Friday,
1/11/13
In
Our Lord’s time leprosy was a double whammy. As a disease it was an endless
string of sores that were not followed by natural healing and fresh flesh. It was also a religious uncleanness
that banned the leper from attendance at the synagogue, temple or market. The leper in today’s gospel apparently
had grown used to living with his disease, so he didn’t ask for a cure, but he
hadn’t been able to accept being excluded from the company of other humans, so
he asked to be cleansed.
The
U.S. isolated lepers in a colony at Carville Louisiana. In 1873 G. A. Hanson
isolated the bacteria causing leprosy. Then, the first highly effective drug for treating it, dapsone, became available in the 1940’s.
Carville was completely shut down in 1999.
The
lepers were wandering beggars in Korea when I went there in the 1950’s. There
was a cardboard and tin settlement of twenty thousand lepers on the red mud
flats near the Yellow Sea. Once when I went to pay a visit on some Irish
nursing nuns, they had arranged for an American archbishop to accompany them out
there to offer Mass, and they had me come along to hear
confessions.
There
was a three-hour string of Catholic lepers kneeling next to me for confessions,
and they had me noticing two things. One thing was that Korean
Catholics are no different than American Catholics, and that lepers are no
different then healthy people. We all have the same troubles praying and
getting along.
At
the outdoor Mass that followed, we had three cups of communion hosts to be
consecrated at the Mass, but I forgot to put them on the altar. Just before
communion time the archbishop and I both noticed them on a side table. So, I
put them where I should have had them on the altar, and Archbishop Henry
repeated the Consecration.
Afterwards,
in telling the other priests about it, Archbishop Henry said, “At the same
moment both of us noticed the
three cups of host on the side table, and Sully said, “Cripes!”
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