Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Lv 13:1-2, 45-46
Second Reading: 1 Cor 10:23 - 11:1
Gospel Reading: Mk 1:40-45
This Sunday’s liturgy focuses on leprosy, now called Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian doctor who discovered the leprosy bacillus in 1873.
Leprosy is infectious but (usually) only after close and prolonged contact. With modern drugs, it is now entirely curable.
The leprosy bacillus affects the skin, nerves, and mucous membranes of the nose, throat, and eyes. On the skin, a patch may appear where nerve damage has decreased circulation and destroyed sensitivity to heat, cold, and touch. Minor injuries tend to go unnoticed, and large eroding ulcers can form, causing loss of fingers and toes. Facial skin can become thickened and corrugated, and soft nodules formed on ears, nose, and cheeks can evolve into discharging sores.
Leprosy progresses slowly, with increasing disability and disfigurement. It does not usually cut life short.
The disease has been around for at least 4,000 years. As in the Bible, its victims have always been considered “unclean” and forced to live apart, frequently in large “leper colonies.”
At the one at Kalaupapa, on the island of Molokai in Hawaii, Father Damien De Veuster served leprosy patients 1873-1889 “so that they may be saved,” to quote St. Paul. He contracted the disease after 11 years and died at the age of 49. Pope St. John Paul II beatified him in 1995, and Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2009.
Today, leprosy occurs in Brazil and some parts of Africa and southern Asia, but it has disappeared from most temperate regions.
However, leprosy can be a metaphor for sin, and sin still occurs the world over.
We are born infected with original sin; we inherit it from our ancestors. baptism erases it, but the tendency to sin remains.
Habitual sin attacks our spiritual nervous system. It erodes the “supernatural reflexes” with which the Holy Spirit endows us at Confirmation, making it harder for us to distinguish good from evil and slowing our response to God’s grace. In fact, “conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Sin is infectious. For example, the Catechism cites the “contagious effect” of divorce, which “makes it truly a plague on society.” As Alexander Pope noted, “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated needs but to be seen; yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
Sin is present throughout Christ’s Mystical Body on earth. “Communal situations and social structures that are the fruit of men’s sins” exert a “negative influence” on us and make us “accomplices” of one another in sin, the Catechism says.
If left untreated, sin progresses. “Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition,” says the Catechism. It tends to “reproduce” and “reinforce” itself.
However, no matter how far sin has progressed in our lives, we can always be healed.
“If you choose, you can make me clean,” a man with leprosy begged Jesus. Jesus touched him and said, “I do choose; be made clean!” Immediately, the man was healed.
“Jesus has the power not only to heal, but also to forgive sins,” notes the Catechism; “He has come to heal the whole man, soul and body; He is the Physician” Whom the sick need.
On Molokai, Father Damien’s heaviest cross was the impossibility of frequent confession, he said. He met each supply ship as it docked, but even if a Catholic priest was aboard, he would not be allowed ashore, so Father Damien would yell up his confession in Latin or his native Dutch and receive absolution the same way. “That sacramental absolution meant more to me than the tea, tobacco, clothing, food, or letters being brought ashore,” he said.
Lent, which starts soon, is a time for spiritual healing. If we examine our lives and repent our sins, we can find the cure in the nearest confessional.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is Divisions Among Christians. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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