Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez

He was born at Segovia, son of a wool merchant who had been reduced to poverty while Alphonsus was still young. ¹ Franciscan Media says he inherited the family textile business at twenty-three. ² Campbell says he married at twenty-six, and at thirty-one "found himself a widower with one surviving child, the other two having died previously." ¹

Franciscan Media compresses the same years differently and the effect is worse: "Within the space of three years, his wife, daughter, and mother died; meanwhile, business was poor." ²

What he did next was not dramatic. He sold the business and moved with his surviving son into his sister's house, and there, Franciscan Media says, "he learned the discipline of prayer and meditation." ² Campbell dates the change from the same point - "from that time he began a life of prayer and mortification, although separated from the world around him." ¹ Then the third child died too. ¹

He was nearly forty when he tried to enter religious life, and the obstacle was not devotion but schooling. Campbell is precise about it: entering the Society was "apparently impossible... as he was without education, having only had an incomplete year at a new college begun at Alcala by Francis Villanueva." ¹

At thirty-nine he went back to school, attempting the course at the College of Barcelona "but without success." ¹ Campbell adds that "his austerities had also undermined his health." ¹ Franciscan Media says simply that he applied twice before being admitted. ²

He was received as a lay brother on 31 January 1571 - not as a priest, and not on the strength of anything he had accomplished. ¹ Campbell notes that distinct novitiates did not yet exist in Spain, so where he served his probation is itself disputed, either Valencia or Gandia. ¹ After six months he was sent to the recently founded college at Majorca. ¹

He kept it for forty-five years. ²

Franciscan Media does not dress up what that involved: "When not at his post, he was almost always at prayer, though he often encountered difficulties and temptations." ² The difficulties are worth noticing. This is not a portrait of a serene man doing a simple job well; it is a man who found prayer hard for decades and kept at it in the gaps between answering a door.

What came of it was other people. "His holiness and prayerfulness attracted many to him, including Saint Peter Claver, then a Jesuit seminarian." ² Claver went on to Cartagena and forty years among enslaved Africans arriving in the New World, and the encounter that pointed him there happened at a college entrance in Majorca.

Franciscan Media makes the other observation that keeps him from being forgotten: "Alphonsus' life as doorkeeper may have been humdrum, but centuries later he caught the attention of poet and fellow-Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, who made him the subject of one of his poems." ²

Campbell opens his article with a warning rather than a fact, and it is worth repeating because anybody searching this name will hit the same problem. "On account of the similarity of names he is often confounded with Father Rodriguez the author of 'Christian Perfection', who though eminent in his holiness was never canonized." ¹

Two Jesuits, one surname, one canonized and one not, one a lay brother who kept a door and one the author of a widely read book on the spiritual life. The encyclopedia thought the confusion likely enough to head off in its first sentence.

Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez is the patron saint of Majorca, the island where he spent the second half of his life. ² Campbell states no patronage. ¹ It is a local patronage rather than a thematic one - he is claimed by a place rather than by a trade or a difficulty - which suits a man whose entire public work was to be reliably present at one address.

The feast of Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez is October 30. ² The sources do not quite agree on the death it commemorates: Campbell gives 31 October 1617 and Franciscan Media gives October 30. ¹² They differ on the birth as well, Campbell giving 25 July 1532 and Franciscan Media 1533. ¹² Neither gap changes anything about him, and both are recorded here rather than resolved, because this library does not pick between two sources it has no grounds to rank.

He is the saint for anybody whose life did not work out and who kept going anyway. The list is brutal when set down plainly: a failed business, a wife dead, a mother dead, three children dead, two rejections from the order he wanted, a return to school at thirty-nine that came to nothing, and health already broken by his own austerities. ¹² He was admitted at last in the lowest rank the Society had.

The forty-five years at the door are the whole of his public life. Nothing was built, nothing was written, nothing was founded. Franciscan Media's word for it is humdrum, and the honesty of that is why the entry is worth reading. ² Most people's work is humdrum, and most people are not told that this is compatible with sanctity.

The temptations matter too. He "often encountered difficulties" in prayer across those decades, which is to say the interior life was not a consolation prize handed to him for having lost everything else. ² He had to work at that as well, in a porter's lodge, between callers.

What came of it was not visible to him. A seminarian passing through was changed by the conversation and spent his life in Cartagena; a poet three hundred years later wrote him down. ² Neither was the point. The point was answering the door, and he did that until he was eighty-five.