5.43 St. Alphonsus Liguori: Prince of the Moralists

By Dr. James Papandrea ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 22, 2026 | In Way of the Fathers (Podcast)

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St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696—1787) is one of the most popular and widely-read spiritual writers of all time, and yet his most significant contribution to the Church was his moral theology, including the guidance he gave to clergy for hearing confessions.

Links

AUDIO BOOK—Liguori’s Uniformity With God’s Will—https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/st-alphonsus-liguori-uniformity-with-gods-will/?repos=6&subrepos=0&searchid=2680738

Classics of Western Spirituality, Alphonsus Liguori: Selected Writings—https://www.paulistpress.com/Products/3771-2/alphonsus-de-liguori.aspx

Liguori’s Duetto—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYyHfHbHRxc

Pope St. John Paul II Apostolic Letter Spiritus Domini on St. Alphonsus Liguori (1987)—https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/spiritus-domini-8413

Dr. Papandrea’s Homepage: https://jimpapandrea.wordpress.com/

Dr. Papandrea’s latest book—Praying the Wisdom: Inspired Prayers for Lectio Divina and Contemplative Prayer: https://sophiainstitute.com/product/praying-the-wisdom/

Dr. Papandrea’s YouTube channel, The Original Church: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOriginalChurch

Theme Music: Gaudeamus (Introit for the Feast of All Saints), sung by Jeff Ostrowski. Courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed: https://www.ccwatershed.org/

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to The Way of the Fathers, a production of Catholic Culture. I’m Jim Papandrea. To support this podcast, go to catholicculture.org/donate. Today we continue our series on the Doctors of the Church with our second episode on St. Alphonsus Liguori.

St. Alphonsus wrote, “If all preachers and confessors would discharge their duties as they should, the whole world would be holy. Bad preachers and bad confessors are the ruin of the world. Every preacher and every confessor who does not study to improve himself is a bad preacher or confessor.” Now, that’s slightly paraphrased to make it easier to get the gist in this audio format. But for what it’s worth, I think it’s still true. St. Alphonsus Liguori said so much that is still relevant today. Of course, he also wrote a lot that was very much addressing his particular context in the 18th century, and so that means not everything has been translated into English.

Believe it or not, St. Alphonsus has been called the best-selling author of all time and the most popular author who ever lived. He was arguably the most famous author in Italy within his lifetime. And a century after his death, he would become the most popular spiritual writer. He’s also been called the most influential mariologist in the history of modern Catholicism. He wrote over one hundred books, so I can’t even list them all here, and his writings have been translated into almost one hundred different languages.

He wrote homilies for every Sunday of the year, and he also wrote about fifty hymns in Italian, though I don’t know of anywhere where you can hear the tunes that he wrote. When you hear them or see them in a hymnal, it’s usually his lyrics set to other people’s music that was written later. Though if you went to Italy, you might hear them sung in the original tunes by the people who have never stopped singing them. He also composed an oratorio called The Duetto, a duet between the soul and Jesus Christ on his way to the cross. I’ll include a link to a performance of this in the description. And as a bishop, he wrote a pastoral letter on church music. And there are literally thousands of his letters that still exist, though only a small number of them have been translated into English as far as I know. And most of his apologetic works have not been translated into English because they are so specific to his context. So here I’ll just try to mention his most famous works that you can actually read in English.

Overall, the most popular were two of his earliest, Visits to the Most Blessed Sacrament, which is Meditations for Eucharistic Adoration, and The Glories of Mary. The official title of this book is:

The Glories of Mary: A Work Useful for Reading and Preaching, Divided into Two Parts. In the first are treated the many and bountiful graces that the Mother of God dispenses to those devoted to her, as demonstrated in the various parts of the Salve Regina. In the second part are treated the principal feasts of Mary, her sorrows in general and in particular, and also included are her heroic virtues and the accustomed devotions in her honor. Finally, there are added some selected stories by way of examples.

All of that is the title, and as it tells you, the first part is kind of a commentary on the Salve Regina prayer, the Hail Holy Queen. And the second part has reflections on her feasts, her sorrows, and her virtues, with prayers and devotions to her.

It’s been called the most widely read book on the Blessed Virgin in the world, and it’s meant to be a resource for priests for their sermons. In addition to being among his most popular works, this one was also one of his most controversial. Of course, the Jansenists and the Protestants didn’t like it, but even some Catholics thought it went a bit too far with devotion to Mary.

