A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. While the crowds pressed around him, Jesus began to speak to them in these words. This is an evil age. It seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah was a sign for the Ninevites, so will the son of man be a sign for the present age.
The queen of the South will rise at the judgment along with the men of this generation, and she will condemn them. She came from the father's corner of the world to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, but you have a greater than Solomon here. At the judgment, the citizens of Nineveh will rise along with the present generation, and will be ir the own the lives. The lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. Today, we are commemorating Columbus Day, and it is alleged that he had something to do with the discovery of the North American continent. Now I'm not at all sure who Columbus was. Very likely he was an Italian and was aided and abetted by the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. It's more than possible that he was not an Italian and that he was aided and abetted by the two two religious kings, but that he was from Catalonia, from Barcelona, and that the money for the for the little cruise that he and a few friends took going West Ward was financed by a Jew of Barcelona.
You can ask any Spaniard, and they will agree to this second explanation of who Columbus was. Whoever he was, we say he discovered North American continent, maybe the South American continent, maybe a lot of islands in between. Well, when they say about him discovering it, I recall a little item that was in the daily paper some years ago when one of our native born Americans referred to as Indians went over and stood in the forum of Rome and claimed Rome in behalf of the Navajo Indian tribe. He had discovered Rome. You see, this was not entirely an empty bit of land over here when Columbus found it.
Now, of course, the Columbus Day today, like so many other things, it is it's chiefly a commercial enterprise. But you see, it's so easy to simplify things. We love to do this. And because the motivation that inspired Columbus and his compatriots to do what they did and those who financed it, whoever they were, and those who encouraged him, whoever they were. Because they were various kinds of motives, It's very easy to pick and to choose and to say it was nothing but this or nothing but that.
Whether or not Columbus was the first European over here is highly questionable. But whether he was or he wasn't, and however his his enterprise was financed, and whoever were whoever were or whoever was his main backer. The fact is he did something tremendous. Why? Why did he do it?
What motivated that man? What motivated the men who went with him? Any of you who have gone down to the sea in small ships know what it is to face that empty horizon even today when you have all kinds of of helps. And these people, for the most part, had none of the helps that we have. None of them.
They didn't even have a an exact way of finding longitude and latitude. They didn't have a chronometer that they could take on board a ship. So the enterprise of sailing away from the from from Europe and going into the land of the setting sun on the ships you know were relatively small. We think they were tiny ships. Now what motivated these people to do it?
Well, answer is there were all kinds of motives. There wasn't any single one. But because you had a complexity of motives, it doesn't mean we should eliminate some of them. And one of them was to carry the good news of Jesus Christ. See, this is kind of overlooked.
It's overlooked a great deal in in in many of the stories of the what happened after Columbus, the coming of the Spaniards and all of that. Depending on whom you read, you can get extremely different views of what was done. But the point is that in every instance, while there was a complexity of motives from the meanest, the the most sordid kind of motive, all the way up to the most noble, the most magnificent, the most benevolent kind of motive, there were very few of those expeditions that left the European shore without a priest on board. Why did they carry a priest? They didn't need him to find god for them, and he certainly wasn't much good to them trying to find their way westward.
That's for sure. Many sailors wouldn't have a priest on board a boat in those days. Some of them wouldn't have one now. But the thing is, what what inspired these people to lay their life, their career, everything on the line? And I repeat, a lot of things did it.
But because there were a lot of things, let's not neglect or deny or ignore, which is the worst kind of neglect, the the deep profound religious motivation that was behind a a a a great deal of this, a great deal of this. Where the Spaniards went, they brought the religion, the good news of Jesus Christ. They didn't do it perfectly. They didn't do it totally in every instance by a long shot. But so what?
Are you going to forget what was being done because it wasn't done perfectly, because it was done incompletely, because it was all mixed up with with the human elements of greed and lust and all the rest? You see, it's a very complex story. And in that complexity, let's not grade not downgrade the heroes in it and some heroines. They're mostly anonymous, not all of them by a long shot, but this this was a tremendous adventure. And the confidence and the supernaturalism that these men had in their lives, their view of life, their view of destiny, their their evaluation of what my life is worth.
These are these are questions we have to ask ourselves, don't we? I was with some people last evening in which one of the guests was involved with cancer research. Believe me, she's done a lot of thinking about dying. And and you see, what is how do we fit that into our into our daily living? When these guys got on on that boat and started to go westward, they gave a lot of thought to this.
They knew the perils of the sea. They didn't have to read Saint Paul to know that. And why did they do it? And why did successors do it? For two or three hundred years they flowed westward.
And I repeat, they did it for a lot of reasons, and some of them far some of them downright ignominious, but some of them as glorious as a human being can be called to. So let's try to hold the whole story together. It's a magnificent story. And whether or not he Columbus was the first one here or the second or the third, whether he came from Italy or from up in Catalonia, from Barcelona, the the main facts of the case are perfectly clear and indisputable, and they have a lesson for us. We're setting our little old ships into the setting sun.
We're going out to that boundless horizon. We're in fragile craft, but there's a big difference. We have got a lot of navigational helps. We've got loads of navigational helps to keep us on course, not to save us from storms, but to keep us on course in enduring and out of the storms. And that's the big difference between Columbus and us.
In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.