The founder of the Redemptorist Order, he was born at Pagani, near Naples, in 1696 of a noble family. He was a lawyer, achieving considerable success until the unexpected loss of a case caused him to look again at his life and turn to the Church. He was ordained priest in 1726, and became well known as a preacher in and around Naples. In 1732 he founded the Redemptorists - more correctly, the Congregation of the Holy Redeemer - an Order dedicated to preaching to the rural poor. His first mission was at Scala, near Amalfi. The early history of the Redemptorists was marred by internal disputes, and St. Alphonsus even found himself excluded from his own Order, allegedly because he signed a document without fully reading it - which showed just how far he had moved from his legal upbringing. The Order now flourishes in many countries; in England it is associated with missions, and with publishing. St. Alphonsus published theological and devotional works, the latter including his hymns to Mary, somewhat over colourful for modem tastes, and several generations have been brought up on his version of the Stations of the Cross. He was also a moral theologian. In the great debate raging at the time (principally around the Jesuits) between the "rigorists", who held to the letter of the law, and the "laxists", who were accused of going to the opposite extreme, he steered a middle course based on pastoral need. The spirit of St. Alphonsus lived on in the modem Redemptorist moral theologian, Fr. Bernard Haring (who died recently), whose "The Law of Christ" extracted moral theology from the arid desert in which it was again languishing. St. Alphonsus was made bishop of the small see of Sant' Agata dei Goti in 1762; he resigned through illness in 1776, died in 1787, was canonised in 1839 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1871.