Readings for the Memorial of Saint Ambrose, bishop and doctor of the ChurchReading 1 Is 40:25-31

Reading 1 Is 40:1-11

Reading I Is 35:1-10

In August 1619, a slave ship captained by Manuel Mendes da Cunha carried 350 Africans toward Vera Cruz, New Spain. Before it arrived, Captain Cunha’s ship was attacked and robbed by an English corsair that then sold about twenty of those Africans in Virginia. It was the first recorded transaction of its kind in the colonies, and thus began slavery in what would become the United States of America.

When the first Africans were sold in the colonies, conscience and tradition gave at least some of the locals pause. Should we really be buying and selling other human beings? Isn’t that against the Faith? The Catholic Church certainly taught that it was. Although many Catholics were slave traders, and many American Catholics would end up owning slaves, the official teaching of the Church was unequivocal: trading and owning humans was a sin that put you in danger of eternal damnation.

There was one book C.S. Lewis said he didn’t enjoy writing. I know how he felt.

In 1942, Lewis published The Screwtape Letters, which consists of a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to his incompetent, inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, who is learning how to tempt people. The book is one of Lewis’s most popular, due in part to the uniqueness of its primary literary device. Instead of writing yet another book on how to avoid temptation, Lewis lets us “peer behind enemy lines” so we see the traps the evil one lays for us and respond accordingly.

Almost 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul wrote to his young apprentice Timothy about the terrible times to come:“People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”(2 Tim. 3:2-4).

In the next line of the passage quoted above, Paul continues his description of the Last Days by characterizing the people as“holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.”The sinful people he’s talking about are Christians!