Today February 21

Today is the feast of St. Peter Damian (died 1072), doctor of the church. In those (mostly) pre-abortion days, his desperate and poor mother resorted to attempted infanticide to solve the financial burden of this child -- this future bishop, doctor, and light of the 11th century! Luckily, a woman rescued him and returned him to the now-repentant mother. Who was this woman? A priest's concubine, actually.

Peter soon found himself an orphan, however, and was farmed out to an older married brother who treated him like a slave, made him live under the stairs and fed him with the swine. (I'll bet the story of the Prodigal Son, when he heard it, really moved him, since he could so identify with his sufferings!) Cold and hungry, he ran away to another brother, a priest in Ravenna, who took him in and educated him. He was so grateful he added the brother's name (Damian) to his own. He excelled in school, especially in the humanities. He graduated and became a professor, later leaving the secular life for the monastery of Fonte Avellana "akin rather to the Carthusians than the Benedictines they styled themselves." - Angelus Book of Saints.

Peter was a man on fire. He was so incensed by and opposed to the laxity and vice in his church and his world that he feared nothing in his efforts at reform. No doubt he viewed it as an act of charity to correct his bothers. He reformed two Benedictine monasteries before becoming abbot at Fonte Avellana and was called on by a succession of popes, including Stephen IX who compelled him to clean up the Curia by joining it as the now cardinal-bishop of Ostia. He did not suffer fools gladly. He opposed any self-indulgence in his fellow bishops, even the harmless habit of playing chess! He was wrong, too, when he backed two eminently more virtuous and responsible but wholly illicit pretenders to the papacy put forward by Emperor Henry III. But he supported a later real pope, Gregory VII, who shook off the imperial yoke and enacted papal reform.

He retired to his beloved Fonte Avellana in his last days. He'd treated his body horribly -- bread and water, an iron belt, self-flagellation -- and yet he lived to the ripe old age of 83! I'm beginning to think that our supposedly bad habits don't always prevent our living to old ages, or, conversely, our supposedly good habits don't always ensure a ripe old age, either! Anyway, St. Peter mellowed out a little in his last days, writing a beautiful poem on the joys of Paradise and a charming letter to Empress Agnes. Dear St. Peter Damian, pray for us.