The Life
Aloysius Gonzaga was born on March 9, 1568, into one of the most powerful noble families of Renaissance Italy — the Gonzagas of Castiglione delle Stiviere, a marquisate in Lombardy. He was the eldest son of Ferrante Gonzaga, a military commander in the service of Philip II of Spain, and from the age of four was already being prepared for the military and courtly life appropriate to his birth. He was taken to Florence, brought to the court of Philip II in Madrid, served as a page to the Infante Diego. The entire trajectory of his life pointed toward power, wealth, and dynastic authority.
He renounced all of it at eighteen. His conversion — which appears to have been gradual, beginning in his childhood with a period of intense prayer and developing through his adolescence — led him to the conviction that his life was meant for something other than the court. He read the Jesuit annual letters describing the missions in India and was drawn immediately. He applied to enter the Society of Jesus in 1585. His father was furious and spent two years trying to dissuade him. Aloysius was unmoved. He renounced his right to the marquisate in favour of his brother Ridolfo and entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rome in 1585, under the direction (briefly) of Robert Bellarmine.
Aloysius spent the next six years in Jesuit formation — studying, praying, living the common life of the scholasticate. He was known for his extraordinary austerity: he fasted severely, slept little, and practised mortifications that his superiors repeatedly had to moderate. He was also known for a quality of purity — a childlike transparency — that struck everyone who met him. The poet and Jesuit Francis Thompson called him the archangel among the saints. Cardinal Bellarmine, who knew him well, said that he was the most extraordinary young man he had ever encountered.
In 1591, a plague swept through Rome. The Jesuits opened a hospital to care for the sick, and Aloysius threw himself into the work — carrying the sick on his back, washing them, sitting with them as they died. He contracted the plague himself. He died on June 21, 1591, at the age of twenty-three, just before dawn, whispering the name of Jesus. He had been a Jesuit for six years. He was declared patron of youth by Pope Benedict XIII in 1729 and patron of those suffering from AIDS and epidemic disease by Pope John Paul II in 1991 — exactly four centuries after his death.
The Renunciation
Aloysius Gonzaga was the eldest son of a marquis, heir to a title, a fortune, a castle, and a place in the hierarchy of Spanish-Italian Renaissance power. His father's ambitions for him were entirely conventional and entirely achievable: a military career, a noble marriage, the administration of the marquisate, the continuation of the family's position. Aloysius renounced all of it — formally, legally, irrevocably — in favour of his younger brother Ridolfo, signing away his inheritance and entering the Society of Jesus at the age of seventeen against his father's passionate objection. The renunciation was not a rejection of his family, whom he loved, but a recognition that his life had a different shape than the one the world had assigned it. He understood this with the calm clarity of someone who has prayed the question long enough to receive an answer he did not choose and would not contradict. His father eventually accepted it. His father's acceptance, before his own death, was a grace. The Plague of Rome — the last six months In 1591, when a severe plague swept through Rome, the Jesuits opened a field hospital and the scholastics were asked to nurse the sick. Aloysius volunteered immediately. He was young, slight, and already weakened by years of severe fasting and mortification — the last person, physically, who should have been carrying plague victims. He carried them anyway. He washed them, sat with them, prayed with them as they died. He contracted the plague himself and was brought back to the Jesuit house. He recovered enough to be ambulatory for a period, then declined. He asked to die on the feast of Corpus Christi. He did not die on the feast of Corpus Christi — he died nine days later, on June 21, 1591, at twenty-three, shortly before dawn. He was found on his knees with his eyes fixed on something the others could not see. The last word recorded from him was the name of Jesus.
Walk in Their Footsteps
Pilgrimage sites connected to St Aloysius Gonzaga
Ask St Aloysius Gonzaga to Intercede
Bring these intentions to this saint in prayer:
Aloysius had everything the world offers and gave it all away at seventeen. He did not do this from self-hatred or a spirit of flight. He did it from the same clarity that makes a composer hear the music he must write, or a scientist see the problem he must solve: he could see what his life was for, and it was not the marquisate. The hardest thing was not the renunciation — he had decided that. The hardest thing was the two years of his father's resistance, the sustained pressure of a family that loved him and could not understand. He bore it with patience, not contempt. And when he finally entered, he served the sick until he died of their disease. He was twenty-three. Some people live more in twenty-three years than others do in eighty.
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
St Aloysius, young servant and martyr of charity — pray for the young people of today. Pray for those who are being told what their life must look like by the world, by their families, by their own fears. Give them the clarity to hear the different voice that speaks beneath those voices. Give them the courage to follow it. And for those who are sick — who are young and sick and afraid — sit with them as you sat with the plague victims of Rome. Do not leave them alone. Amen.