23 and Thee

  
   Ah March, the month of my nativity and the first day of Spring. And that basketball tournament. I used to go to college basketball games when I was in college. Boston College had a good team back then. Bob Cousy, the former Celtics great, was the coach. Occasionally my old school makes the tournament. but mostly they don't.
   I never learned to dribble myself and don't really understand the game. Disorganized football was my sport. But I do study the bracket each year. A good 80% of the entrants are there year after year. But there's always the handful of newcomers and also three or four schools I've never heard of. Where is Gardner-Webb located, or Wofford? And what does VCU stand for again?
   I'm not interested in the perennial performers. I want a Cinderella team to follow. Last year it was Loyola Chicago who made it to the Final Four on the rosary beads of Sister Jean, a 97 year old nun who prayed for the team from her wheelchair courtside.
   This year the potential Cinderellas have had their pumpkins smashed early, so I looked for a good Jesuit school to follow. Boston College is a Jesuit school. There were actually six of them to start, but now that we're down to the Elite Eight, only Gonzaga remains. The "Zags" from Spokane.
  I wondered who or what Gonzaga is.  Well it turns out Aloysius (or Luigi) Gonzaga was an Italian aristocrat who lived in the late 16th century. He was expected to become a soldier and take over his father's estates, but he decided to become a missionary. It took years to convince his father, but at the age of 17, he entered a Jesuit seminary. When he was 22 he had a vision from the Archangel Gabriel who told him he would die within a year. The next year the plague hit Rome. Gonzaga insisted on working with the sick and soon fell victim himself. He died a few months short of his ordination at age 23.
  Gonzaga was canonized  in 1726, 135 years after his death. In the 1880s when an Italian Jesuit missionary started building a college in the pioneer town of Spokane, he decided to name it after his fellow Italian and Jesuit. Go Zags!
   Now this post should end here, but the only reason I'm posting at all is that by a remarkable coincidence, I came across another saint who died at the age of 23: Saint Louis of Toulouse. I've been reading about the Middle Ages and came across a reference to a Bishop Louis of Toulouse. I remembered that the California city of San Luis Obispo was named after a French Bishop and checked it out.
   Sure enough this Louis was the son of the King of Naples back in the thirteenth century. When the king was captured in Spain during a battle, he obtained his freedom by sending his three sons as hostages to take his place. This was a common practice in those days. The sons were treated well and given an education. If dad behaved for seven years, the boys would be sent home. Louis was supposed to take his father's place, but  was inspired by one of his teachers in Spain to become a Franciscan friar..
   Because of his royal connections, Louis was appointed bishop of the French city of Toulouse. He could have lived like a prince, but instead went out to work with the poor. After six months he was exhausted and resigned as bishop. He died of a fever a few months later at the age of 23. He became a saint in 1317, twenty years after his death.
   In 1772 when the Franciscan priest Junipero Serra was building a mission in what is now San Luis Obispo, he named it after Louis of Toulouse. There are more than 10,000 Catholic saints and I'm sure research would turn up several more who died at age 23 or younger. There's Saint Maria Goretti for example who died at age 11, as well as the 110 infant and child martyrs of the French Revolution.
   Sports update: The Zags were defeated last night in Anaheim, but they'll be back.

There's a college in Spokane named after Saint Aloysius Gonzaga.

Saint Louis of Toulouse has a whole city named after him.