The Life of St. Alonso Rodriguez: A Biography of the Jesuit Lay-Brother
Father Francis Goldie, S.J. · 1889
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Alonso Rodriguez kept the gate of the Jesuit college in Majorca for more than twenty years. He came to it after the failure of his father’s cloth business in Segovia, the deaths of his wife and three children, and a refusal from the Jesuits at thirty-eight, when he had no Latin and a body worn down by his own penances. Admitted in his fortieth year as a lay brother, he was sent to the island and never left it. When the bell rang he said, “I am coming, my Lord,” and opened the door as if God himself had rung. Asked how much of a day his mind was away from God, he said about the length of a Creed.
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Fr. Francis Goldie, S.J., wrote this life from the account the saint was made to write under obedience, from the unpublished manuscript of his confessor, and from the sworn testimony taken for his canonization, some of it from men who had been schoolboys at his gate. A superior had to mark out how far the porter could walk before turning back to answer a second ring. For eight years prayer made him physically sick until the bell ended the hour. Told one night by his Rector to go to the Indies, he went straight to the gate in his cassock.
The book also follows the people he shaped. St. Peter Claver came as a student of twenty-five, spent a quarter of an hour with him every day for three years, and left for the Americas at his urging. His death in 1617, the eight thousand rosaries passed over his body, and the canonization of 1888 close the book, with his own sermon on St. Ignatius as an appendix.
The first page of The Dawn
Chapter I
The Dawn
1531–1562
While Henry the VIII. was about to sever England from the Communion of the Faith, and Martin Luther and Calvin were preaching revolt against the Church of Christ, God in His goodness was raising up valiant and holy souls to fight for His cause and to exalt His name. When the holiness of that Church was most denied, He was pleased to give to earth a cloud of saintly witnesses, whose lives have been the best proof that she was still, as ever, spite of the wickedness of many, the unspotted Spouse of her Lord. Among these many saints, who glorified the 16th and 17th centuries, is he whose life forms the subject of these pages.
Our story is cast in Spain—Spain essentially Catholic, where the faith was living and strong, and whose children were to furnish so large a quota to that band of saints who were to make reparation for the scandals of a time of shame.
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Edition and sources
Edition
- Source edition
- The Life of the Venerable Alonso Rodriguez, 1889
- This edition
- Manualist Press, March 2026
- Paperback
- 262 pages, 6 × 9 inches, ASIN B0GS6VND86
- Hardcover
- 262 pages, 6 × 9 inches, ISBN 9798251388527
- Kindle
- ASIN B0GRWJ4WKP
- Sample
- Chapter I. The Dawn and Chapter II. Life of Penance in the World
- Plate
- Francisco de Zurbarán, The Vision of Blessed Alonso Rodríguez, 1630. Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid.
First published in 1889 by Burns and Oates, London, as volume seventy of the Quarterly Series.
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