Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

What is Daily Mass Readings with Homily and Saint of the Day?

Hear the Mass readings of the day, followed by a homily grounded in the writings of the Church Fathers, Doctors, and master theologians. Every episode concludes with a brief reflection on the heroic virtue of the Saint of the Day and a practical spiritual resolution to carry into your daily life.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Saturday, the first day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-six. Holy Mother Church celebrates the Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church — a man who devoted the whole of his long life to preaching, teaching, and writing that no soul might perish for want of mercy. Let us enter these sacred readings with recollected hearts, attentive to the Word of God who speaks to us across the ages.

A reading from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, chapter twenty-six.
The priests and prophets said to the princes and to all the people, "This man deserves death; he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your own ears." Jeremiah gave this answer to the princes and all the people: "It was the LORD who sent me to prophesy against this house and city all that you have heard. Now, therefore, reform your ways and your deeds; listen to the voice of the LORD your God, so that the LORD will repent of the evil with which he threatens you. As for me, I am in your hands; do with me what you think good and right. But mark well: if you put me to death, it is innocent blood you bring on yourselves, on this city and its citizens. For in truth it was the LORD who sent me to you, to speak all these things for you to hear." Thereupon the princes and all the people said to the priests and the prophets, "This man does not deserve death; it is in the name of the LORD, our God, that he speaks to us." So Ahikam, son of Shaphan, protected Jeremiah, so that he was not handed over to the people to be put to death.

The Word of the Lord.

The Responsorial Psalm, from Psalm sixty-nine.

Lord, in your great love, answer me.

Rescue me out of the mire; may I not sink! May I be rescued from my foes, and from the watery depths. Let not the flood-waters overwhelm me, nor the abyss swallow me up, nor the pit close its mouth over me.

Lord, in your great love, answer me.

But I am afflicted and in pain; let your saving help, O God, protect me. I will praise the name of God in song, and I will glorify him with thanksgiving.

Lord, in your great love, answer me.

"See, you lowly ones, and be glad; you who seek God, may your hearts revive! For the LORD hears the poor, and his own who are in bonds he spurns not."

Lord, in your great love, answer me.

Alleluia, alleluia. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Alleluia, alleluia.

A reading from the holy Gospel according to Matthew, chapter fourteen.

Herod the tetrarch heard of the reputation of Jesus and said to his servants, "This man is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why mighty powers are at work in him." Now Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, for John had said to him, "It is not lawful for you to have her." Although he wanted to kill him, he feared the people, for they regarded him as a prophet. But at a birthday celebration for Herod, the daughter of Herodias performed a dance before the guests and delighted Herod so much that he swore to give her whatever she might ask for. Prompted by her mother, she said, "Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist." The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and the guests who were present, he ordered that it be given, and he had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who took it to her mother. His disciples came and took away the corpse and buried him; and they went and told Jesus.

The Gospel of the Lord.

In the narratives placed before us today, Holy Scripture presents two prophets brought to the very threshold of death for no crime other than fidelity to God's truth. Jeremiah stands before princes and a hostile crowd and speaks with a composure that can only be called supernatural. John the Baptist lies in Herod's dungeon, and his life ends not in a courtroom but in the degraded theater of a banquet hall, surrendered to the whim of a dancing girl and a weak king's wounded pride. The contrast between these two outcomes — Jeremiah delivered, John beheaded — is not an inconsistency in Providence. It is, rather, an instruction in the manifold ways that God vindicates His messengers.

Let us consider first the literal sense of these passages. The great Flemish commentator Cornelius a Lapide, in his monumental scriptural commentary, observes of Jeremiah's trial that the prophet's defense is not a legal stratagem but a theological confession. Jeremiah does not argue for his own innocence; he argues for God's authorship of his words. "It was the LORD who sent me," he declares. In so doing, he places himself entirely within the divine economy and removes himself from the calculus of self-preservation. This is not recklessness. It is the perfect freedom of one who knows that his life belongs not to himself but to the One who called him from his mother's womb.

