Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori was born at Marianella outside Naples in 1696 and was practising law at sixteen. In 1723, after losing a case he had believed unanswerable — he had missed a document in the brief — he left the courts, laid his sword on the altar of the church of the Redeemed Captives, and began studying for the priesthood over his father's opposition. The Church keeps his memorial on August 1.
He was ordained in 1726 and worked among the lazzaroni, the street poor of Naples, gathering them into evening chapels for catechism. In 1732, at Scala above Amalfi, he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer — the Redemptorists — for missions to the shepherds and farmers of the Neapolitan hinterland, whom he judged worse instructed than any people in a Christian kingdom.
His Theologia Moralis set itself against the rigorism then dominant in seminaries, arguing for equiprobabilism: where opinion on the lawfulness of an act is genuinely balanced, liberty may be followed. The book went through nine editions in his lifetime and made him the reference for confessors; Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1871 and Pius XII patron of confessors and moral theologians in 1950. He wrote The Glories of Mary and the Christmas carol Tu scendi dalle stelle, and composed music.
He was bishop of Sant'Agata dei Goti from 1762 until age and illness forced his resignation in 1775. He died at Pagani on August 1, 1787, at ninety, after years in which arthritis had bent his head permanently onto his chest. His tomb is in the basilica at Pagani, inland from the Amalfi coast and within reach of Naples.
