Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church:
Born: 988 AD
Ravenna
Died: February 22, 1072, or 1073
Faenza
Venerated in: Roman Catholic Church
Feast: February 21
Saint Peter Damian was a reforming Benedictine monk and cardinal in the circle of Pope Leo IX. Dante placed him in one of the highest circles of Paradiso as a great predecessor of Saint Francis of Assisi and he was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1828. He fought the heresy of simony and spread the use of discipline and penance. Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, Italy. His feast day is 21 February.
Early life:
Peter was born in Ravenna around 988, the youngest of a large noble, but poor family. Orphaned early, he was at first adopted by an elder brother, who ill-treated and under-fed him while employing him as a swineherd. After some years, another brother, Damianus, who was an archpriest at Ravenna, had pity on him and took him away to be educated. Adding his brother’s name to his own, Peter made such rapid progress in his studies of theology and canon law, first at Ravenna, then at Faenza, and finally at the University of Parma, that, around the age of 25, he was already a famous teacher at Parma and Ravenna.
Comments :
St. Peter Damian disseminated the custom of receiving the discipline. Spreading this practice was, in my opinion, one of the greatest services that he could do for the Church.
Because doing this, he disseminated the spirit of penance, which is, in many senses, more important than the moral humiliation and the physical pain that come with the discipline. The spirit of penance is the comprehension of and adhesion to the principles that penance is based upon.
These are the principles: Since man is conceived in original sin, he needs to combat his unrestrained passions and instincts. He is a sinner, and sin is an offence to the justice of the Divine Majesty, which demands that reparation be made. This reparation must be suffering proportionate to the offence committed. Often this offence is an illicit pleasure the person took. Just as a thief who steals money is obliged to make restitution, the person who steals some illicit pleasure to which he didn’t have the right before Divine Providence, must also make restitution, to restore balance to the scales of Divine Justice. A person who has the spirit of penance understands the gravity of his sins.
Further, even when no sin has been committed, penance is useful to break the bad inclinations of the flesh and the tendency to revolt of human pride.
The modern man abhors penance and, even more, the spirit of penance. If you go to a movie, read a novel, or just enter a modern ambience, you see that this notion of penance is miles away. On the contrary, invitations to exacerbate human pride and sensuality are present everywhere.
One of the characteristics of the counter-revolutionary man or woman is to have the spirit of penance. The spread of the use of discipline, hair shirts, and similar things is valuable because they help us to form a state of mind that is suspicious of ourselves and to fight against our bad inclinations.