Elegi abiectus esse in domo Dei mei, magis quam habitare in tabernaculis peccatorum. “I have chosen to be an abject in the house of my God, rather than to dwell in the tabernacles of sinners.” — Psalm 83:11
I. A note on this entry
St. Alphonsus Rodriguez was never placed in the General Roman Calendar. His feast was kept in the proper calendar of the Society of Jesus, on the thirtieth of October, because the thirty-first, the day of his death, was then occupied by the Vigil of All Saints. He is honoured above all on the island of Majorca, whose patron he is. In the universal Church his memory is kept in the Roman Martyrology, which names him as a professed lay brother of the Society, remarkable for humility and unceasing mortification.
He belongs on this day for a reason beyond the date. Tomorrow the Church keeps the feast of all the saints, known and unknown, most of whom lived lives that no chronicle recorded. Alphonsus is the patron of that hidden multitude. For forty-six years he answered the door of a college on an island, and the Church raised him to her altars for it.
One confusion should be cleared away at the start. There were two Spanish Jesuits of this name in the same generation. Fr. Alonso Rodríguez (1538–1616), a priest, wrote the Exercise of Perfection and Christian Virtues, the great manual of the religious life read in novitiates for three centuries. He was a holy man but has never been canonised. The saint of this day is the other Alonso, a lay brother who wrote nothing for publication and could hardly have written a manual if he had wished to.
II. Segovia
Alonso Rodríguez was born at Segovia, in Old Castile, on the twenty-fifth of July, the feast of St. James, in 1532 (some accounts give 1533). He was the second son of a large family of wool and cloth merchants. Segovia was then one of the great cloth towns of Castile, and the Rodríguez household was comfortable and devout.
When the boy was about ten, the first Jesuits came to Segovia. Among them was Bl. Peter Faber, one of the original companions of St. Ignatius, who preached a mission in the city and was received as a guest in the Rodríguez home. Faber prepared young Alonso for his First Communion. It was a brief contact, but the seed it planted would lie in the ground for nearly thirty years before it came up.
At twelve he was sent with an elder brother to study at Alcalá, at a college newly begun by the Jesuit Francis Villanueva. He had completed less than a year when his father died suddenly. The boys were called home, and Alonso, still a youth, was put to work in the family business beside his mother. His schooling ended there. It was to cost him dearly later.
III. Merchant, husband, widower
In his early twenties Alonso took over the management of the business. At about twenty-six he married María Suárez, and they had three children. By the account of his own later notes, he was in these years an ordinary man of commerce: honest, pious in the usual way, and attached to the comforts and the standing that his trade gave him.
Then, within a few years, everything was taken. The business failed, burdened by debts and by the heavy taxes of the time. His wife died. Two of the children died. His mother died. By the age of thirty-one he was a widower with one surviving son, and that child too died not long after.
It is here that his real life begins. Alonso did not curse God, and he did not merely endure. He sold what remained of the business, moved with two of his unmarried sisters into a small house, and gave himself to prayer, penance, and frequent confession and Communion under the direction of the Jesuits of Segovia. The two sisters joined him in a common life of devotion that was almost monastic. He later wrote, in substance, that God had taken from him one by one all the things he loved, so that he might learn to love nothing but God. The bereavements that might have hardened him became, in his own understanding, the means by which he was set free.
St. Paul says that to them that love God, all things work together unto good (Rom. 8:28). Alonso’s life is a commentary on that verse written in suffering. He did not choose his losses, but he chose what to do with them.
IV. Knocking at the door
After some years of this hidden life Alonso asked to be admitted to the Society of Jesus. He was refused. The reasons were sensible. He was nearly forty. He had almost no education. His health had been weakened by grief and by austerities that his directors had not always moderated. A man of his age who could not read Latin would never be a priest, and the Society did not yet see what use he would be as a brother.
He did not give up. He went to the east coast of Spain and sat in Latin classes among schoolboys a third of his age, begging his bread and serving as a household servant to pay his way. He made little progress. His memory, never trained, could not hold the grammar. The boys mocked him. He bore it, and he kept asking.
At last the matter came before the provincial of Aragon, Fr. Antonio Cordeses. His consultors advised against admission. According to a tradition handed down in the Society, Cordeses answered that if Alonso was not fit to be a brother or a priest, he would be fit to be a saint, and he admitted him over their objections. Whether those were the exact words or not, the judgement was vindicated. On the thirty-first of January, 1571, Alonso Rodríguez entered the Society of Jesus as a lay brother, a temporal coadjutor.
He made his novitiate at Valencia, or perhaps at Gandía, for the sources differ. After only six months he was sent across the sea to the island of Majorca, to the college of Our Lady of Montesión at Palma, which the Society had opened a few years earlier. He would never leave the island again.
