“The nature of giving is best illustrated in the life of Our Blessed Lord, Who one day was approached by a leper who asked for healing.  The Gospel tells us that Our Lord stretched forth His hand and touched the leper.  Jesus could have healed without the touch, as He healed the servant of the centurion at a distance.  Why, then, in the face of one of life’s greatest miseries and a disease from which the healthy often recoil, did the Lord cure with a touch?  The Son of God Made Man touched the leper in order to annihilate distance between the Giver and the receiver, between the Lover and the beloved, to prove sympathy by contact, to identify himself with the woes of others.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Footprints in a Darkened Forest)