Feast day: October 30

St. Alphonsus Rodríguez

Religious, Friar · 1532–1617

Patron of —

A Spanish wool merchant who, after losing his wife and children, became a Jesuit lay brother and spent forty-six years as a college doorkeeper, answering the gate as if it were Christ himself.

Alphonsus Rodriguez was born in 1532 at Segovia, in Spain, the son of a prosperous wool merchant. He took over the family business on his father's death, married, and seemed set for an ordinary life — but it collapsed into sorrow: within a few years his business failed and his wife and children all died, leaving him alone, middle-aged, and bereft.

Out of this grief grew a deepening prayer life and a resolve to give himself to God. He sought to enter the Jesuits, but, with little education and in poor health, was at first refused; admitted at last, at nearly forty, as a lay brother, he was sent to the Jesuit college on the island of Majorca and given the lowly post of doorkeeper, or porter.

For forty-six years he kept that door — answering the bell, running errands, greeting visitors — and in this utterly humble, hidden occupation became one of the great mystics and spiritual guides of his age. He taught himself to meet each person at the door as if meeting Christ, and his holiness and wisdom drew students and visitors to seek his counsel; among those he profoundly influenced was the future missionary St. Peter Claver.

He bore long interior trials and physical suffering with serenity, and died in 1617. Canonized in 1888, the humble porter is remembered as proof that the highest sanctity can be reached in the lowliest of tasks — a life that later inspired the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to verse.

He answered the door for half a century with the words 'I'm coming, Lord!' — and the young Peter Claver, whom he counseled there, became an apostle to slaves.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01341a.htm