On Saturday we celebrated the feast day of St. Alphonsus Rodríguez. A 16th-century Spanish Jesuit, he was canonized by Pope Leo XII in 1888. Now, I know you are used to hearing fantastic stories of courageous Jesuit missionaries who traversed the globe to preach the gospel. Extraordinary religious who surrendered their lives and risked it all to defend the Catholic faith in foreign lands under the harshest conditions. Martyrs and theologians, astronomers and physicists, whose heroic lives inspire millions. They ran faster than a speeding bullet and could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well, this guy did none of that.
 

In fact, St. Alphonsus spent his entire Jesuit life as a porter at the Jesuit college in Mallorca, Spain. That’s it… a porter. In other words, he sat by the door at the entrance of the school and opened it for anyone who rang the doorbell. While most of his Jesuit colleagues crossed the ocean to teach and defend the natives in North and South America, or stealthily slipped into Japan and China to plant the seeds of Christianity, he humbly sat for 46 years on a stool and opened a door.
 

How he became a Jesuit is somewhat rare. He was the son of a prosperous wool merchant. When his father died, he left school to help his mother run the business. He eventually married and had three children. A few years later, his wife and, eventually, his children passed away. It was then he decided to leave it all behind and become a Jesuit brother. Not a priest, but a brother, dedicated to simple and humble service to the Society of Jesus.
 

So what made this guy so special that, 200 years after his death, the universal Church proclaimed him a saint? 

First, it was his humility. That evasive little virtue that seems so necessary for holiness, yet is constantly challenged by the ultra-competitive world we live in. Society necessarily links success to great fame and fortune. It tells us that history is made by those who jump higher, shoot further, and stand taller. It measures the greatness of a man by the diploma that hangs on his wall, the amount in his bank account, or the speeches he gives. Alphonsus had none of that. He never graduated from school; he had no money, and he never gave a speech. And yet, he was awarded the greatest of all prizes; he was awarded eternal life, and it is his life that is still celebrated more than a century after his death.
 

The gospel the Church chose to read at Mass on his feast day comes from Luke 14:7-11. It tells the story of when Jesus is surrounded by Pharisees and other leaders of Israel. He teaches them that when you are invited to a dinner, humbly choose to sit at the end of the table, not at the head. It is better, he says, to be later invited to move up than to embarrassingly be asked to move down. That is humility. The great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis once defined humility as, “not to think less of yourself, but to think of yourself less.”
 

Second, this humility shaped his relationship with others. It is said that when there was a knock at the door, he would run to open it and exclaim, “I am coming, Lord!” He did this because he was convinced that everyone who came to the door carried the person of Christ within them. So moved were others by his profound spirituality, they often sat with him to listen to him speak. One such person was a young Jesuit seminarian named Peter Claver. It was because of his time with the saintly doorman that he was encouraged to go on mission to Colombia, where he tirelessly served the bodily and spiritual needs of the African slaves that arrived at the port in Cartagena. St. Peter Claver became known as “the slave of the slaves,” and was named the patron saint of Colombia.
 

We often think of the saints as elusive and fail to realize that each and every one of us is called by God to be one. Sanctity is not a vocation a few are called to; it is the vocation for each and every single one of us. It doesn’t matter whether you are a priest or married, a doctor or a lawyer, young or old; God calls each of us from the moment of our conception to be a saint. St. Alphonsus proves that in the secret of humble service, the grace of God can permeate the world and help transform it. 
 

Auspice Maria,