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The saints

St. Alphonsus Liguori

A star lawyer who lost one case and walked away from the law to serve the poor.

Feast: 1 August · 1696 to 1787 · Reformation and missions · Naples, Italy

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Painting of St. Alphonsus Liguori as a young priest in black, holding a crucifix.

Unknown author. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Home / The saints / St. Alphonsus Liguori

A courtroom in Naples, 1723

Alphonsus was a lawyer in Naples who never lost a case, until he did, over a detail he had missed.1

Humiliated, he left the courtroom and gave his life to God.1

He became a priest and preached to the poorest people in the countryside around Naples.

Patron of theologians1; vocations1

01St. Alphonsus Liguori

The Redemptorists

He founded the Redemptorists to preach to the abandoned poor.1

He wrote on moral theology, prayer and Mary, and he suffered from scruples for much of his life.1

Live it this week

Let a failure redirect you

Alphonsus lost a case and found his calling. Look at one recent failure this week and ask God in prayer what He might be pointing you toward through it.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Alphonsus Liguori”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.