The Foreigner and the Scapular of the Seven Sorrows

Told to St. Alphonsus Liguori by a priest companion, to whom it happened.

A priest who was a companion of St. Alphonsus told him of something that had happened to himself. While he was hearing confessions in a certain church, a young man stood nearby who seemed to want and not want to come. After watching him for a while, the priest called him over and asked if he wished to confess. The young man said yes, but since he needed a long time, the confessor took him to a quiet room. There he said he was a foreigner of noble birth, and that he could not believe God would ever pardon him after the life he had led.

Besides many other grave sins, including impurity and even bloodshed, he had fallen so deep into despair of his salvation that he had begun sinning not so much for pleasure as out of open defiance of God. He had treated sacred things with contempt and, that very morning, had received Communion sacrilegiously, meaning to commit an outrage against the Blessed Sacrament, but had been prevented by the people who noticed him; he now handed the consecrated host, wrapped in paper, to the priest.

He said that as he passed this church he had felt a strong desire to enter, which he could not resist; once inside, he was seized with remorse and a confused longing to confess, and though he had wanted to flee, it felt as if someone held him there by force until the priest called him. The confessor asked whether he had kept up any devotion. "None, Father," he said. "What devotion could I have, believing myself lost?" But pressed to think harder, he put his hand to his breast and remembered that he wore the Scapular of the Seven Dolors of Mary. "My son," said the priest, "do you not see that Our Lady has won this grace for you? And know that this church is a church of the Blessed Virgin."

At these words the young man was moved to deep sorrow, broke into tears, confessed all his sins, and was so overcome with grief that he sank weeping at the priest's feet. The confessor revived him, finished the confession, and absolved him, finding him truly contrite and resolved to change his life. He returned to his own country, having freely given the priest leave to make known everywhere the great mercy Mary had shown him.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the "example" stories that St. Alphonsus Liguori placed at the end of each section of The Glories of Mary. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the 1888 English translation. Liguori himself, in his author's "Protest," noted that the miracles and apparitions in the book are offered on human authority only, not as articles of faith.