Monday, September 9. 2024

Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, priest

(I Corinthians 5:1-8; Luke 6:6-11)

As much as St. Paul is outraged at the immorality of the man who lived with his father’s wife, any person should be appalled by the living conditions which St. Peter Claver witnessed aboard slave ships.  Peter Claver was a Jesuit priest who worked among the slaves in Cartagena, Colombia, during the first half of the seventeenth century.  

African men and women were brought to Cartagena where they were sold to work in mines and on plantations.  The voyage was perilous as were the conditions of the concentration camps where they lodged awaiting purchase.  On his visits to the camps, Claver distributed a range of products from medicine to tobacco to alleviate the slaves’ suffering.  He also prepared them for baptism by teaching rudimentary catechism.  A true missionary of charity, Claver reached out to the seamen and slaveowners in his ministry.

Peter Claver reminds us of the need for spiritual as well as corporal works of mercy.  The destitute may require immediate food for the stomach, but food for the soul is equally important.  Perhaps it is right as well that we become outraged when we see human inhumanity as St. Paul and St. Peter Claver did.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

(I Corinthians 5:1-8; Luke 6:6-11)

Donald Trump’s “locker room banter” many times is more than bravado.  Men will brag of actual sexual exploits as if they were still school boys propelled by excess dopamine.  The same coarseness has long been in comic routines and now appears even among strangers.  St. Paul takes the Corinthians to task for showing acceptance of a similar display of lewdness.

Paul is outraged upon hearing how the Corinthian community gossips about sexual sins. Evidently the community is more amused than affronted by a member’s sleeping with his father’s wife. He chastises everyone for finding delight in the travesty.  He implies that this kind of practice indicates a loss in the Christian quest for holiness.  He says like leaven in dough they have been inflated by sin.  He exhorts them to renew the quest by distancing themselves both spiritually and physically from the guilty party.

In this time of sexual license many will think it normal, even healthy to describe sexual adventure.  The ancients labeled such description “obscene” to relegate it to the periphery.  We should be wary that such talk does not become familiar.  It will lure us into thinking the sexual intimacy may be pursued by anyone at any time.  Surely such an idea will detour us from the road to sanctity.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

(I Corinthians 5:1-8; Luke 6:6-11)

Although the Church is popularly thought to have put many people to death with the Inquisition, in fact it did not do so. The Inquisition was a Church office that sought out heretics for most of the second millennium. The Church typically assigned spiritual and physical penances for guilty parties, but it was the state that generally meted out capital punishment. A prototype of what occurred is found in today’s first reading.

St. Paul is scandalized by the report that a member of the Christian community in Corinth has been living with his father’s wife. The crime, forbidden both in Jewish and pagan cultures, even seems over the top to contemporary ears. When Paul suggests that the man delivered to “Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” he likely means that he be turned into the secular authority for some kind of corporal punishment. Whether the punishment was execution or something less, it would likely elicit an act of repentance.

Although we find the practice endorsed in the Bible, we should not think of corporal punishment as a remedy for infractions of sexual boundaries. Tolerance is more in order for today’s cases of promiscuity. But this does not mean that sexual crimes should be either celebrated or ignored as often done in contemporary life. Young and old should realize that such sins are shameful. Also, we should pray for the sinner and for ourselves as well that we do not fall into temptation.