V. The door of Montesión
For his first years at Montesión Alonso held various humble offices. He took his first vows in 1573 and his final vows as a coadjutor in 1585. From about 1579 he was the college porter, and he remained at that post, with interruptions for illness, until his strength failed in his eighties.
The porter of a Jesuit college was not a decorative figure. He received every visitor, from the viceroy of the island to the beggar at the gate. He carried messages through the house, ran errands in the town, called fathers to the parlour, answered questions, gave alms to the poor, and turned away, as kindly as he could, those who could not be admitted. The door was the point at which the college met the world, and the porter stood in it all day.
Alonso made of this work a continuous act of prayer. Every time the bell rang, he set himself to see Christ standing at the door. The tradition of Montesión remembers that he would rise at the sound and answer, Ya voy, Señor, “I am coming, Lord,” as he crossed to open it. His own notes describe the practice in substance: that he tried to go to the door as if God Himself were waiting outside, and to receive each person as if he were receiving his Lord. Behold, I stand at the gate, and knock (Apoc. 3:20). Alonso took the words literally, and found that they were true. I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matt. 25:35).
He practised a further discipline that his superiors observed with some amazement. He obeyed instantly and without question. If he was called while in the middle of a word or a stroke of the pen, he left it unfinished. He regarded the voice of the bell and the voice of the superior as the voice of God, and he answered both alike. In an age that prized the obedience of judgement as the summit of the Ignatian life, the brother at the door was held up as its living model.
Over the years the porter’s lodge became something more than an entrance. Students, fathers, townsmen, magistrates, and the troubled of every kind came to the door not to be let in but to speak with the porter. He had no learning, but he had a gift of counsel that his contemporaries recognised as supernatural. He spoke plainly, briefly, and with great charity. Many came away consoled, corrected, or converted. Montesión had learned theologians, but the person in the house whom the city most wanted to see was the old brother who opened the door.
VI. The interior life
What the visitors saw was peace. What lay beneath it, as Alonso’s notes later revealed, was a long and severe interior struggle.
Trials and temptations. For years he suffered violent temptations against purity, scruples that tormented his conscience, and periods of spiritual desolation in which God seemed wholly absent. His bodily penances were severe: the discipline, hair shirts, fasting, and long hours of prayer at night after a full day at the door. His superiors at times had to restrain him. He wrote of these trials without self-pity, as the ordinary price of union with God. St. John of the Cross, his contemporary, was describing the same purifying night at the same time on the mainland.
Union with God. Alongside the trials came graces of prayer that his notes record with great simplicity: a continual sense of the presence of God, even amid the distractions of his work, and moments of intense union in which he felt himself wholly given over to the divine will. He did not seek extraordinary things and was suspicious of them. His fundamental practice was to do nothing except for God and to want nothing except what God willed. He summed up the spiritual life, in substance, as the emptying of oneself so that God may fill the place.
Our Lady. His love for the Mother of God was tender and lifelong. He prayed the Rosary constantly, and he recited each day the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, two and a half centuries before that doctrine was defined. Older writers credited him with composing that Office. The Catholic Encyclopedia rightly rejects the attribution, since the text existed before him and he lacked the learning to write it, but it grants that he did much to spread its use. In his notes he speaks of Mary as a mother to whom he could bring everything, and he attributed to her help his perseverance in his worst temptations.
Writing under obedience. Toward the end of his life his superiors ordered him to write down his spiritual experiences and his counsels. He obeyed with reluctance. The result was a large mass of manuscripts, plain in style and often repetitive, but sound in doctrine and full of insight. They were not meant for publication. A selection appeared at Barcelona in 1885 as the Obras espirituales del B. Alonso Rodríguez. Through them we know the hidden life of a man whom his brethren knew only as the patient brother at the door.
VII. The porter and the apostle
In 1605 a young Catalan Jesuit named Peter Claver arrived at Montesión to study philosophy. He was shy, earnest, and uncertain of his path. He sought out the old porter, and a friendship formed that would shape the history of the New World.
Alonso was then over seventy. Day after day he spoke to Claver of the souls in the Indies who had no one to bring them the Gospel, and urged him to ask to be sent there. Claver kept notes of the old brother’s counsels and treasured them all his life. In 1608 he left Majorca to complete his studies, and in 1610 he sailed for Cartagena, on the coast of present-day Colombia, which was then the principal slave port of the Spanish empire.
There, for nearly forty years, St. Peter Claver met the slave ships as they came in, went down into the holds, nursed the sick and the dying, instructed and baptised the Africans by the tens of thousands, and defended them as far as he could. He signed his final vows as Petrus Claver, æthiopum semper servus, “Peter Claver, slave of the Ethiopians for ever.” The porter who saw Christ at the door had taught his disciple to see Christ in the hold of a slave ship. The Church recognised the bond between them by canonising them on the same day.
