon law in the capital, taking his doctorate in both. He was ordained a priest in the mid-1540s; the sources differ between 1545 and 1547. In 1548, according to the older biographical tradition, he made the Spiritual Exercises under the Jesuit Father James Laynez, who would succeed St. Ignatius as General of the Society. The seed was sown then, though it did not yet bear fruit. Lancelotto went on to practise as an advocate in the ecclesiastical courts of Naples, and he practised with success.
III. The lie
The traditional date is 1552. He was pleading a case, and in the course of his argument he said something he knew to be untrue. The accounts agree that it was a small thing, of the kind that advocates in every age have found easy to excuse. It may have won him nothing; it may not even have been noticed. But that evening, reading the Scriptures, he came upon the eleventh verse of the first chapter of the Book of Wisdom: Os autem quod mentitur occidit animam, “The mouth that belieth killeth the soul.”
He saw at once what he had done. He was a priest. His mouth had been anointed to pronounce the words of consecration and the words of absolution, and he had used it to lie for a client and a fee. He did not reason his way around the text, nor tell himself that the lie was venial and the profession necessary. He gave up the practice of law entirely, and he never returned to it. From then on he devoted himself to the care of souls: to prayer, to preaching, and to the hearing of confessions.
The Church has always taught that every lie is a sin, because it sets the tongue against the mind, and the mind is made for truth (St. Thomas, Summa Theologiæ II-II, q. 110). St. Augustine, in his treatise On Lying, would not allow even the most well-meant lie to be called good. Lancelotto had learned this doctrine as a student of canon law. On that evening he learned it as a penitent.
IV. The convent at Baiano
His new life was soon tested. The Archbishop of Naples, who knew his ability, charged him with the reform of the convent of nuns of Sant’Arcangelo at Baiano. The house had fallen into grave disorder. Men of the city came and went freely, and the enclosure was enclosure in name only. Lancelotto undertook the work with firmness. He closed the doors, stopped the visits, and called the community back to its rule.
The men who had frequented the convent did not forgive him. In 1556 he was attacked and severely beaten; some accounts say he was wounded in the face. He was carried to the house of the Theatines at the church of St. Paul in Naples to recover. The convent’s troubles did not end with his reform; it was later suppressed altogether.
He bore the attack without bitterness, and he did not seek redress. The tradition of his life holds that he prayed for the men who had beaten him. But the episode did something more. It brought him, wounded, into the house of the Theatines, and there, during his convalescence, he found his vocation.
V. Andrew, the Theatine
The Clerics Regular of the Divine Providence, called Theatines, had been founded in 1524 by St. Cajetan of Thiene together with Gian Pietro Carafa, Bishop of Chieti (Theate in Latin, whence the name), who later became Pope Paul IV. They were secular priests who lived in community under vows, and their purpose was to restore the dignity and discipline of the clergy at a time when many priests had forgotten both. Their poverty was severe. They held no revenues, and they were forbidden even to beg. They lived on what Providence sent them unasked, and they taught the people by the example of a priesthood lived as it ought to be.
Lancelotto asked to be received. He was clothed in the habit on the fourteenth of August, 1556, the vigil of the Assumption, at the age of about thirty-five. He took the name Andrew, out of love for the Apostle who was crucified on a cross and who greeted it, in the ancient account of his passion, as a thing long desired. The name was a programme. The new Theatine meant to embrace the Cross as his patron had.
After his profession he was made master of novices, and in 1567 he was elected superior of the house in Naples. For the rest of his life he held one office or another in his order, and in none of them did he spare himself.
VI. The two vows
To the three vows of religion Andrew added two more, made privately with the leave of his superiors. He vowed to resist his own will continually, and he vowed to strive every day to advance in Christian perfection.
The first was the vow of a man who knew where sin begins. The will that is never crossed grows strong in its own direction and weak in God’s. Andrew bound himself to cross his own will at every turn, in small things and in great, so that the will of God might have room in him.
The second is the vow for which the Church specially honours him. It is named in his Collect, which calls it arduum, steep and hard. A vow of daily progress cannot be fulfilled once and set aside. It must be renewed every morning, and it rules out the quiet settling-down that tempts every soul that has made some progress and would like to rest. Andrew kept it for more than fifty years. Old age did not release him from it, and he did not ask to be released.
The Church does not counsel such vows to everyone. They can be dangerous to the scrupulous, and they should not be made without a prudent director. But she holds up Andrew’s vow as a sign of what every Christian is bound to by baptism. He that is just, let him be justified still: and he that is holy, let him be sanctified still (Apoc. 22:11). The Collect does not ask that we take his vow. It asks that we share his grace.
