A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The lord said, this is Christ speaking. If one of you had a servant now that word servant can just as well be translated as slave. We don't know. You'll see why I'm pointing that out.
So our lord says, if one of you had a servant plowing now, a day's work in the field was from sun up to sunset. I don't know how many of you have followed a plow, but to be in a out there in the field plowing all day is no small matter. Keep all this in mind. So if one of you had a servant plowing or herding sheep now herding sheep is no small task. They didn't even have dogs, and to keep a bunch of crazy sheep together is no small job.
So our lord says, if you had a servant plowing or herding sheep out there all day from sun up to sunset, and with the sheep he may have been out during the night. And then this servant or slave came in from the fields, would you say to him, come and sit down at table with me? Would you rather not say, prepare my supper, put on your apron, and wait on me while I eat and drink? You can eat and drink afterwards. Would the master be grateful to the servant who was only carrying out his orders?
It is quite the same with you who hear me. When you have done all you have been commanded to do, say, we are useless servants. We have done no more than our duty. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I I can't resist pointing out what I have just read, and that's a pretty stern bit. Pretty stern. That's all I have to say. And and these are the words of our blessed lord, and he uses the word duty, and he doesn't say a word in there about enjoying it.
Which brings me naturally and logically to mother Cabrini. That's obvious. Now, she is the first American citizen to be declared a saint. We hail her as a virgin. That doesn't you notice that's a negation.
And a negation is a nothing. Keep that in mind. A negation is a nothing. So virginity in itself isn't such a big deal at all. It's what you do with it, what you're replacing it with that matters.
And that's what brings me back very logically again to mother Cabrini. Here is a girl. She was born in 1850 in Lombardy, North of Rome. You could tell that by the name Cabrini. She was the thirteenth kid in the family.
Now, I suppose the mother and father were overjoyed when they got the thirteenth. Today, if people have three children, it's almost overwhelming. But she was the thirteenth. And from a very tender the this is the part part that's mysterious to me, but when she was 12, she started to take a vow of virginity. Now, what's a young girl of 12 thinking about?
But anyway, that's what she did and she annually took this vow of virginity until she was 18, then she took a permanent vow. What the background of that is, I don't know. I mean, it's not in my morse. But anyway, she she was sent to to as a student to a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, and she liked it. She wanted to become a nun.
She wanted to join them. Well, the only thing that went wrong was she got smallpox, which is a dread disease. And it left her so frail that the good sisters, the good daughters of the sacred hearts that you were sorry. No. Then she was it was suggested by the bishop that she go and teach in an orphanage to poor kids.
So she went to the orphanage. She didn't want to go there. She wanted to go she wanted to be a missionary to China. So now she finds herself with a frail figure, a victim of smallpox, going into an orphanage to be a teacher. She'd already been certified and all that.
The orphanage closed, it was it flopped. It was a it was a miserable failure. So with six or seven of the kids, she's now about 24, 25 years old, she she opens up another institute which she calls the the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. She still had in mind that she was going to go to China. Of course, she never put a foot in China.
Instead of going east, she got a little mixed up and wound up in New York. We had a flyer doing the same thing a few years ago. Now, this this sort of succeeded, and she was making her plans to go to China. When Leo the thirteenth in 1889 and are the bishop Scalabrini, who was was her bishop, her ordinary, begged her to go to the new world. So with six of her sisters, the missionary sisters of the sacred heart, she sets out for the new world in 1889 about.
And she died in 1917, so she didn't have many years with us. So she came over here. By the time she died, she had founded 35 religious houses of various hospitals, schools, orphanages, and the schools included also adult education. Now, about this school business, the one thing she wanted to do was to teach Catholic doctrine. Notice, I didn't say religious education.
That can be Hinduism. She wanted to and that's what Leo the third teeth wanted her to do, to spread, to propagate, to to make it permanent among the Italians in the New World, which they were coming over here in multitudes. They built the reservoir over on North Capitol Street to bring to to keep them in touch with the church through authentic Catholic doctrine. It's what her old whole idea was. Now, the one and you know the success she had, but you see, we are so prone to look upon this success business as something that everybody gets behind and enthusiastically supports.
