“Here lies Father Al. He tried his best for Jesus.”
That is what Venerable Father Aloysius Schwartz once told his sister he wanted inscribed on his gravestone.
But when his body was returned from overseas after his death at age 62, another message was chosen: “All praise, honor, glory and thanksgiving to the Virgin of the Poor.”
That first phrase fits who Father Schwartz started out to be—a man impatient to do great good. The second phrase describes where he ended up— a man who recognized God’s great good and humbly took his place within it.
It’s a lesson St. Elizabeth Ann Seton saw very clearly in her life, when before her conversion she described herself to her Italian mentor Antonio Filicchi as “Terrified. Impatient, wretched,” and later in life summed up her attitude as “we must have Patience, and love him, and he will turn all for our good.”
From a young age, Aloysius Schwartz wanted to spend himself for the poor.
As a child born in 1930 in Washington, D.C., Aloysius knew about poverty. His father was a furniture salesman knocking on doors in the Great Depression for money to feed his seven children.
In Aloysius’ formative years, America entered the Second World War and the propaganda comic books Boy Commandos captured his attention. He wanted to be the kind of superhero he encountered in their pages: intrepid Americans who, by expert planning, execution and dedication brought help to people all over the world.
By the end of his life, Aloysius had done just that, and more, providing Boystown-style world villages for orphans and the dispossessed worldwide. But it took a lot of fits and starts to get there.
Al, as he was called, was in minor seminary in Catonsville, MD, when he received tragic news: his mother had died of cancer. He dedicated his studies to her and continued on, attending Maryknoll College in Baltimore.
There, he was bothered by the stark difference between the material amenities he enjoyed in seminary and the difficult conditions suffered by the poor of Baltimore and worldwide. He didn’t want to live a comfortable life; he wanted to provide comfort for others.
He traveled to Europe to attend missionary preparation schools, where he was frustrated by weeks of waiting between terms. He spent his free time restlessly hitchhiking across the continent, staying in monasteries and even living among the “ragpicker” scavenger class in Paris.
The training paid off — but not for long.
Having learned the ways of Catholic missions to Africa and Asia, he returned to the United States before his ordination, where he was deeply moved by reports of the suffering in South Korea, where the Korean War had orphaned many children, widowed many women, and left many homeless. After he was ordained in 1957, he was sent there.
But his plans were immediately interrupted once again. Schwartz saw the tragic poverty all around him, and studied Korean to be able to communicate with his new flock in the scavenger class. But after only a few months at his first assignment, he collapsed, sick with hepatitis. He couldn’t find proper medical care in Korea, and had to talk his way onto an American ship to get home to heal.
It seemed as if insurmountable obstacles were being thrown in his way. But this ushered in a new phase in his life.
“One of the most baffling paradoxes of Christianity is that in order to fully realize one’s capacity as a child of God, one must surrender freely and joyfully all that he is and has in an interior act of abandon,” he wrote. “The total renunciation of self is the only door that leads to fulfillment of self.”
In Washington, he started an organization to raise money for Korean Catholics and gave presentations to drum up donors. He was very good at it, and when he returned to South Korea in 1961 he took charge of an impoverished parish in the port city of Songdo.
He lived in a shack there to make room for religious sisters to live in his rectory, and founded a school and shelter for homeless children.
Father Al learned the hard way a lesson that the New Testament exhorts again and again: Patience.
“Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up,” says St. Paul.
Father Al explained how patience changes souls in a letter to his sister. “Since the fourth grade in grammar school, I have been waiting to leave for the missions,” he wrote. “The older I get the more intense becomes this desire. It’s only natural but we learn so much by patience. It purifies everything in our selfish hearts and leaves us clean before God.”
After 20 years of serving people in South Korea with physical and mental disabilities, and women who had nowhere to turn, in 1961 he founded the Brothers of Christ religious institute of men, who helped in his work.
It was 24 years later, in 1985, that he founded the Sisters of Mary in the Philippines to further expand his charity work. Four years later he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) which is perhaps God’s highest test of patience. The disease shuts down muscle groups one by one, ending only when the ability to breath is lost. He spent the last three years of his life wheelchair-bound, initiating charitable works in Mexico and elsewhere that he would not live to complete.
He leaves behind the two congregations that are legacies of his patience — the Sisters of Mary and Brothers of Christ — and their ministries in Korea, the Philippines, Latin America, Brazil, and Tanzania.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is also an apostle of patience.
Exhortations to patience — most often directed at herself — appear again and again in Mother Seton’s letters.
George Weis was the carpenter whom Elizabeth came to rely on for her building projects that served the poor. In time she became a spiritual mentor to him.
She considered construction delays a good metaphor for the spiritual life. “Remember that sufferings are for moment,” she wrote to him, whereas “the crown of patience is eternal — where there will be no muddy roads or stormy skies between the children and the Father.”
Like Father Al, Mother Seton was well acquainted with those delays caused by obstacles that God could remove, but chooses not to, especially those involving illness.
When he accepted into religious life the woman who would later become Secretary General of the Sisters of Mary, Father Al told her not to worry about her illness. “All the saints are sickly: You see St. Teresa was sick,” he told her. “Do you want to be a Sister? Why don’t you try it?”
What mattered most was internal obedience, not external obstacles, he said. “When you pray, you only have to ask for two things: You should ask for the light to see the will of God, and you have to ask for the courage to be able to do the will of God.”
TOM HOOPES, autor más reciente de El Rosario de San Juan Pablo II, es escritor residente en el Benedictine College de Kansas, donde imparte clases. Es anfitrión de La extraordinaria Story podcast sobre la vida de Cristo. Su libro Lo que dijo realmente el Papa Francisco ya está disponible en Audible. Antiguo reportero en la zona de Washington, D.C., fue secretario de prensa del Presidente del Comité de Medios y Arbitrios de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos y pasó 10 años como editor del periódico National Catholic Register y de la revista Faith & Family. Su trabajo aparece con frecuencia en el Register, Aleteia y Catholic Digest. Vive en Atchison, Kansas, con su esposa, April, y tiene nueve hijos.
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