And he wrote a book called The Way of the Cross: Reflections and Prayers for Doing the Stations of the Cross. Now, St. Alphonsus did not invent the Stations of the Cross, of course, but he is often given credit for popularizing the practice, rather like the Dominicans are given credit for spreading the practice of saying the Rosary. According to St. Alphonsus himself, his most devotional and most useful book is called The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ. It’s been called a summary of his moral theology for the laity, but that makes it sound too dry. It’s actually one of my favorites of his. And he wrote a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which I am actually in the middle of praying right now. Like his hero, St. Francis de Sales, St. Alphonsus had a great devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And like the writings of St. Francis de Sales, Liguori’s novena and its preface also contributed to paving the way for Pope Clement XIII to approve the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1765. This was not long after the novena was written. And remember, this is one of the popes who refused to let him retire. But apparently, some people opposed the devotion to the Sacred Heart. They didn’t really understand it and asked whether such a thing would lead to devotions to the Sacred Head and the Sacred Feet, etc. But Liguori was able to explain that the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the love of Jesus, and a devotion to the Sacred Heart means to love Jesus back in gratitude for his love and in humility for his sacrifice.

St. Alphonsus wrote many books on the subject of prayer, including one called A Way of Conversing Continually with God as a Friend, and another called Prayer, the Great Means of Salvation. In this one, he goes so far as to say that personal prayer, that is, private devotions outside of going to Mass, are required for salvation. He actually says this several times throughout his writings, including also in The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ. And in case you don’t believe him, he quotes St. Teresa of Avila to back him up, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas. Commenting on Scripture passages about prayer and perseverance, St. Alphonsus says, Those who do not ask with perseverance will not persevere.

He wrote guidelines for priests when hearing confessions and manuals to help priests with their own spiritual growth and to catechize the laity and teach them how to pray. And based on his own experience, he wrote Advice for Priests Who Minister to Those Condemned to Death. But for all that, and if I stopped here, he would still be worthy to be named a Doctor of the Church. Yet it’s pretty universally acknowledged that his greatest contribution to the Church, his greatest legacy, is in moral theology. Now, what is moral theology? Simply put, it’s using theology, that is what we know from scripture, tradition, and the teaching magisterium of the Church, to make moral decisions. It is the conscience making judgments informing the will about what actions to take or not take. So it has a lot to do with the discernment of what is and isn’t a sin. And this comes into play in a very practical way when our priests have to hear our confessions. They have to be able to correctly assess, taking circumstances into account, what sins are mortal or venial, or perhaps something that’s not a sin at all, like how you’re not responsible for what you do in your dreams, for example. And so moral theology is kind of like where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.

St. Liguori’s moral theology ran to four thousand pages in four volumes, going through eight editions by his own hand over forty years. He said that for five straight years, he worked on it eight to ten hours a day. And it is as much an encyclopedia of everything that came before him as it is an original work of genius. It started from teaching moral theology in the seminary of his diocese, and from his lectures, he wrote the textbook, a 4000 page textbook. His methodology for moral theology was to find the balance of the middle way between the very strict rigorism that he learned in his own seminary training and the new progressive laxity that was not taking sin seriously. To put it another way, he was looking for the balance of taking sin seriously, but also leaving the penitent with a real sense of peace. And this requires a priest hearing confessions to know the teachings of the church, but it also requires them to know people and what their people are really capable of, so as not to burden them with penances they will never carry out. And St. Alphonsus found this balance by the combination of his rigorous training on the one hand and his experience as a missionary with real people on the other. And his moral theology would become the Catholic standard, making him a kind of counterpart to Aquinas. And this is actually the biggest part of his legacy as a Doctor of the Church. What Thomas Aquinas was to philosophical theology, Alphonsus Liguori was to moral theology.

And it’s said that he revolutionized the way priests heard confessions. And there’s an 18th century revolution you don’t hear about much. Now, in part, this was a correction against Jansenism. I talked about Jansenism in the last episode, but for now just remember that the heretics known as Jansenists were basically Calvinists under another name, trying to remain Catholic, I suppose. Well, they were definitely on the strict rigorist side when it came to confession and penance. But St. Alphonsus knew that their doctrines led not only to a scrupulosity in confession, but to a kind of depressing fatalism that eroded hope, and this kept people away from the sacraments. Now, in case this word scrupulosity is new to you, let me just define it briefly. Scrupulosity in the context of the confession of sins means to be overly scrupulous. In other words, overly focused on the smallest details of every sin, overly worried about forgetting to confess something and not being forgiven, and obsessing about all this to the point where one finds no peace from the sacrament of confession. That’s what it is, and it’s something you want to avoid.

So St. Alfonso’s moral theology and his guides for clergy when hearing confessions were extremely helpful in a time when they were greatly needed. I can only assume they would be helpful today as well. And in fact, the church has declared that priests are at all times able to follow his advice in good conscience. But at the time, some people thought his method of the middle way was still too easy on the penitents. Like our earlier Catholic Reformation doctors, he had to suffer books being published that called him out and criticized him. Not to mention that the Jansenists hated him and wrote books denouncing him, including targeting his novena to the Sacred Heart. And all this criticism went on for a century after his death. But in the end, it was St. Alphonsus who balanced the sacrament of confession and who showed the problems with Jansenism and pretty much single-handedly defeated this heresy in Italy. But apart from the moral theology, most of his books were written for the laity to catechize them, or for the priests to catechize the laity, and to teach the laity to live lives of making progress in holiness. For them, he usually wrote in easy conversational Italian, though he preached and wrote his hymns in the Neapolitan dialect.

