Love & Mortification

I have always thought the admonition in Matthew 18: 8-9 about cutting off your hand if it offends you, referred more to an unrepentant member of the Church whose scandal called for the ultimate penalty of banishment or capital punishment as the verse (18:6) preceding it surely did; but as we see in the story of the first saint in the New World, St. Rose of Lima, it can also mean what it says, literally.

An excerpt.

“The first canonized saint of the New World has one characteristic of all saints—the suffering of opposition—and another characteristic which is more for admiration than for imitation—excessive practice of mortification.

“She was born to parents of Spanish descent in Lima, Peru, at a time when South America was in its first century of evangelization. She seems to have taken Catherine of Siena (April 29) as a model, in spite of the objections and ridicule of parents and friends.

“The saints have so great a love of God that what seems bizarre to us, and is indeed sometimes imprudent, is simply a logical carrying out of a conviction that anything that might endanger a loving relationship with God must be rooted out. So, because her beauty was so often admired, Rose used to rub her face with pepper to produce disfiguring blotches. Later, she wore a thick circlet of silver on her head, studded on the inside, like a crown of thorns.”