Father Corapi's Biography

St Gregory the Great relates on the authority of  “his elders” that Germanus saw Paschasius, deacon of Rome, in Purgatory long after his death for having adhered to the schism of Laurence against Pope St Symmachus, and that he was purging his fault as an attendant at the hot springs, whither Germanus had been sent to bathe for the good of his health. Within a few days the bishop’s prayers released Paschasius.

   Thus left a widow at the age of forty-three, she went to live at Marienwerder, and in 1393 became a recluse in a cell by the church of the Teutonic Knights. She was there only a year before her death, on May 25, 1394, but long enough to gain a great repute for holiness and supernatural enlighten­ment. Numerous visitors sought her cell, to ask advice or in hope of obtaining a miraculous cure of their ills.

   Her confessor, from whom we learn that Dorothy had a very intense devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and was often supernaturally enabled to look upon it, which she greatly desired to do, wrote her life, in Latin and German, with an account of her visions and revelations. In the middle ages great importance was attached to seeing the Body of the Lord, especially at the elevation at Mass, and the “life” of Bd Dorothy shows that in her time it was exposed all day for this purpose in some churches of Prussia and Pomerania. She was greatly revered by the people and soon after her death the cause of canonization was begun, but as soon dropped. Nevertheless the cultus spread, and Dorothy was popularly regarded as the patroness of Prussia.

Diego Rodriguez was a well-to-do wool-merchant in Segovia, and Alphonsus, born about 1533 was his third child in a big family. When Bd Peter Favre and another Jesuit came to preach a mission at Segovia they stayed with Diego, and at the end accepted his offer of a few days’ holiday at his country house. Young Alphonsus, then about ten, went with them and was prepared for his first communion by Bd Peter.

When he was fourteen he was sent with his elder brother to study under the Jesuits at Alcala, but before the first year was out their father died, and it was decided that Alphonsus must go into the business, which his mother was going to carry on. She retired and left him in sole charge when he was twenty-three, and three years later he married a girl called Mary Suarez.

The business had been doing badly and his wife’s dowry did not do much to improve it Alphonsus was not an incapable businessman, but “times were bad”.  Then he lost his little daughter, and, after a long illness following the birth of a boy, his wife too. Two years later his mother died, and this succession of mis­fortunes and losses made Alphonsus give very serious thought to what God was calling him to do in the world.

   He had always been a man of devout and righteous life, but he began to realize that he was meant to be something different from the numerous commercial men who led exemplary but unheroic lives in Segovia. If he sold his business he would have enough for himself and his little son to live on, so he did this and went to live with his two maiden sisters. These two, Antonia and Juliana, were a pious couple and taught their brother the rudiments of mental prayer, so that he was soon meditating two hours every morning and evening on the mysteries of the rosary.

    Alphonsus began to see his past life as very imperfect when regarded in the light of Christ and, following a vision of the glories of Heaven, he made a general confession and set himself to practise considerable austerities, Confession and communion every week. After some years his son died, and the edge of Alphonsus’s sorrow was turned by the consideration that the boy had been saved from the danger and misery of ever offending God.

He now contemplated, not for the first time, the possibility of becoming a religious and applied to the Jesuits at Segovia. They unhesitatingly refused him he was nearly forty, his health was not good, and he had not finished an education good enough to make him fit for sacerdotal studies. Undaunted, he went off to see his old friend Father Louis Santander, s.j., at Valencia. Father Santander recommended him to get ordained as soon as possible, and as a first step to learn Latin. So, like St Ignatius Loyola before him, and with like mortifications, he put himself to school with the little boys. As he had given nearly all his money to his sisters and to the poor before leaving Segovia, he had to take a post as a servant and supplement his earnings by begging to support himself.

