Basilica of St. Aloysius

The Story

The Basilica-Sanctuary of San Luigi Gonzaga stands in Castiglione delle Stiviere, the small Lombard town where St. Aloysius Gonzaga was born in 1568, heir to a princely family of the Italian Renaissance. Renouncing his inheritance, Aloysius entered the Society of Jesus in Rome at seventeen, drawn to prayer, penance, and service. When plague swept Rome in 1591, he devoted himself to carrying the sick to hospital and caring for them; he contracted the disease and died on June 21, 1591, at the age of twenty-three. His purity, resolve, and charity made him a model for young people, and the Church honors him as a patron of youth. The sanctuary in his native town was begun in 1608 at the behest of the Gonzaga family and completed in the following century. Its most treasured possession is the relic of the saint's skull, kept in an 18th-century urn above the high altar, which has made Castiglione a center of Aloysian devotion for four centuries. The saint's principal tomb is in Rome, at the Church of Sant'Ignazio, where his body rests beneath the altar of the Lancellotti chapel. Pilgrims, especially the young, come to Castiglione to walk in the footsteps of the boy who chose heaven over a crown. The basilica, together with the nearby museum and sites of his childhood, keeps alive the memory of a saint whose short life still speaks with unusual force.

Church Recognition

Pope Paul VI raised the sanctuary to the rank of minor basilica in 1964; St. Aloysius was canonized in 1726, and Pope Pius XI declared him patron of Christian youth in 1926.

Catholic Teaching

The veneration of St. Aloysius's relic reflects the Church's honor for the bodies of the saints (CCC 1674), while his life illustrates the universal call to holiness (CCC 2013) and the evangelical counsels lived with heroic generosity by the young.

Plan Your Visit

Open only what you need. Expand all

Practical

1 Additional Information ▾

Pilgrims venerate the relic of the saint's skull above the high altar and visit sites of his childhood in Castiglione delle Stiviere, a center of devotion for youth pilgrimages. The feast of St. Aloysius on June 21 is the high point of the sanctuary's year.

Go Deeper

The sanctuary's official website is https://www.sanluigisantuario.it. St. Aloysius's letter to his mother, read in the Liturgy of the Hours on his feast, and standard Jesuit biographies of the saint offer a deeper portrait of his brief, luminous life.