Alphonsus de Liguori: The Saint of Bourbon Naples. - book reviews

Such, however, is not the ease. I think Jones's biography is an absolutely splendid achievement despite his almost dogged insistence on following out the interminable clerical struggles that marked the public life of Alphonsus. 1 pay Jones this compliment because his biography reflects a deep understanding of the Catholic culture of the Settecento Kingdom of Naples. He provides us with an accurate (and depressing) picture of Catholic life in Southern Italy. He has excellent pages on everything from the style of preaching in the era to the quotidian religious life of the rural areas and the tensions between post-Tridentine Catholicity and the rise of skepticism in the Enlightenment. He is especially acute in describing the elfoffs of Alphonsus in writing a moral theology that would resist the rigorism of Jansenist inspired morality so as to provide a sensible method for confessors to deal compassionately with penitents, sparing them the tortured scruples that plagued his own life right down to the end.

I read this extremely well-written work just as I had finished Susan Sontag's new novel The Volcano Lover which is set in the same locale at nearly the same period. It was like background reading for that somewhat tedious novel. Jones, like Sontag, evokes that curious culture of the Kingdom of Naples, which combined, however imperfectly, the atheism and skeptical scientism of the philosophes, the sensuous piety of baroque devotionalism, the yawning gaps between rich and poor, the tenacious hold of the family (one of the Redemptorists' biggest problems was getting their novices to leave the shelter of their Neapolitan homes), and the greedy corruption of the Bourbon court and the church which was so under its thumb. Sontag describes a gruesome public hanging; Jones describes a pamphlet that Alphonsus wrote for chaplains who succored their charges as they were brought to the scaffold.

Jones is a model biographer. He is devoted to his subject (Jones is an Irish Redemptorist) but critical; a clear writer; and, most important of all, totally at home in the culture of the time. It is a worthy study of a man who was a zealous priest, a learned theologian, and the founder of an order which has brought honor to the church. I could not help but think as I finished the book that it was one of Alphonsus's spiritual sons, the German Redemptorist Bernard Hating, who revolutionized moral theology in our day as Liguori did in his own.

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