Venerable Aloysius Schwartz
Venerable Aloysius Schwartz was born in Washington, D.C., on September 18, 1930. He grew up with the idea of becoming a secular priest and working as a missionary, with an apostolate to the poor.
In 1944, he entered St. Charles Seminary in Maryland and finished his B.A. Degree at Maryknoll College, and studied theology at Louvain Catholic University in Belgium. He used to spend his vacations helping at the rag-pickers camps for the derelicts of French society. Visiting Banneux, where the Virgin of the Poor appeared, inspired him to dedicate his priesthood to the service of the poor in fulfillment of her message.
He was ordained as a diocesan priest on June 29, 1957, and was assigned in Busan, South Korea on December 8, 1957. He founded the Religious Congregation of the Sisters of Mary to serve the poorest of the poor on August 15, 1964, and the Brothers of Christ on May 10, 1981. He established Boystown and Girlstown to take care, educate, and give a bright future to the orphans, abandoned, and children coming from very poor families. He also built hospitals and sanatoriums for very indigent patients; hospices for the homeless, handicapped elderly men, retarded children, and unwed mothers. He was also involved in pro-life activities.
In 1985, he started his charity programs in the Philippines. In 1989, he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which he accepted with joy and serenity as a gift from God. Despite his deteriorating health, he established Boystown and Girlstown in Mexico in 1990.
With humility, courage, and unwavering faith, he suffered and accepted a lot of humiliations, criticisms, trials, pains, and difficulties, just to be able to serve and love God through the poor. His illness made him immobile but still even in a wheelchair, he continued to fulfill his duties with joy. He spent hours before the Blessed Sacrament, praying the rosary, hearing confessions, and heroically preaching in words and examples the virtues of truth, justice, chastity, charity, and humility. His love for God and the poor consumed him. He did not only help the poor but he also lived poorly.
On March 16, 1992, he breathed his last at the Girlstown in Manila and he was buried at the Boystown in Cavite, Philippines.
The Sisters of Mary and the Brothers of Christ continue to live their charism of serving gratuitously twenty thousand of the poorest of the poor in Korea, the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil Honduras, and Tanzania.
