You. A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. Jesus said to his disciples, scandals will inevitably arise, but woe to that man through whom they come. He would be better off thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck than giving scandal to one of these my little ones. Be on your guard.
If your brother does anything wrong, correct him. If he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times a day and seven times a day turns back to you saying, I am sorry, forgive him. The apostle said to the lord, increase our faith. And Jesus answered, if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this sycamore, be uprooted and transplanted into the seed, and that tree would obey you.
This is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Attractive almost impossible to resist the attraction of a few words on this matter of faith. I want to devote a few words to this matter of Saint John Lateran.
We call this the feast of the anniversary, the dedication of this church. And in my humble estimation, this meet this kind of a feast has profound meaning for us. Now, this is what this is remember, Saint John Lateran is Cathedral Church of Rome and it goes back even before Saint Peter. I looked a bit of it up because I don't have this on the top of my head, you know. But where the Saint John ladder and some of you perhaps have seen it, it's a magnificent church at the present time.
It's gone through I don't know how many transformations being rebuilt in the regular thing. But here is a church built on a site that goes back at least to the time of Nero, not the church but the site, the Lateran. The name Lateran comes from the family that owned the whole square, the whole area there, and whose property was confiscated confiscated by by Nero. Nero. Now here's the irony of it.
Nero was not one of the best champions of Catholicism or of the new way or of Christianity. Remember, the first half of the first century AD. He was one of the worst enemies of Christianity in Rome. He did his best to extirpate it. So this property he took from the Paluzzi family And in one way or another, it wound up as a dowry for a young girl named Fausta.
And Fausta became the wife of Constantine, the emperor of Rome, and the first emperor who became a Christian first half of the fourth century. He was emperor just before Augustine was born over in Africa in Hippo. And it was Constantine who first built a church there in the first half of the fourth century and there's and there's been a church there ever since and they've excelled in their magnificence. This was the heart of the of the the Roman church not Saint Peter's. Now in these readings readings we have today about the new Jerusalem in the city and all of that.
So you can take this literally or you could take it figuratively. But that Saint John Latery, which is the pope's special church in Rome, In many ways is the mother church of Christendom, the mother church of Christendom. Now when we speak of mother church of Christendom, we should be speaking of something that has some kind of unity. What kind of unity? What kind?
Well, certainly there should be the unity of faith. How do you express the unity of faith? How do you talk about faith? How do you communicate about faith? How do you teach the faith?
You have to use a language, don't you? And what language? Well, we used to have a language, it was the Latin that went straight back. Not to the time of Nero, Greek was the language in those days. But it's just so you see it's such a plain common sense if we're going to have a unity, what's it going to be based on?
And especially when you talk about truth and its communication and its transmission. How do you transmit it? Now the church today presents Saint John Lateran. It isn't a matter of our talking about a building, but don't underrate that. A tangible concrete monument has meaning, has significance, and can have tremendous meaning, tremendous significance.
Think of what the flag has meant because someone gets on top of a small hill and puts a flag up there, hundreds and hundreds of our young men gave up their lives in trying to preserve it and put it back up again. These are symbols. Now, it's a big mistake of course to mistake a symbol for the reality. But on the other hand, it's a big mistake to underrate the symbol. And a physical building is a symbol of what?
Of what? You don't need a roof to worship God. You don't need walls to worship God. You can get out of your bed and fall on your knees right beside your bed and give God the truest kind of worship. You don't have to leave your bedroom.
You don't have to leave your bedroom to do it, but you cannot truly be a religious human being and stay in your bedroom. Now, the church, if we would believe, and I say if we are dumb enough to believe what many so called authorities tell us has gone through a great change since Vatican two. A lot of that is simply dream. It didn't happen. Not that there haven't been radical and sad changes because they have come about.
No question about it. One man referred to what he calls the great number of half Catholics that we have today. In some other times they would have been thrown out of the church. So we are we today are faced with this problem of unity. And it's a very serious question.
