Tragedy and challenge beset today’s saint early in life, but Alphonsus Rodriguez found happiness and contentment through simple service and prayer.

    Years later, at the death of his son, Alphonsus, almost 40 by then, sought to join the Jesuits. He was not helped by his poor education. He applied twice before being admitted. For 45 years he served as door keeper at the Jesuits’ college in Majorca. When not at his post, he was almost always at prayer, though he often encountered difficulties and temptations.

    His holiness and prayerfulness attracted many to him, including St. Peter Claver, then a Jesuit seminarian. Alphonsus’s life as doorkeeper may have been humdrum, but he caught the attention of poet and fellow-Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, who made him the subject of one of his poems.

    Reputed to heal by fervent prayer. The night before his death was spent in a visionary ecstasy (see image). Some authors claim he wrote the "Little Office of the Immaculate Conception", but his part was to make more popular. Left behind a collection of manuscripts of journal entries, random thoughts, simple illustrations, and musings on things spiritual that are remarkable for their simplicity, sound and correct doctine, and spiritual understanding; they were published as "Spiritual Works of Blessed Alonso Rodriguez" in Barcelona in 1885.    

    Comment: We like to think that God rewards the good even in this life. But Alphonsus knew business losses, painful bereavement and periods when God seemed very distant. None of his suffering made him withdraw into a shell of self-pity or bitterness. Rather, he reached out to others who lived with pain, including enslaved blacks. Among the many notables at his funeral were the sick and poor people whose lives he had touched. May they find such a friend in us!

http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/SaintOfDay/default.asp?id=1184
Alonso Rodriguez

Born 25 July 1532 at Segovia, Spain

Died 31 October 1617 at Palma, Majorca of natural causes; relics enshrined at Majorca

Beatified 1825  - Canonized 6 September 1887 by Pope Leo XIII

Representation an old Jesuit with two hearts on his breast connected by rays of light to Christ and the Virgin