Like his hero, St. Francis de Sales, he actually taught people to pray, and he has been called the Doctor of Prayer. But in this podcast, that name was already taken by St. Teresa of Avila. So for this episode, we’re giving him another name by which he is called Prince of the Moralists. What’s at stake for St. Alphonsus is his conviction that everyone is called to holiness, and holiness is possible for everyone. All it takes, according to St. Liguori, is frequent reception of the sacraments, denial of self or total abandonment to the will of God, and prayer. And this is why he called prayer the great means of salvation and sanctification. You’ve heard that expression, “God helps those who help themselves.” Well, he would say, “God helps those who pray,” and that’s because he said that grace only comes to those who pray. He wrote, “God grants his grace only to those who ask for it,” and he actually taught people how to ask for it. He taught people how to pray, and he taught his priests how to pray and how to teach their people to pray.

Pope St. John Paul II said he is the teacher of the Catholic soul of the West, and he did for modern Catholicism what Augustine accomplished in ancient times. So in one way or another, he’s a modern St. Augustine, a modern St. Dominic, and a modern St. Thomas Aquinas. Not too shabby.

Canonized in 1839, he was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius IX in 1871. This pope said, “Are not the things we have solemnly approved concerning the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mother of God and the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff when teaching ex cathedra found most clearly explained and demonstrated with the strongest arguments in the works of Alphonsus?”

Now, before we wind down here, there’s a legend out there that St. Alphonsus never refused absolution to anyone. This is not actually true. He did on a few occasions postpone absolution and tell the person to come back later when they were ready to make a good confession. Having said that, though, he did advise priests not to do this in most cases because most people, he said, are already coming to the sacrament with the best they can do in their situation. So if you send them away and tell them to examine their conscience again and come back with a better confession, they probably won’t do it. They might not come back at all, and you can’t afford to lose them in the confessional because especially for those who don’t get to Mass much, this is where you can bring them back, so you don’t want to drive them away. He quoted with agreement St. Francis de Sales, who said that the role of the confessor is the most important and the most difficult job of the clergy. So some of his critics said he was too easy on the penitents. Others said he was too hard on them. That’s how he knew he was in that place of balance in the middle between the extremes. And as you know, I always say that heresy lives at the extremes, and orthodoxy is in the middle way between the extremes.

For St. Alphonsus, even though he sometimes struggled with scrupulosity himself, that middle way was between a pessimistic scrupulosity and Jansenism on the one side and an overly optimistic Enlightenment humanism on the other, often made even worse by forms of universalism. On that point, St. Alphonsus said in effect that many people will go to hell simply because they refuse to believe it exists.

Well, I don’t have to tell you that these two extremes still exist today, though most commentators on Liguori’s life will remark that today the biggest problem is not scrupulosity but laxity and that confessors today are too easy on sin. St. Alphonsus wrote in The Practice of the Love of Jesus, “Some people destroy themselves by making peace with their faults.” So, if he was so popular back in the day, why not today? Well, his popularity fell off for a while, partly because his writings often addressed his own historical context as an apologist against the Enlightenment or against the heresy of Jansenism, and within arguments over moral theology that no one is really having anymore. But also because for some reason, after Vatican II, St. Alphonsus got eclipsed by new and experimental forms of spirituality, some having more to do with New Age philosophy and pop psychology, the 20th century version of the Enlightenment perhaps, than they do with Christianity. And that gets us back to the comment that the problem today is not an overly strict scrupulosity, though that does exist in some circles. But the problem today is a laxity based on the opposite extreme.

One final fun fact. The church of St. Alfonso in Rome, where I believe his three writing fingers are, is also the home of the famous icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. This icon was brought to Rome from Crete at the end of the 15th century, and it was given to a devout family in Rome. And according to the story, a little girl in that household had a vision. And in the vision, Our Lady told her that the icon was to be placed between the great basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and the Cathedral of St. John Lateran. And so it was placed in the church of San Matteo, right there in between the two great basilicas, in 1499. But that church, San Matteo, was destroyed by Napoleon in his occupation of Rome. The icon was saved and hidden away by the Augustinian monks, and in 1855, the church of St. Alfonso was built on or near that site. And in 1866, the icon was placed in the church, and even though St. Alfonso himself probably never saw it, it was entrusted to the Redemptorists, who have promoted its devotion ever since.

So, what is a good entry point for reading St. Alphonsus Liguori? Well, once again, I would point you to the volume on him in the Classics of Western Spirituality series. It has a great selection of his works to get you started, and I’ll include a link to that in the description. And we also have on the Catholic Culture website an audiobook of St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Uniformity with God’s Will that you can listen to for free, and so I’ll include a link to that in the description as well. Next time on The Way of the Fathers, St. Therese of Lisieux. Thanks for listening.