Counter-Reformation (16th century)
Feast: June 21
The son of a marquis who gave up a title, a fortune, and his future to become a Jesuit — then died at twenty-three carrying plague victims off the streets of Rome.
Aloysius Gonzaga grew up in one of Italy's most violent noble families. His father, the Marquis of Castiglione, took him to military camps as a child; Aloysius learned to fire a cannon before he was ten and picked up soldiers' language that he later repeated without knowing what it meant. He was horrified when he found out. By his teens, he wanted nothing to do with court life. He renounced his inheritance in favor of his brother — over his father's apoplectic objections — and entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rome. He was intense, scrupulous about sin, and hard on himself in ways that worried his superiors. Robert Bellarmine, his spiritual director, ordered him to eat more and pray less. When plague hit Rome in 1591, Aloysius volunteered for hospital duty. He carried sick people off the streets on his own back. He caught the plague. He lingered for weeks and died on June 21, 1591, at twenty-three. He is the patron saint of youth, not because he was perfect — his scrupulosity was a real struggle — but because he gave everything he had, without hesitation, when it mattered.