A reading from the holy gospel according to Luke. As Jesus drew near to Jericho, of course, that's down in the valley, down by the not far from the Dead Sea and of course near the Jordan River. As Jesus drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. And hearing a multitude going by, the blind man inquired what it meant. Someone said, Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.
The blind man cried out, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. Those who were in front rebuked him, telling him to be quiet. But the man cried out all the more, son of David, have mercy on me. Jesus stopped and commanded the blind man to be brought to him. And when the man came, Jesus asked him, what do you want me to do for you?
The blind man said, Lord, let me receive my sight. And Jesus said to him, receive your sight. Your faith has made you well. The man immediately received his sight, and then he followed Jesus, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.
And this is the gospel of the Lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Today we are celebrating the feast of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. She's not a well known saint.
Her life deserves to be better known because it's again in so many ways it was so ordinary. She was of course, she was of the royal family, she was married, had children, and then when her husband died, always she didn't have a great conversion to religion as we see with within Ignatius, she had always been that way. So when her when this period of her life was fulfilled of being a wife and a mother, she simply continued doing in a more expanded way what she'd been doing all the time, and that was serving her lord. Except that those who received her services became more numerous because she devoted her life and her her fortune to alleviating the needy, trying to alleviate the want, poverty, and all the rest that go with lack of these worldly goods. And in those days remember, keep this in mind, there was no united givers.
There were there was no there were no public funds. There was no conception on the part of any state that it had an obligation to help people. If the poor, the sick, the lame, the blind, the crippled, if they got any help it was from individuals. Not that that help was all was absent, but it was a very different world from ours today. There weren't any social security checks coming monthly from them through the mail.
Now, here again, we travel across a few centuries and have one of our own, a young woman, noble family, married, a mother, then devote herself as a religious to alleviating as well as she could the suffering around her. A lot like mother Satan in some ways, a lot like it. Now, once again, I want to bring before you who you are. We when we bring up these names, we're not bringing up simply a a personage whose memory we now entertain for a few minutes and we feel inspired to live a life something like that because of the present potency of the memory. That's not the way it is at all.
Any pagan pardon me, I'm awfully unjust to pagan because you see we're not living in a pagan world. The pagans believed in God. A lot of gods. We're living in a world you see that believes in man, including women. We're living in the the best description is it is secular humanism.
We have lost this concept to the holy catholic church. The church militant, the church suffering, and the church triumphant. We're one. Let's not think of it just as the church militant as we are. We call ourselves in this life struggling as we try to do with our ups and our downs, we're on the we're right in the front, we're taking it, but we're not alone.
We have the church triumphant and we have the church suffering. We are all united. And when we think today of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, let's not think of it as a memory, she's a present reality. If our faith means anything, if it means anything, it means this because this is an article of faith of the Apostles Creed. I believe in the communion of saints.
What do you mean by the communion of saints? I don't know why we don't have that. We the the creed that we recite at mass now is I think the Nicene Creed. But the apostles creeds as I believe in the communion of saints. Let's make this a reality.
Now this ties in I mean, you may think this is exaggerated, but it ties in with our holy father's visit to Germany. He's in Germany now. The first place he went to was Cologne. Why did he go to Cologne? Well, first let me tell you about Cologne.
They started a cathedral there in the twelfth century. It was finished after the first world war, the same cathedral. It was finished on plans that had been originally made but were found in the library of Paris. You see what I'm the continuity? John Paul is the first pope to go to Cologne in nine hundred years, but it's still this pope, the same pope that's going there.
Nine hundred years since the last visit of a pope to Cologne. It's like saying he was there yesterday. Do you see what I'm driving at this continuity of God's church? Think of nine hundred years, multiply it by four. That's I think a rough estimation of a generation.
Anyway, it's as good as any. Alright. There you have it. Oh, think of the millions and millions of people who have been born, who have lived, who have passed on in nine hundred years. And here is the representative of Peter going back to Cologne.
Now he didn't go back to Cologne because it no pope had been there in nine hundred years. Why did he go go to Cologne? Well, you read the papers as well as I do so you know the answer. He went there because of Albert the Great. Who's Albert the Great?
He's one of us. He's with our gang and I hope I'm in his gang. Albert the great the teacher of Saint Thomas, twelfth century Dominican, thirteenth century Dominican, who wound up by being the bishop of Cologne. A man who was extremely different from Thomas Aquinas, but a very learned man. A man with much more of a scientific spirit than Aquinas had.
A man that had much more respect for what we today call the inductive sciences. After all, he was called amalgous, Albert was. Amogus, a magician. And so here we have a Polish man who has become who grew up in a country taken over by the most out explicitly atheistic country or nation the world has seen, who becomes pope in the footsteps of Saint Peter, who goes up to Bon in the nineteen hundred and eighty November to pay his respects at the tomb of Albert the Great, who came from the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. How about that for pulling things together?
That's our church. You see how the boundaries of nationalism dissolve? You ask who or what was Albert, who or what was Aquinas. Nationalism didn't exist in those days. They roamed around freely, went from Paris, I don't know how many times Aquinas crossed the Alps on foot.
Dominicans were forbidden to ride. That's our church. It's Catholic. It is Catholic. And we have to keep this in mind, it's not Western European, and it's not Eastern European, and it's not African, but it ought to be all of those things.
All of them. All of them. It's not Western European exclusively. It is Western European, but it should be South African. It should be Alaska.
It should be the Eskimo. And so this is our church. It's the living church. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Elizabeth of Hungary, the holy father in Rome in the twentieth century. We're all there together.
We're trying to fight. Some of us have made it. Some of us on the way. Some of us are still on the battlefield, but we're all united. It's the church of God.
And in the can of the mess when we talk about church as it comes in, keep this in mind. You're not alone. We're not fighting a single battle. We're not on on on the front with no with no friends around us. We are surrounded by friends.
Not only friends, veterans, heroes and heroines who have been where we are and who have made it and who are in there plugging for us that we will make it too. It's just a pity that we don't have a more intimate acquaintance with some of these people, and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is one of them. We can so identify in many ways with their lives, in what they had to put up with, in what they had to suffer, and how they accepted Their views to life, their acceptance of the idea that happiness is not man's goal in this life. Think of this, how contrary that is to the present view. And so, let us let us rejoice and be glad in this company, and pray to God we'd be not too unworthy of these men and women who have gone ahead, but who are still, let us pray with us.
In the name of the father and of the son, holy spirit. Amen.