Oct 30 – St Alphonsus Rodriquez (1533-1617) Jesuit lay brother
Summary :St Alphonsus Rodriquez overcame many tragedies in his early life. He was born in Spain in 1531, the third of eleven children and became a Jesuit lay brother at forty and had an enormous influence on all he came in contact with.
Alphonsus was the son of a wool merchant of Segovia. He first had contact with the Jesuits through Fr Peter Favre who, while preaching a mission in Segovia, stayed at his parents’ house and gave Alphonsus his first communion.
Patrick Dufffy briefly tells his story here.
Alphonsus went to study at the Jesuit school at Alcalá, but had to come home to help his mother with the family business after his father died. He married Maria Suarez, and they had two children. But Maria and his daughter and his mother all died in the space of three years. His business collapsed and he moved in with his two sisters, who introduced him to the habit of regular prayer and meditation. Some time later, his remaining son died.
Joins the Jesuits aged 40 Nearing forty, Alphonsus applied to join the Jesuits, but they rejected him as being too old and without sufficient education. He set himself to study Latin and applied again. This time the provincial admitted him as a lay brother. Six months later he was sent to the Jesuit college of Monte Sion in Majorca, where he spent the remaining forty-five years of his life.
Majorca Here he worked as a door-keeper but also devoted himself to prayer and penances. Through attention to his own inner struggle, Alphonsus was able to influence not only young students, like St. Peter Claver, whom he advised to go to America and became the “saint of the slaves”, but also local civic and social leaders, who came to his lodge for advice and direction.
Death and Influence In obedience to the command of his superiors, Alphonsus left a number of writings, simple in style but sound in doctrine: exhortations and advice on cultivating virtue, illustrations from every-day life, and so on.
When he died on October 31, 1617, his funeral was attended by Church and government leaders. He was declared ‘Venerable’ in 1626, and in 1633 was named a patron of Majorca, where his remains are enshrined. Since the Jesuits were suppressed in Spain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Alphonsus was not beatified till 1825. He was canonised with his friend St. Peter Claver in September 1888.
Sonnet in Honour of St Alphonsus Rodriguez In October 1888 at the request of a Jesuit priest, Francis Goldie, who had been a novice with him, to honour the saint on his canonisation, Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ wrote this poem. It celebrates the saint’s interior discipline and how God drew wonders from his humdrum life:
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say; And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field, And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may; But be the war within, the brand we wield Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled, Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent, Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment, Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
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Memorable Sayings for Today
A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself,
since perfect humility implies perfect confidence
in the power of God.
Summary: St Winifred of Holywell (in Welsh Treffynon) in Clwyd, north Wales is that a would-be suitor, when informed she was engaged to another (Christ?), cut off her head. A well sprang up where it hit the ground. But, her uncle, St Beuno, came and put her head back on again. She became an abbess at Holywell with eleven other virgins who came to join her there.
Patrick Duffytells her story here.
Late source The account of the life of Winifred (c/f image left)
date from about five centuries after her death and seem to work back from the famous spring associated with her.
One of the accounts of her life was written by Fr Robert, Benedictine prior of Shrewsbury, when her relics were transferred there in 1138.
Her Story It seems her father wanted her to marry, but when she refused the intended, the son of a neighbouring prince called Caradoc, in rage at the refusal, pursued her. She fled to her uncle – St Beuno – at his chapel, but before she could enter it Caradoc cut off her head.
A fountain sprang up where her head touched the ground. Her uncle Beuno came out from the chapel and cursed Caradoc, who immediately melted in his presence like wax before fire. Beuno put her head back on her body and prayed. The body received back the soul with only a thin scar showing at the neck.
Abbess One account has it that Winifred was abbess of a convent at Holywell where eleven other virgins joined her. Another was that after visiting other places she settled at Gwytherin under the direction of a St Eleri, where after her death her relics were enshrined before being brought to Shrewsbury in 1138.
“The Lourdes of Wales” St Winifred’s Well was an important centre of pilgrimage in the middle ages with cures reported up to the present day. Henry V gave thanks there for his victory at Agincourt. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, had a two-storey chapel erected to enclose it.
The Jesuit mission named after St Beuno had a presence there during penal times. In 1917 the well ran dry due to mining in the area but was soon restored. (The image right is of the holy bathing pool)
The town of Holywell website advertises
it as “the Lourdes of Wales“. The shrine is a well visited and well looked after site in the town of Holywell, Flintshire, North Wales.
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Memorable Sayings for Today
There is no life without water. Water and air are the two essential fluids
on which all life depends,
Rivers of living are to be poured over the whole world
to ensure that people,
like fishes caught in a net can be restored to wholeness.