VII. Milan and Piacenza
In 1570, at the request of St. Charles Borromeo, Andrew went north to found a house of his order in Milan. The two men became close friends. Charles, who was then remaking his vast diocese according to the decrees of Trent, sought Andrew’s counsel in important matters, and Andrew found in the Archbishop a man who lived what he himself was trying to live. The Theatine house of Sant’Antonio Abate in Milan, with its statue of Andrew on the façade, still recalls the foundation.
From Milan he went to Piacenza, where the bishop was Paolo Burali d’Arezzo, himself a Theatine, later a cardinal and Archbishop of Naples, and venerated as Blessed. Andrew worked with him in applying the reforms of Trent to the diocese. He directed the diocesan seminary, cared for a house of penitent women, and preached. His preaching is said to have changed the city. A number of noblewomen of Piacenza gave up their finery and took up a life of prayer and works of mercy, and the change was so marked that complaints reached the Duke of Parma. The tradition of his life records that the Duke summoned the preacher to account for himself, and that Andrew answered so well that the Duchess asked him to become her director.
Three times he served as visitor of the Theatine houses of Lombardy. In 1582 he returned to Naples, which he did not leave again except on the business of his order. In 1590 he made the official visitation of the Theatine houses of the Roman and Neapolitan provinces. He was proposed for a bishopric and he begged to be excused. His petition was granted.
VIII. The director of souls
Andrew’s great work in the last quarter-century of his life was the direction of souls. He preached, heard confessions for long hours, and visited the sick and dying of Naples at every hour of the day and night. People of every rank sought him out. He kept up a vast correspondence of spiritual direction. Some three thousand of his letters are known, and about a thousand were published at Naples in 1731 and 1732, followed by his conferences and other ascetical writings. They are plain, practical, and full of the doctrine of the Cross and of the daily struggle against self-love.
His most notable disciple was Lorenzo Scupoli, who entered the Theatines at Naples in 1569 while Andrew was superior of the house. Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat, first published in 1589, became one of the most widely read books of Catholic spirituality. St. Francis de Sales carried it with him for years and read from it daily. Its teaching is Andrew’s teaching: that the spiritual life is a war against self-will; that we must distrust ourselves entirely and trust in God entirely; and that we must fight every day, for the enemy does not rest. It would be too much to call the book Andrew’s, but it is not too much to call it the fruit of the school he formed.
He had a special devotion to the Passion of Our Lord and to the Most Holy Sacrament. The tradition of his life records several wonders. One night, it is said, he was carrying the Viaticum to a dying man through a violent storm, and a light from heaven surrounded him and his companion and kept them dry until they reached the house. He was also credited with knowledge of hidden things and with prophecy. These are given here as the tradition of his life holds them. The Church, in canonising him, judged above all his heroic virtue.
IX. Introibo ad altare Dei
On the morning of the tenth of November, 1608, at the church of St. Paul in Naples, Andrew vested to say Mass. He was eighty-seven years old. He went to the foot of the altar, made the sign of the Cross, and began the antiphon with which every priest of the Roman rite begins the Holy Sacrifice: Introibo ad altare Dei, “I will go in to the altar of God.” He said the words once, and again, and a third time, and could go no further. A stroke had seized him.
His brethren carried him from the altar. He received the last sacraments and lived until the afternoon, through a long agony. The tradition of his death records that in his last hours he suffered a fierce assault of the enemy, and that he was comforted by a vision of Our Lady and of his guardian angel, after which he died in peace.
The faithful saw at once what his death meant. It had been sudden; it had not been unprovided. He had been preparing for it every day for half a century, and death found him vested, at the altar, with the psalm of ascent on his lips. In the Litany of the Saints the Church prays, A subitanea et improvisa morte, libera nos, Domine: “From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us, O Lord.” Andrew’s death was the first kind and not the second. The people of southern Italy took him at once as their patron against sudden death, and they invoke him still in apoplexy and stroke.
X. Cultus
His body was laid in the church of St. Paul, San Paolo Maggiore, in Naples, the church of the Theatines, where it rests today. The tradition records that after his death physicians made incisions in his body and that fresh blood flowed from them for several days, and that the blood collected in a vial was later seen to bubble. This is reported as the tradition of his cult.
The process of his beatification moved quickly. Urban VIII beatified him in 1624, only sixteen years after his death. Clement XI canonised him on the twenty-second of May, 1712, in the same ceremony in which he raised to the altars St. Pius V, St. Felix of Cantalice, and St. Catherine of Bologna. His feast was fixed on the day of his death, the tenth of November. He is the patron of Naples and of Sicily, and of the dying, and he is invoked against sudden death and against stroke.
