Saint Aloysius Gonzaga

Born to inherit, drawn to give it away

Aloysius Gonzaga was born on March 9, 1568, in Castiglione delle Stiviere, a small Italian marquisate, the eldest son of a noble family whose position came with real political weight. As heir, he was groomed from boyhood for the life expected of him — court etiquette, military training, eventual management of his family's lands and title. But by his early teens Aloysius had set his sights elsewhere. He felt drawn to religious life with a seriousness that alarmed his father, and after years of family resistance, he formally renounced his inheritance rights in favor of his younger brother and entered the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits — as a novice in 1585, walking away from a title most people in his position would never have questioned keeping.

A novice in a city under plague

Aloysius's Jesuit formation took him to Rome, where in 1591 a severe outbreak of plague struck the city. Rather than staying clear of the danger, he volunteered to work at a hospital the Jesuits ran for plague victims, taking on some of the most physically demanding and dangerous tasks available: carrying the dying from the streets and receiving them into the ward, feeding them, and tending to their basic needs by hand. It was unglamorous, exhausting, and about as directly exposed to contagion as work could get. Aloysius kept at it even as his own health — never especially robust — began to break down under the strain.

Death at twenty-three

He contracted the plague from that work, and after a period of decline, died in Rome on June 21, 1591, at just twenty-three years old. There's no legendary embellishment layered onto this story the way there is with many ancient martyrs elsewhere on this blog — Aloysius's life is comparatively well-documented, close to modern record-keeping standards, and the core of what made him remarkable is exactly what it appears to be on the surface: a young man who had every reason to live comfortably and chose instead to spend his final months in a plague ward.

Patron of youth, and later of AIDS caregivers

Aloysius was beatified in 1605, just over a decade after his death, and canonized in 1726 by Pope Benedict XIII. In 1729, the Church formally declared him patron of youth, a recognition of a young man who made a defining, costly choice about how to live before he'd reached his mid-twenties. That patronage took on a further, more contemporary dimension in 1991, when he was also recognized as patron of AIDS patients and their caregivers — a natural extension of his own history caring for the sick at direct personal risk to himself. His feast is kept on June 21, the date of his death, and his story remains a rare case among the saints covered here where the record of his life needs almost no separating of fact from later legend.