   He met at the school a man of his own age and inclinations, who induced him to consider giving up all idea of becoming a Jesuit and to be instead a hermit. Alphonsus went to visit this man at his hermitage in the mountains, but suddenly seeing the suggestion as a temptation to desert his real vocation, he returned to Valencia and confessed his weakness to Father Santander, saying, I will never again follow my own will for the rest of my life. Do with me as you think best.” In 1571 the Jesuit provincial, over-ruling his official consultors, accepted Alphonsus Rodriguez as a lay brother, or temporal coadjutor, as such is called in the Society. Six months later he was sent from Spain to the College of Montesione in the island of Majorca, and soon after his arrival was made hall-porter.
   St Alphonsus carried out the duties of this post till he became too old and infirm, and the reputation he had in it was summed up once for all by Father Michael Julian in his exclamation, “That brother is not a man—he is an angel!”  Every minute left free by his work and what it entailed was given to prayer, but though he achieved a marvellous habitual recollection and union with God his spiritual path was far from an easy one.
   Especially in his later years he suffered from long periods of desolation and aridity, and with terrifying regularity he was seized with pain and sickness whenever he set himself formally to meditate. Added to this, he was beset with violent temptations, just as though for years he had not curbed his body by fierce austerities, which now had to be made even more rigorous. But he never despaired, carrying out every duty with exact regularity, knowing that in God’s own time he would be seized again in an ecstasy of love and spiritual delight.
   Priests who had known him for forty years used to say that they had never noticed a word or action of Brother Alphonsus that could justly receive adverse criticism. In 1585 when he was fifty-four years old, he made his final vows, which he used to renew every day at Mass. A hall-porter is not to be envied at the best of times, and when a boys’ school is part of the establishment he needs to have a firm hand and an extra fund of patience; but the job has its compensations the porter meets a variety of people and is a link between the public world without and the private world within.
   At Montesione, in addition to the students, there was a constant coming and going of clergy of all sorts, of nobles and professional men and members of their families having business with the Jesuit fathers, of the poor wanting help and merchants and tradesmen from Palma wanting orders. All these people got to know, to respect and to love Brother Alphonsus, whose opinions and advice were sought and valued as well by the learned and holy as by the simple, and his reputation was known far beyond the boundaries of the college. The most famous of his “pupils” was St Peter Claver, who was studying at the college in 1605. For three years he put himself under the direction of St Alphonsus who, enlightened by Heaven, fired his enthusiasm for and urged him on to that work in America which was eventually to gain for St Peter the title of “Apostle of the Negroes”.

St Alphonsus had always a very deep devotion towards the Mother of God as conceived free from original sin, a truth that had been defended in Majorca three hundred years before by Bd Raymund Lull.
For a time it was believed by many that Al­phonsus had composed the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception; he had a great regard for this office and popularized its use among others, from which arose the mistake that he was its author.
Nor did he write the famous treatise on the Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues this was the work of another Jesuit of the same name, who has not been canonized.
   But St Alphonsus left some fugitive writings, set down at the command of his superiors, full of the simple, solid doctrine and exhortation that one would look for from such a man, showing too that he was indeed a mystic favoured of Heaven. When he was over seventy and very infirm, his rector told him one day, just to see what he would do, to go on duty to the Indies. St Alphonsus went straight down to the gate and asked for it to be opened for him. “I am ordered to the Indies”, he said, and was going there and then to look for a ship at Palma, but was told to go back to the rector.
  That during the later part of his life he suffered from spiritual dereliction and diabolical assaults has been mentioned above, and to these were added the trials of ill-health and physical suffering; at last he was practically confined to his bed. But his invincible perseverance and patience brought consolations “to such a degree that he could not raise his eyes in spirit to Jesus and Mary without their being at once before him”.

    In May of 1617 the rector of Montesione, Father Julian, was down with rheumatic fever, and asked for the prayers of St Alphonsus. He spent the night interceding for him, and in the morning Father Julian was able to celebrate Mass. In October Alphonsus knew that his end was at hand, and after receiving Holy Communion on the 29th all pain of mind and body ceased. He lay as it were in an unbroken ecstasy until, at midnight of the 31st, a terrible agony began. At the end of half an hour composure returned, he looked around lovingly at his brethren, kissed the crucifix, uttered the Holy Name in a loud voice, and died. The Spanish viceroy and nobility of Majorca, by the bishop, and by crowds of the poor, sick and afflicted whose love and faith were rewarded by miracles, attended his funeral. He was canonized in 1888 with St Peter Claver.

The documents printed for the Congregation of Sacred Rites in view of the beatification and canonization of St Alphonsus are very copious owing to the objections raised by the promotor fidei in connection with the saint’s early occupations and his writings. These documents, with the autobiographical notes, which he wrote down by order of obedience between the years 1601 and 1616, supply the most valuable materials for his life. The notes in question are printed at the beginning of his Obras Espirituales, which were edited in three volumes by Fr J. Nonell at Barcelona in 1885—1887. The same Fr Nonell wrote in Spanish what is still perhaps the best biography of the saint, Vida de San Alonso Rodriguez (1888) and Father Goldie largely used this in the English life that he published in 1889. In the Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. xiii, is reprinted the earliest published life of Alphonsus, that by Father Janin which appeared in 1644 and was written in Latin.  On the saint’s connection with the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, often errone­ously printed under his name, see Uriarte, Obras anonimas y seudonimas, S.J., vol. i, pp. 512—515 and on his ascetical teaching see Viller, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, vol. i (1933), cc. 395—402. The latest biographies seem to be that of M. Dietz, Der hl. Alfons Rodriguez (1925), and a popular account by M. Farnum, The Wool Merchant of Segovia (1945).