February 21--St. Peter Damian, Monk, Bishop, and Doctor of the Church

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The Church is holy due to Jesus, not us. We are still sinners. We live in a time when some priests and bishops have committed grave public sins. In the eleventh century, there were also serious sins of sexual immorality and crimes of corruption committed by the clergy. One who championed the good and right against such deviations from chastity and holiness was our saint, St. Peter Damian.

Born about 1007 in Ravenna, Italy, Peter was the youngest of a noble, but poor family. Poorly treated by one brother, he was adopted by another brother who was archpriest of Ravenna, who provided him with an education. Peter Damian was gifted in academics and became a university teacher at the age of 25. He left teaching to become a monk. As a monk he was dedicated to austerity and penance, including the discipline of self-flagellation, which he later moderated due to the imprudent zeal of others. He then assisted the Church in opposing the sins of his time as bishop and cardinal.

He was also a great advocate of clerical reform, especially against the corruption of simony, or the buying and selling of Church offices, and clerical sexual license, including concubinage and sodomy. He wrote the book Liber Gomorrhianus, or the Book of Gomorrah, which railed against clerical sins against chastity. Pope Leo IX wrote in response to St. Peter’s work: “Therefore, lest the unrestrained license of filthy lust should spread abroad, it is necessary that it be repelled by a suitable reprimand of apostolic severity and that some attempt at more austere discipline should be made [with them].” St. Peter Damian is a model of how our priests, bishops, and laity should live the gift of chastity. He died about 1072 and was named a Doctor of the Church in 1828.

*https://www.catholic.org/files/images/saints/780.jpg

February 20--Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Holy Children

                  

Our saints today are proof that age is no barrier to holiness. They were ten and nine when they died from the 1918 influenza pandemic. They are the youngest non-martyrs canonized. St. Jacinta and her brother St. Francisco along with their cousin Lúcia dos Santos were blessed with the apparitions of Our Lady of Fátima on the 13th of each month May through October 1917. Mary asked them to learn to read and write and to pray the rosary “to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.” They were told to pray for sinners and the conversion of Russia. After the apparitions they practiced austere self-mortifications, such as prostrating themselves to pray for hours or kneeling with their heads on the ground.

Pope Pius XI denied their causes for sainthood because he decided that minors could not fully understand or practice heroic virtue. However, in 1979 the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima asked that the world’s bishops to petition the pope for their causes. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints decided that children could be blessed with the grace to be “spiritual prodigies.” Pope St. John Paul II declared them venerable in 1989 and blessed in 2000. Pope Francis canonized them on May 13, 2017, one hundred years after the first appearance of Mary to them.

Children are gifts from God to their parents. Parents are blessed to be able to share the faith with these new disciples in the haven of the domestic Church, the home. Children are God’s opportunities to bring parents closer to God so the children can also be closer to God. Holiness is both our calling and a grace from God. Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto show us that even children can know holiness. May they pray for us and our children.

*https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/ChildrensofFatima_%28croped%29.jpg   Attributed to Joshua Benoliel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons