Today’s saint, a young Jesuit who died at the age of 23 as a result of nursing plague victims in Italy in 1591, wrote to his beloved mother on his deathbed. Here is part of the letter: ‘May the comfort and grace of the Holy Spirit be yours for ever, most honoured lady. Your letter found me lingering still in this region of the dead, but now I must rouse myself to make my way on to heaven at last and to praise God for ever in the land of the living; indeed I had hoped that before this time my journey there would have been over. If charity, as Saint Paul says, means to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who are glad, then, dearest mother, you shall rejoice exceedingly that God in his grace and his love for you is showing me the path to true happiness, and assuring me that I shall never lose him. … I write all this with the one desire that you and all my family may consider my departure a joy and favour and that you especially may speed with a mother’s blessing my passage across the waters till I reach the shore to which all hopes belong. I write the more willingly because I have no clearer way of expressing the love and respect I owe you as your son’.

Clearly, the mother treasured this letter, else it would not have come down to us. May she, and her son St Aloysius, pray for us as we make our journey to our heavenly homeland, and may God bless you this day.