A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. And this continues the narrative which we have been reading for the last few days. Our blessed lord is the host I mean, the guest of a pharisee. So one of those who sat at table with Jesus said to him, blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God. But Jesus said to the man, a man once gave a great banquet and invited many to it.
And at the time for the banquet, he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, come for now everything is ready. But those who had been invited all alike began began to to make make excuses. Excuses. The first said, I have bought a field and I must go out and see it. I pray you hold me excused.
Another one said, I have bought five yoke of oxen and I go out to look at them. I pray you please excuse me. And the third man said, I have married a wife and therefore I cannot come. I don't see the connection there but that's the way it goes. So the servant came and reported all of this to the master.
Then the householder, the man who was giving the banquet, in anger said to the servant, go out quickly to the streets and the lanes of the city and bring in the poor and the maimed, the blind, and the lame. Well, the servant did that, came back and said, sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room. And then the master said to the servant, go out to the highways and the hedges and compel people to come in that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet. And this is the gospel of the lord.
Thank you lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Here's another instance of one of the soft sayings of Jesus Christ. And I challenge you to tell me what is soft about it because there is nothing soft about this. Again, notice our blessed lord is talking to Jews.
He's in the house of a pharisee. They knew they were the chosen people. This was no secret. They knew him. They were expecting the messiah.
They were expecting the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. And very and in a very vigorous and lively way, they were expecting it. And for reasons that I'm not too sure of, they felt the time was near, that this was going to happen, that the Messiah was going to come. So they weren't in any doubt about who they were and how they were indeed among the elect of God, and they had plenty of history to prove it. And so we have this instance then of our Lord telling them, it's not enough that you have been invited.
You have to come. You have to be there at the banquet table. You have to be among the guests actually at the banquet. I take no excuses at all because these may may have been valid excuses, I don't know. There's no question whether they were valid or invalid.
The point is the master of the banquet says they are no good. I don't accept You were invited, you didn't come, away with you, away with you. There's no suggestion you have a second chance. Have you ever thought about that? Now, we have all been invited to the banquet of the Lord.
That was done to us in baptism. We were most of us, unless we are converts, we were babes in arms. We were infants. We don't have a very lively memory of our baptism. But something happened to us there.
We were transformed. We were put in the way of salvation, but it doesn't guarantee it. It doesn't guarantee it at all. We have to make it. And that brings me, in one way or another, to Saint Charles Barra, Maine.
I cannot let this feast go by without saying a word about this tremendously extraordinary man. Now one of the most significant events of his life or of his history, which I'm at the time he was not aware, is that he played a part in my life. I hope he's proud of it, maybe he's not. But Saint Charles Barremao, of course, is sixteenth for strong very foundation pair there, for that we pray have that the the church church. Will be renewed.
And Now, just to give you a few the life of Bartimaeus was fantastic. At 12 years of age, he was given the tonsure. First of all, he was the nephew of what was to become who of who of the man who was to become Pius IV. Saint Charles's mother was Margaret de Medici, so he had excellent connections. So at the age of 12, he was given the tonsure, and at the same time, he was given the title to an abbessy, at the age of 12.
At the age of 22, he was made a cardinal. At the age of 23, they thought it was time for him to be ordained a priest. And at the age of 25, he went back to reside. He'd already been appointed archbishop of Millen. And at the age of 25, he went back to live in his sea, which was not an ordinary thing in those days.
He went to live there to be one of the people and of his own flock. And what that man did between those years, in twenty five years, he had less than that. He was 25 when he went there, so he had roughly only twenty four years to go or less. So, but one of the things he did, you see, he played an active part in the Council of Trent. Remember that this is the sixteenth century.
It's a century of reformation. It's a century where we have Philip and Saint Teresa of Avila in Spain. We have the Jesuits just getting off to a good start. Ignatius was born in forty fourteen ninety two about him, and the his society was was was gaining momentum by the time that Charles came on the scene. In England, of course, you had to have Queen Mary.
You have and in in Northern Europe, you have all the turmoil of the Reformation. You have in Trent, the council, which was over in about '63. It lasted eighteen years for various reasons. Charles Barrow Mayer took an active part in that, but above all, he was active after the council. And of all the things that that man did, and he tackled almost everything, even to when the plague hit the city, that he went out himself to take care of the sick.
The plague just ripped through Millen and devastated city. Because in those days, about all you could do was to identify the victims and bury them. So he was a man of great activity and yet a man of tremendous asceticism. And and while he had it in the palm of his hand to lay to live the life of a luxurious prince, he had it made from the age of 12. He couldn't miss.
He chose to be a honest to God follower of God's son, Jesus Christ. Now of all the things that he did in trying to reinforce the council of Trent, which did renew the church. Remember, this idea of reformation didn't begin with Luther, Reed, Erasmus, or Thomas More or any of those men. The idea that the church needed reformation was well known. But these are the men who did something for God's church without destroying it.
And one of the main things, if you take a a big view, was the the what Saint Charles did for the education of priests. He set up a program following the lead of council Trent whereby you had what was called the minor in the major seminaries, where young men, as soon as they were identified as possible candidates for the priesthood, they were shunted into a special school which would correspond to our four years of high school and two years of college. And then for what we call the major seminary, they would go for their what we would call two years of college and four years of theology to a separate, two big divisions, the minor and the major seminary. This is what he did. Remember, there had been no formal procedure for educating a priest.
He went to a university and got a degree in theology. That's what we've come back to now. That's how we have retrogressed, in my humble estimation. But the what what Charles Barra Mayo did among all his other illustrious works was to establish a seminary system which where it was followed in the spirit of the man and carried out into actuality produced results and we have the centuries to prove it. That's the best test and the proof of anything are facts.
Facts. Not alleged facts, but facts. And today, I was subject to that curriculum and I have never for one minute felt sorry about it. Not for one minute. It was a privilege because from the moment you entered into that system, you had an idea of what you were to be.
You weren't looking to find yourself. You had found yourself. You knew where you were going, and you knew how to get there. Now there's so much confusion. So today, when we talk about Charles Baromeo and what he did to renew the church, let us say amen, amen, amen.
We need another Charles Barra Mayo. Whether we'll get him or not, I don't know. But one thing I'm sure, I am never in any doubt about how it will all turn out. It'll turn out just fine as God sees it because it will all work out as he wants it to work out. Because in the last analysis, you see, God is running the show.
In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.