28 August 2026

We couldn’t imagine how Francis could kiss the leper and yet, when he did, he discovered that he was embracing the risen Christ! This was the catalyst for his conversion. If he hadn’t had the courage, the world may have been deprived of its most popular and inspirational saint.

Nor could we follow in the footsteps of that Victorian priest, Father Damien, who volunteered to work among the lepers isolated in a sin bin on the island of Molokai. But we were moved when he out his feet into a basin of boiling water and didn’t feel a thing! Damien became a leper too!

In the 1930s, Stanley Browne was a doctor in the Belgian Congo. The village chiefs denied the existence of advanced leprous cases by  banishing them. Browne found them in the bush crawling out of huts with deformed limbs and ravaged faces. The image haunted him for life and inspired his international fight against leprosy.

Each of these incidents were preceded by another of eternal significance. Two thousand years ago and a thousand years before St. Francis kissed the leper in Assisi, Jesus reached out to touch and heal the leper who begged him, ‘Lord, if you will, you can make me clean!’ And he did!