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Every religious congregation has patron saints who influence their way of life and their prayer. The spirituality of the IHM Congregation, finds its origin in the spirituality that has been passed down to us from our patrons, St. Alphonsus Liguori and St. Teresa of Avila. It is the spirituality of St. Alphonsus in particular that influenced Redemptorist Father Louis Florent Gillet and Mother Theresa Maxis, the founders of the IHM Congregation.
St. Alphonsus was an 18th century Neapolitan gentleman born to a noble family, but somewhat impoverished. He was the eldest of seven children and it became obvious through his young life, that he possessed the God given gifts of art, music, prose, and poetry which he later used in his ministry as a bishop and theologian. He was tutored at home until he entered the University of Naples where he received doctoral degrees in civil and canon law at the age of sixteen. He had a prosperous future ahead of him, however, his attention to God’s voice within him and extraordinary sensitivity to the immensity of people’s sufferings compelled him to give his life over to God. His passion was to make God’s redeeming love accessible to everyone, especially the poor and spiritually abandoned. His sense of mission was rooted in a spirituality that was fueled by prayer, by devotion to the Blessed Mother, and by a focus on the three-fold mystery of God’s redeeming love in the Incarnation, in Redemption, and in the Holy Eucharist. During his years of ministry, St. Alphonsus founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer on November 9,1732 in Scala, Italy. St. Alphonsus held the belief that God is lovingly present in all the daily and ordinary happenings of our lives.
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