Posts Tagged ‘Instruments of Peace’

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Isaiah 52:7-10    Psalm 96:1-8    Galatians 6:14-18    Matthew 11:25-30

In the calendar of the Church, we remember today Saint Francis of Assisi, born in year 1181. In the Middle Ages, in Saint Francis’ day, the disease of leprosy, the oldest and most dreaded of all diseases, was a terrible scourge.  Lepers would be seen with the most hideous of skin ailments: sores all over their bodies; bones protruding; eyes forever draining: wounded people, broken down, festering, stinking.  A leper died a slow, repulsive, ignominious, lonely death.  And yet the source of a leper’s problems was not with their skin or bones.  Those merely showed the symptoms.  The problem with leprosy is with the nervous system.  The nerves become deadened to any feeling.  The nerves sense nothing in the affected area.  And as the disease would spread through the body, the person would not be able to feel anything in the affected area.

A person with leprosy affecting their hand would be working using, for example, a broom or garden trowel with a splintered handle.  They might tear their hand but not feel it, not know it, and a resulting infection would settle into this lame hand. Read More