In the 1962 calendar his feast is of the third class. The Mass is Os justi, of the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop. Its Introit sings the reversal of his conversion: no longer the mouth that lies and kills the soul, but os justi, the mouth of the just that meditates wisdom (Ps. 36:30). Its Gospel is the parable of the servants waiting with girt loins and burning lamps, whom the Lord, coming at an hour they think not, finds watching (Luke 12:35-40). The Collect is proper, and names his vow.
XI. What his life teaches
That small sins are not small. The lie that converted Andrew was the kind most of us tell without noticing. He noticed. He took Scripture at its word and judged his own act by it. The saints are not men who never sinned, but men who refused to excuse their sins. He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in that which is greater (Luke 16:10).
That the tongue belongs to God. A priest’s mouth is consecrated to the words of God, and every Christian’s tongue was given him to confess God’s truth. Andrew took back his tongue from the courts and gave it to the pulpit and the confessional. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man (Jas. 3:2).
That holiness is a stair, not a landing. No one reaches a point in this life at which he may rest. Andrew vowed to climb every day, and he was still climbing on the morning he died. In his heart he hath disposed to ascend by steps (Ps. 83:6).
That the self is the first enemy. Andrew’s vow to resist his own will, and the book his disciple wrote, teach the same lesson: that the war of the spiritual life is fought first within. Self-love yields to nothing but daily resistance and complete trust in God.
That a good death is prepared for by a good life. Andrew did not know the hour. He did not need to. Be you then also ready: for at what hour you think not, the Son of man will come (Luke 12:40).
Practice
Examine. Is there a small, habitual dishonesty in my work or speech that I have learned to excuse because everyone in my position does it? When I read a hard word of Scripture, do I let it judge me, or do I reason around it? Where have I settled down in my spiritual life, content with what I have attained? In what small thing today did I insist on my own will when I could have yielded? If death came at the start of my next prayer, would it find me provided?
Do. Read the first chapter of the Book of Wisdom slowly, and stop at the eleventh verse. Resolve that for one week you will not shade the truth, even in small things, even in jest, even to spare yourself embarrassment. Choose one small thing a little more perfect than your custom, and do it every day this week. If you have not read it, begin The Spiritual Combat. Make a good confession, and keep your soul in grace, which is the Church’s remedy against an unprovided death.
Pray. The Collect of the feast:
Deus, qui in corde beati Andreæ Confessoris tui, per arduum quotidie in virtutibus proficiendi votum, admirabiles ascensiones disposuisti: concede nobis, ipsius meritis et intercessione, ita eiusdem gratiæ participes fieri; ut, perfectiora semper exsequentes, ad gloriæ tuæ fastigium feliciter perducamur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O God, who by the arduous vow of daily advancing in virtue didst dispose wonderful ascents in the heart of blessed Andrew, Thy Confessor: grant us, through his merits and intercession, so to become sharers in the same grace, that ever performing what is more perfect, we may be happily brought to the summit of Thy glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Introibo ad altare Dei. “I will go in to the altar of God.” Or, with the Litany: A subitanea et improvisa morte, libera nos, Domine.
Devote. Commend to St. Andrew those you love who are elderly, ill, or in danger of a sudden death, and ask for them the grace of the last sacraments. In this month of the holy souls, pray for those who died today without warning. At your next Mass, follow the prayers at the foot of the altar and the psalm Iudica me with attention, as though it might be the last time you go up to the altar of God.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets Andrew beside his founder St. Cajetan, his friend St. Charles Borromeo, his fellow Theatine Blessed Paolo Burali, and his disciple Lorenzo Scupoli, and beside the other great directors of souls of the Catholic Reformation, St. Philip Neri and St. Francis de Sales. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the doctrine of The Spiritual Combat, the use and prudent limits of private vows, and the preparation for death. The Theology and Doctrine path examines St. Thomas on lying (II-II, q. 110) and on the obligation of tending to perfection (II-II, q. 184). The Church History path treats the clerics regular, the Theatine reform, and the application of Trent in Naples and Lombardy. The Sacred Liturgy path studies the prayers at the foot of the altar and Psalm 42 as the psalm of ascent.
Sancte Andrea, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Roman Breviary, lessons of the second nocturn for 10 November; the Roman Martyrology; the Litany of the Saints; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ II-II, qq. 110 and 184; St. Augustine, De mendacio*; the* Acta Sanctorum*, November, vol. IV; G. M. Magenis,* Vita di S. Andrea Avellino (Venice, 1714); the letters of St. Andrew Avellino (Naples, 1731–1732); Lorenzo Scupoli, Il combattimento spirituale (1589); Butler’s Lives of the Saints*; the Catholic Encyclopedia. The episodes of the tonsure at Venice, the prayer for his attackers, the Duke of Parma, the light in the storm, the vision at his death, and the blood after his death are given as the tradition of his life.*