VIII. Death and cultus
In his last years Alonso’s body failed. From 1615 he was largely confined to bed, rising only to hear Mass and receive Communion. His mind grew weak, and toward the end, according to the accounts of his brethren, he could say little but the names of Jesus and Mary. He passed through a final period of great interior desolation, followed by deep peace.
He died at Montesión near midnight between the thirtieth and thirty-first of October, 1617, about eighty-five years of age. He had kissed the crucifix and pronounced the Holy Name. The city that had come to his door for half a century came to his funeral: the viceroy, the bishop, the nobility of Majorca, and great crowds of the poor. His body was laid in the church of Montesión, where it rests today.
The Church moved slowly to raise him to her altars. He was declared Venerable in 1626. In 1633 the Grand and General Council of Majorca chose him as a special patron of the city and island. Clement XIII declared his virtues heroic in 1760. The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and the suppression of the Society delayed the cause, and he was beatified by Leo XII only in 1825. Leo XIII decreed his canonisation in 1887 and solemnly enrolled him among the saints on the fifteenth of January, 1888, in St. Peter’s, together with St. Peter Claver, St. John Berchmans, and the Seven Holy Founders of the Servites.
That same year the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sonnet In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, Laybrother of the Society of Jesus, for the celebration of the canonisation. It contrasts the visible heroism of soldiers and martyrs with the hidden war of a soul, and ends with God’s patient work through
Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
IX. What his life teaches
That holiness is in the ordinary duty. The Church canonised a man for opening a door faithfully for forty-six years. No miracle of eloquence, no foundation, no book, no martyrdom. Our Lord said that he that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in that which is greater (Luke 16:10). Alphonsus shows that the least, done for God with perfect love, is not small at all. Most of the saints whom the Church honours tomorrow lived in exactly this way, unknown.
That suffering can be a door. Alphonsus lost his business, his wife, his children, and his mother before he found his vocation. He did not find it in spite of those losses but through them. Grief can close a soul or open it. In him it opened, and God entered.
That vocation can come late. He was refused because he was too old, too sick, and too ignorant. He was admitted at nearly forty, and his life’s work began then. No one is too late for God, and no state of life is beyond being given to Him entire.
That Christ waits in every person. The discipline of seeing Christ at the door is available to anyone whose work involves other people: the receptionist, the clerk, the nurse, the parent at the door of a child’s room. Every interruption becomes a visit. Every visitor becomes the Lord.
That the hidden can be fruitful. Alphonsus never crossed the sea to the Indies. But through the young man he counselled, the Gospel reached hundreds of thousands of the most abandoned people of his age. God does not measure the reach of a life by the distance it travels.
Practice
Examine. How do I receive the interruptions of my day: the knock, the call, the request, the message? As intrusions, or as visits? Is there someone I treat as an obstacle whom I should see as Christ? Have my own losses closed me to God, or opened me?
Do. Choose one recurring interruption in your day, the telephone, the door, a particular person’s question, and answer it today as Alphonsus did, saying inwardly before you respond: I am coming, Lord. Do one humble task in your house or workplace that no one will notice, and do it perfectly, for God alone.
Pray. St. Alphonsus has no Collect in the 1962 Missal for the universal Church. Pray instead the Collect of today’s Mass of Our Lady, which suits a man who knew both great sorrow and great peace:
Concede nos famulos tuos, quæsumus, Domine Deus, perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere: et gloriosa beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis intercessione, a præsenti liberari tristitia, et æterna perfrui lætitia. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord God, that we Thy servants may rejoice in continual health of mind and body; and by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary ever Virgin, be delivered from present sorrow, and enjoy eternal gladness. 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. Ya voy, Señor. — Venio, Domine. “I am coming, Lord.”
Devote. It is Saturday, Our Lady’s day, and the eve of All Saints. Pray the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, which Alphonsus loved and recited daily, or at least the Rosary. Offer it for all who serve in hidden and humble work, for late vocations, and for those whose grief has not yet become a door.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets Alphonsus beside St. Peter Claver, St. John Berchmans, and the other holy lay brothers and porters of the Church, among them St. Conrad of Parzham and St. Felix of Cantalice. The Spiritual Practices path takes up the practice of the presence of God, the discipline of seeing Christ in others, and the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. The Theology and Doctrine path treats St. Thomas on obedience (II-II, q. 104) and on the religious state as a state of perfection (II-II, q. 186). The Church History path follows the early Society of Jesus in Spain, the college of Montesión, and the suppression and restoration of the Society.
Sancte Alphonse, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Obras espirituales del B. Alonso Rodríguez (Barcelona, 1885); the Roman Martyrology; F. Goldie, Life of St. Alonso Rodriguez (London, 1889); the Vie admirable after his memoirs (Paris, 1890); C. Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus VI; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), s.v. “St. Alphonsus Rodriguez”; G. M. Hopkins, “In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez” (1888). His own words are given in paraphrase. The saying of Fr. Cordeses and the words “Ya voy, Señor” are given as the tradition of the Society.*