Leaving aside of Do you remember about two weeks ago a gentleman who came up and knelt one of these pews up here? He was from Milano. He had been a senator from Rome. He was over here for a meeting. Now here this gentleman could he could use English fairly well, but he couldn't follow us.
And I would notice him there here he was faced with two or three books trying to find his way through the man's. He couldn't do it. And yet that man came here one Saturday night and was here Sunday morning. That's how he loved the mass. But what did he get out of it?
I I don't know. But the point is, he wasn't following us. He wasn't with us. Now, any of you who have gone into a foreign country and you don't have to go very far to be in a foreign country, where they have gone in for the vernacular. Now remember, it was never the mind of the church to give up Latin.
Latin is still the language of the holy Roman Catholic church. It was never the mind of the church that we shouldn't have Latin. What we're using is a translation. And believe me that translation is something. Someone counted over 300 variants in the English translation that we have with the mass and some of them are downright heretical.
Now, this is what we're faced with you see. I've been for example in Jerusalem I attended a mass in Arabic. I might just as well have been up in the North Pole. You go into in a Spanish speaking country and all you hear is Spanish. It's fine if you happen to know Spanish.
But so we'll oppose you don't know Spanish. You would be much more comfortable in that fine Protestant church, Episcopal church down in the in the town. And I went from into Greece. I went into Athens, into the Cathedral of Athens. Now Athens is no I mean, the Cathedral in Athens is no Saint John Lateran.
It's a very modest church. Some of you may have been there. But at their high mass which is celebrated every Sunday and the times I was there the bishop was present. Here's what they did. The ordinary of the mass, the canon of the mass was in Latin.
All the rest of the mass was in Greek. Now what's wrong with that arrangement? You were you felt at home and it was thrilling. It's absolutely thrilling to be almost within the sight of the Acropolis, almost within because you're you cannot actually see it the cathedral, but you're very close to where Saint Paul's came and spoke to those Greeks and came said, I speak to you. I notice, what would have happened if Paul couldn't have spoken Greek?
You ever thought about that? He could he could communicate with the Greeks because he could speak Greek. And he said, I have come to you to talk about that God that you put a temple up and you call him unknown. I've come to tell you about it. And here we were gathered from that pulpit you had the epistles of Saint Paul being read in Greek.
And here you had the Greek community and they they they knew the canon of the mass by heart. They didn't have to read it. We where you see we are we are destroying the unity of the church. How about the teaching? You put a textbook into a boy's hand, a young student in English and that's a translation from the Latin.
Well just think of all the translations we've had of the Bible, that translation we had yesterday. Where at the end of it it says, and this is the moral. That isn't in the original at all. It's not there at all. The translator put it in.
So when you're dealing with a translation, what are you dealing with? And yet that's where our theology is coming from. Men are studying for the priesthood who have no knowledge of Latin at all. They cannot read the original text. When you get a statement from the holy father, the original is Latin, not English or German or Polish.
So this feast of Saint John Lateran bespeaks the unity of the church. The unity of faith. There can be all kinds of variations. No one denies it. No no one should reject it.
There is no one who denies that we should communicate. We shouldn't hide and and bury God's truth in obscurity or in dead languages. Everybody agrees to that who has any sense. But with anybody with any sense knows also how important it is to have a thread of unity. And what's the thread to be?
Well, one of the most important one is this matter of language. Language. And so that on this feast of Saint John Lateran, it's it's a very symbolic that's why we have it. The church isn't interested in the in a building over there in Rome even though it has a magnificent history. It's a great piece of architecture, goes all the way back at the Constantine and all of that.
That's fine. That's archaeological lore. The church is interested in the present tense. The living voice of Jesus Christ is speaking to us. And he says, have come that you may be one.
One. And so on this feast of Saint John Lateran, let us take to heart what the mind of the church is that we should reassure ourselves about the church's unity. We are one in faith, one in practice, one in our acceptance of the living voice of Jesus Christ in the person of his mouthpiece, Peter of Rome. In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.