A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The lord said, this is a continuation of the woes. The The lord said, woe to you, scribes and pharisees. You build the tombs of the prophets, but it was your fathers who murdered them. You show that you stand behind the deeds of your fathers.
They did the the murders, and you erect the tombs. That is why the wisdom of god has said, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of these, they will persecute and murder so that this generation will have to account for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world. Their guilt stretches from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who met his death between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will have to account for it. Woe to you lawyers.
You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves have not gained access, yet you have stopped those who wish to enter. After Jesus had left this gathering, the scribes and pharisees began to manifest fierce hostility towards him and to make him speak on a multitude of questions, setting traps to catch him in his speech. And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. And this is the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila. And as I said in the beginning of the mass, she did not like to be called that. Her name was Saint Teresa of Jesus, and that's why that's the way she wanted to be called, but of course, as so often happens, her wishes have not been respected. I don't think she had appreciated being called the great Saint Teresa either, a contradistinction to the little flower.
That I think would not have fitted in with her ideas of humility. Now this good lady was quite a woman, to put it mildly. One of the interesting features of her life is the fact that she lived in the century of reformation. Remember her life, 1515 to August, she would she her spiritual advisers were the first generation of Jesuits. They were Dominicans, Franciscans, and seculars.
The Spain of her day seems to reflect very little of what was happening in her world. Remember, over in England, you have Henry the eighth having his trouble in a matrimonial way and winding up by being very generous and benevolent towards his great and good friend Thomas More by having him beheaded instead of being drawn and quartered, which showed how the king loved him. You had up in Germany Luther running around wild, and of course, don't forget Erasmus. Remember, he spoke as violently against the evils of the day as Luther did, but with greater eloquence and far better Latin. And this is a very important point to remember that in those days if you were in the least uneducated person, you read Latin.
So that everything a man like Erasmus wrote spread all over Europe. It's not like that we have today, you see. The printing presses simply made us polyglots. But anyway, this was a terrific time. In Switzerland, of course, you had Calvin.
Up in Scotland, you had Knox. And then in France, had the Huguenots. It was a century of terrific turmoil, and she was living in all of this. And yet it's not reflected in her writings at all. She was hailed before the inquisition several times.
Of course, Saint Ignatius of Loyola was tombs. He was silenced for three years. You see, they they weren't male chauvinists in those days. But the thing is, her life was concerned with holiness. Notice that prayer we had, and that's not a word you hear much today.
We're supposed to be community minded, social minded, living for the neighbor, and all this sort of thing, which of course is all very true. But when you get down to the nitty gritty, it's your personal holiness that counts when you stand before the lord that you're gonna stand there yourself. You're not gonna stand there with a squadron or a company or a battalion or a regiment. You're going to stand alone, and the test is holiness. It's a word we shy away from.
It's not a word she shied away from at all. Her life is simply fantastic. I mean just as a human document. What struck me in reading it recently was that there were two books that influenced her life considerably. And one was the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the other, the letters of his great and good contemporary Saint Jerome coming in from, you know, coming in in from Israel where Jerome was busy over there with a few matters like translating the Vulcan.
These two books influenced her. And I get sent to you see, Augustine called his book Confessions, meaning the praising the lord and sorrow for sin. And, when Teresa was put under obedience to write her life, she called it a testimony of God's mercies. A book of God's mercies. She didn't call it a biography, an autobiography.
Now this one of the greatest let me recently, our holy father said made this statement that the two greatest evils facing the world today are its secularism and its anti churchism. I don't know what language you use, but that's the way it's put in the anti church. Now the day you have all this rousing up, you know, with the fundamentalists, the evangelicals, One of the things they and the down and the decline of the mainline religions, Lutheran, Pisperian, all of them. Notice, anti church. And with a Teresa, it was just the opposite.
Now she lived while it's true that her life shows reflects very little of the tumult that was happening all around her, all the way from Midgley sweeping over the North all the way over to England. Her life shows very little of that. Her life was a life lived with her own people trying to find her way to holiness. But in the midst of this, she kept her orientation in a fantastic way because in Spain you did have a movement called the Illuminati or the Alumbrados. You see, every century we have these elevated elegant people, the the elite, the gnostics, for agnosticism.
There's always a brand of that around and they're usually in their own estimation better than the rest of the world. So in Spain, you had this thing, the Illuminati or the Alumbrados. And there was a great deal of fear among the church of Spain that what was happening in the North and to the East, and of course they were very much concerned with what was going on in England as you know, that Spain was going to go the same way. So the inquisition in Spain was very active and she was hailed before it. And somebody asked her, I read this out of her own writings, asked her wasn't she embarrassed?
Didn't she feel it is a disgrace to be called before the inquisition? And you know what she said, not at all. I don't want to teach anything but what the Catholic church teaches. This woman and another thing, you know, her life was seemed to be filled with the religious experiences of one sort or another and yet I have her own words in an English translation I have to add, but she said that she would not take an oath in an absolute sense on the authenticity of any of her revelations. Put that in your head.
She distrusted them, and that's why she went to religious leaders. She was constantly putting herself at the disposal of her religious advisers, Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and seculars, getting their opinion of the learned fathers. She had the highest regard for them and it caused her in many instances profound suffering because she was greatly distrusted or or rather her these so called revelations were and rightly so, I hasten to add. But her loyalty to the church is fantastic. It was the Catholic church that meant so much to her.
And you see, this this is very interesting and startling when you think of how this good woman, apparently a woman of in those days although she came from a very good family, had little or no education to speak of. And yet look at her writings and the insight, her psychological insights, her common sense, her administrative ability. But if all of this was a pursuit of holiness in the arms of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, She didn't put her life on a book. Now you think, I've just been looking over some catechisms that are being stuff that's being taught to our kids. You can't imagine the stuff that's in there.
Where do they get it? Is it the Catholic church speaking? When they tell you that the mass is the leader of the revolution, She was a Catholic, and the church meant everything to her, everything. And this she paid for this with a great deal of suffering. She didn't live in an ivory tower by a long shot, But the church was God's living voice and she wanted nothing that had the taint of schism or heresy or error.
She completely distrusted herself, completely. She distrusted as I say, she said she would never take an oath on the absolute authenticity of any religious experiences, and she had plenty. And so today as we today face up to so many problems, and one of them is this anti church That people feel that they don't need a church. All they need is God and a book. Or even more than that, just simply God speaks to them directly.
You notice that text this morning that very the text there was what changed Luther's life. Either saved by faith, and he added a little tiny word, solo moto only, which of course Saint Paul did not write. But that text you heard this morning is what changed Luther's life completely, that we are saved by faith. I don't need this thing called a church, and I certainly don't need any pope and bishops and all that clap trap. But here you have this lady down in Spain doing the impossible, really, doing the impossible but constantly pursuing one goal, personal holiness and you can't get out of it.
You can try to lose yourself in social work and activities of all this sort of thing but if you miss the opus dei, the work of the lord in all of this, and if you don't see that this is leading you to holiness, you're on the wrong track to get to heaven and salvation. And so today as we honor this great saint, remember we're not just cultivating a memory. She's very a matter of fact, there's a great deal of interest in her today. They even made her a doctor of the church. So she is presently with us.
She is just one great among that great number of saints known and anonymous whose company we keep. The name of the father and the son, holy spirit. Amen.