In the allegorical sense, Jeremiah is a type — a prefigurement — of Christ Himself. Saint Augustine, in his meditations on the persecuted just man, saw in the suffering prophet the very image of the Redeemer who would stand silent before Pilate, whose innocent blood would indeed come upon those who demanded His death. The words of Jeremiah — "if you put me to death, it is innocent blood you bring on yourselves" — echo across the centuries and find their terrible fulfillment on Calvary. The Church, too, is prefigured in Jeremiah's deliverance: she has been condemned in every generation, and in every generation God has raised up an Ahikam — a protector — to ensure that the gates of hell do not prevail against her.

Saint John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Matthew, dwells with particular force on the figure of Herod. He writes that Herod represents the soul enslaved to human respect — that most subtle and destructive of vices. Herod was, Chrysostom notes, "distressed" at the request. He knew, at some level, that John was a righteous man. Scripture itself tells us he had heard John gladly and been greatly perplexed by him. And yet the gaze of his guests, the pride of a rash oath, the enchantment of a moment's pleasure — these were sufficient to extinguish whatever flicker of conscience remained in him. Chrysostom calls this the tyranny of shame before men, which is always accompanied by a corresponding shamelessness before God.

Here is the moral sense of today's readings, laid bare with terrifying clarity. Herod's downfall is not principally lust, though lust opened the door. His downfall is human respect — the inability to suffer the embarrassment of appearing weak or inconsistent before his courtiers. Against this vice, Jeremiah and John stand as antidotes. They did not trim their words to the preferences of their audience. They did not calculate what a powerful man wished to hear and then deliver it with pious decoration. They spoke the truth, accepted the consequences, and left the outcome to God.

Venerable Fulton Sheen, meditating on this passage, observed that John the Baptist is the patron of all who refuse to separate private morality from public life. Herod wanted a religion that would comfort him without challenging him, a prophet who would pray for him without reproaching him. This is the perennial temptation of every age, including our own — to domesticate the Gospel, to accept the name of Christian while exempting one's public conduct from Christian judgment.

In the anagogical sense, the beheading of John the Baptist is not a tragedy but a triumph. His blood, like Abel's, cries out from the earth. His disciples come and bury the body and go and tell Jesus. That final detail is everything. They bring their grief and their loss not to a political movement, not to philosophical consolation, but to the living Person of Jesus Christ. In doing so, they model for us what the Church does with every martyr's death: she takes it to her Lord, and in His hands, death becomes seed.

We celebrate today the Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, born in Naples in the year sixteen ninety-six, into a noble family of considerable worldly promise. He excelled in law, practiced at the bar with great distinction, and seemed destined for a brilliant secular career. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, having suffered a devastating professional humiliation — a case lost on a technicality he had overlooked — he heard in that defeat the voice of God calling him away from the courts of men toward the Court of Heaven. He was ordained a priest, and the transformation was complete.

Alphonsus founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, dedicated to preaching the Gospel to the most abandoned souls in the most neglected corners of the Kingdom of Naples. He preached in the villages, in the fields, in the streets — and he preached always of God's mercy, for he had come to understand that the greatest pastoral wound of his time was a rigorist theology of confessional practice that left ordinary sinners in despair. Against this rigorism, he wrote his monumental work of Moral Theology, a work that earned him the title Doctor of the Church and is still cited as a standard of pastoral wisdom.

The connection to today's readings is profound. Alphonsus, like Jeremiah and like John the Baptist, refused to be silenced. He was opposed by his own religious superiors, by civil authorities, by theological adversaries. He suffered illness, a severe physical deformity in his final years, and the spiritual agony of what appeared to be divine abandonment. Yet he persevered. He trusted not in his own vindication, but in the great love of God — that same love to which the Psalmist cries out: Lord, in your great love, answer me.

Carry with you today this single resolution: when you are tempted to silence the truth on your lips or suppress a work of charity in your heart for fear of another's judgment, recall Herod — and refuse his choice. Let the word of God, however small or trembling, be spoken. Speak the truth in love, as Alphonsus taught, as Jeremiah lived, as John the Baptist died.

May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. Amen.