The Young Robber

Father Razzi, of the Camaldolese order.

A widow who was devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary sent her young son, after his father's death, to serve at the court of a prince. As they parted she made him promise to say a Hail Mary every day and to add the words, "Blessed Virgin, help me in the hour of my death." The young man reached the court, but soon fell into such a loose and dissolute life that his master had to dismiss him. With no means of support and in despair, he took to the countryside and became a highway robber. Even then he kept up the little prayer his mother had taught him. In time he was caught, tried, and condemned to death.

The evening before his execution, alone in his cell and thinking of his ruin, his mother's grief, and the death ahead, he wept bitterly. The devil, seeing him crushed, came to him in the shape of a handsome young man and offered to free him from prison and death if he would do as he was told. The prisoner agreed to everything. The stranger then revealed that he was the devil, come to help him, and ordered him first to renounce Jesus Christ and the holy sacraments. The young man did so. Then the devil demanded that he also renounce the Virgin Mary and her protection. "That I will never do," he cried, and turning to Our Lady he said the prayer his mother had taught him: "Blessed Virgin, help me in the hour of my death."

At these words the devil vanished. Stricken with grief for having denied Christ, the young man called on the Blessed Virgin, who won for him such deep sorrow for all his sins that he made his confession with many tears. On the way to the gallows he passed a statue of Mary and greeted her, as always, with his prayer, and before everyone the statue bowed its head to him. Deeply moved, he begged to kiss the feet of the image. The executioners refused at first, but the crowd's outcry made them allow it. As he bent to kiss her feet, Mary stretched out her arm from the statue, took him by the hand, and held him so firmly that no force could pull him away.

At this wonder the people shouted, "Pardon, pardon," and he was pardoned. He went home, lived an upright life ever after, and was always devoted to Mary, who had saved him from both a temporal and an eternal death.

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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.