And instead of that, in most instances, as I've tried to point out, I will continue to point out. In most instances, what we look upon as these grand successes successes were all funneled through a lot of failure, and discouragement, and lack of support, and lack of encouragement. Look at Newman, who at the end of his life, 90 years old almost, said, not a single thing that I've tried to do for God has succeeded. And I have it, I can give you the what he himself said, point after point after not a single thing that that man tried to do for God succeeded. So let's get this business of success out of our heads.
That's not how our how God weighs things. Now, the what wanna bring out is this is so important in our own lives, that our lives are important. And they're not so much important in God's eyes, but what we think are their successes and the triumphant victories and and all of this sort of thing, but in many instances of what seems to us tragedies. Tragedies of the worst sort. Her life here's here's a young girl who who was stimulated with something or other.
I leave that to the mystics. But here, she all she wanna do is to give her life to God in China. She never got to put to go east at all. She went west, a 180 degree turn. She wanted to be a missionary, and instead of that she became well, I guess you'd call her a missionary.
We were a missionary country, I guess, in those days. I don't know what we are now, but she certainly did not become a missionary in China. Instead of that, she came over here and founded schools, hospitals, and so forth, orphanages, adult education courses. It's the father's thing from her mind. And she did it out of obedience to her bishop and to the holy father Leo the thirteenth.
Notice that date 1889, that's about the date of the founding of Catholic University. It's also roughly the date of the Rerum Novarum. Now, here's a saint we can look up to, not because she happens to have a body up there in New York City at Caprini High School, but because this is the way life goes for the servants and the followers and the servants of Jesus Christ. Don't pat yourself on the back because you're doing a good job. Christ said it this morning.
You know, this picture is revolting. Here you have a poor guy out in that field following and remember, they didn't have a tractor. He wasn't sitting up in an air conditioned cab out in South Dakota. He's trying They didn't even have a a metal chair or whatever you call that thing on the plow. It was tremendously hard work.
And here's the poor guy comes in after slaving out in that field, and the manager says, look, get on your apron now and get my dinner and serve me. And he's been probably been sitting out in the sun arguing with his contemporaries about the weather or about the next election or something. That's a reality of a bolting picture. Where is their kindness or benevolence or thoughtfulness? And then Christ says, when you do your duty, say I haven't begun to do enough.
And the word is duty. You know, somehow that word has become naughty. Just yesterday, just yesterday, I heard a young person aged who has finished college who told me that when in high school, the teacher said, don't go to mass on Sunday if you feel you have to go. It won't do you any good. You must go out of love.
Where do we get this attitude? Where do we get the attitude that we have to that everything is is all love and benevolence and joy, and we're doing what we wanna do, and we're fulfilling ourselves, and and God is good, and God is just, you know. Where do we get all this? By omitting, by being very selective, and by forgetting the rough spots. Because when you come right down to it, all our blessed lord ever said that for us, if we wanted to follow him, all he ever said we had to do, had to do.
No substitute is to take up his cross. His cross. And when we do it, we don't have no reason to pat ourselves on the back. We're doing simply our duty, whether we feel good about it or whether we don't. Notice there's no suggestion in our Lord's words that he felt good about it.
When Cabrini when mother Cabrini leaves Italy, instead of doing what she wanted to do, what she had longed to do from the time she was 12 years old, you think she was happy about it? You think she enjoyed it? Do you think this that she looked upon this as fulfilling her her ego? It's probably the worst thing she ever wanted to do. It's like Lewis when he came back and fell on his knees and admitted there was a God.
He said, I was the most reluctant believer in England. And Carl and Colson, the associate of Nixon said the same thing, that while he had this experience of be whatever it is, he calls himself a reborn Christian. He says he hated it. Hated it. So we come back.
Here we have a tremendous example of following Jesus Christ and doing his work and doing his will. In some instances, it's not ours at all. It seems crazy to us sometimes. It seems repulsive to us sometimes. All that matters is that we say, my lord and my god, I believe.
Help thou my unbelief and help me to carry my cross with you. The name of the father and the son, holy spirit. Amen. The lord