Today, February 21, as our Church celebrates the optional Memorial of Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor, we are invited to read and reflect on a passage from the book of Wisdom (7: 7-16, 22-30), entitled "The joy of the just united to God". Our treasure, which follows, is from a letter by Saint Peter Damian, bishop.
Saint Peter was born in Ravenna, Italy in 1007. Maybe because he was orphaned and had been treated shabbily by one of his brothers, Saint Peter Damian was very good to the poor. It was the ordinary thing for him to have a poor person or two with him at the table and he liked to minister personally to their needs.
Peter escaped poverty and the neglect of his own brother when his other brother, who was the archpriest of Ravenna, took him under his wing. His brother sent him to good schools and Peter became a professor. Already in those days, Peter was very strict with himself. He wore a hair shirt under his clothes, fasted rigorously and spent many hours praying. Soon, he decided to leave his teaching and give himself completely to prayer with the Benedictines of the reform of Saint Romuald at Fonte Avellana. They lived two monks to a hermitage. Peter was so eager to pray and slept so little that he soon suffered from severe insomnia. He found he had to use some prudence in taking care of himself. When he was not praying, he studied the Bible.
The abbot commanded that when he died Peter should succeed him. Abbot Peter founded five other hermitages. He encouraged his brothers in a life of prayer and solitude and wanted nothing more for himself. The Holy See periodically called on him, however, to be a peacemaker or troubleshooter, between two abbeys in dispute or a cleric or government official in some disagreement with Rome.
Finally, Pope Stephen IX made Peter the cardinal-bishop of Ostia. He worked hard to wipe out simony—the buying of church offices–and encouraged his priests to observe celibacy and urged even the diocesan clergy to live together and maintain scheduled prayer and religious observance. He wished to restore primitive discipline among religious and priests, warning against needless travel, violations of poverty, and too comfortable living. He even wrote to the bishop of Besancon complaining that the canons there sat down when they were singing the psalms in the Divine Office.
He wrote many letters. Some 170 are extant. We also have 53 of his sermons and seven lives, or biographies, that he wrote. He preferred examples and stories rather than theory in his writings. The liturgical offices he wrote are evidence of his talent as a stylist in Latin. With the monks gathered around him saying the Divine Office, he died on February 22, 1072. In 1828, he was declared a Doctor of the Church.
The Book of Wisdom was written about fifty years before the coming of Christ. Its author, whose name is not known to us, was probably a member of the Jewish community at Alexandria, in Egypt. He wrote in Greek, in a style patterned on that of Hebrew verse. At times he speaks in the person of Solomon, placing his teachings on the lips of the wise king of Hebrew tradition to emphasize their value. His profound knowledge of the earlier Old Testament writings is reflected in almost every line of the book, and marks him, like Ben Sira, as an outstanding representative of religious devotion and learning among the sages of postexilic Judaism.
The primary purpose of the author was the edification of his co-religionists in a time when they had experienced suffering and oppression, in part at least at the hands of apostate fellow Jews. To convey his message, he made use of the most popular religious themes of his time, namely the splendor and worth of divine wisdom, the glorious events of the exodus, God's mercy, the folly of idolatry, and the way God's justice operates in rewarding or punishing the individual. The first ten chapters provide background for the teaching of Jesus and for some New Testament theology about Jesus. Many passages from this section of the book are used by the church in the liturgy.
