The Order Entrusted with a Famous Icon

Alphonsus Liguori founded his congregation at Scala in 1732 to reach rural and urban poor whose distance from settled parish clergy left them with little regular access to preaching or the sacraments, a mission focused on short, intensive parish missions rather than permanent parish administration. Papal approval followed in 1749 under Benedict XIV, and the congregation spread over the following century well beyond its Neapolitan origin, becoming a significant missionary presence in the rapidly industrialising cities of northern Europe, Britain and Ireland, where migrant and working class Catholic populations faced exactly the kind of pastoral neglect the order had been built to answer at home.

The clearest sign of the Redemptorists' later institutional standing came in 1866, when Pope Pius IX placed a Byzantine icon known as Our Mother of Perpetual Help in their care at a Roman church built for the purpose, entrusting a devotional image already centuries old to a congregation not yet a hundred and fifty years old and giving the Redemptorists lasting responsibility for a devotion that spread through the Catholic world under their promotion, an unusual case of an order becoming identified with a specific image it did not create.