A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to the crowds, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, they shall all be taught by god. Everyone who has heard the father and learned from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the father, Only the one who is from god has seen the father. Let me firmly assure you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the desert and died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven for a man to eat and never to die.
I myself am the living bread come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he shall live forever. The bread I will give is my flesh for the life of the world, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. This is the feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, fourteenth century.
Dominican nun died until the middle of their thirties and is known as a virgin and doctor of the church. There aren't many ladies who have attained the rank of doctor in the church, very few, but she is one. Now I wanna go back to the first reading, and that is this here you have this eunuch, a Jew, who had come from Ethiopia to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Now he's returning home, and notice he's a man of afterwards. He's riding in a carriage.
He's not walking because he was the treasurer, and whoever controls the money runs the show. That's McAllister's first principle. Now he's reading Isaiah or trying to read him. And Philip comes on the scene trotting along and says, do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch says, no.
I don't understand what I'm reading. But notice, he was reading it anyway even though he read without understanding. Because it was the prophet, because it was the law, because it was the word of God, he was reading it even though it brought no understanding. He was doing what he could. So says, well, why don't you understand it?
Man says, how can I unless somebody explains it to me? Now here you have the whole problem of a book. If you get tired of me stressing this or talking about it, I'm sorry. I don't get tired of it at all. Because, you see, a book doesn't speak for itself.
It needs some living voice to explain it, to interpret it. Every everybody who reads it interprets it. So you get as many interpretations as you get readers who think they understand what they're reading. So if you have 10 people reading it, you get 10 you get 10 people's interpretation. Now the 100 question is, which one of the 10 is right?
So where do we go from there? Well, I'll tell you where we go from there. Let's go to Catherine of Siena, fourteenth century virgin and doctor as we honor her today. She didn't start out that way at all. She had a tough life up.
Her parents, she came from a pretty good family and she wanted to become a notice this is fourteenth century. And she wanted to become of all things a mendicant nun, a Dominican nun. Well, her family couldn't see that, so they did everything to dissuade her, and they could not dissuade her. So finally, she had her way, and the family acknowledged that they had something very odd. They had a very peculiar kind of daughter.
Now you talk about trouble. You talk about confusion, you talk about good, honest people not knowing where to turn for the church of Christ, then I refer you to the fourteenth century and the days of Saint Catherine of Siena when we had three popes. That's a little confusing to anybody, you know. This was the period of the Avignon popes. And it was this girl, this young girl because she died when she was around 33 or something like that, that who was absolutely an unknown person, who didn't go to any of the universities, who had no political punch at all, who had no ecclesiastical authority behind her.
And yet she was the one who played a most significant role in the in the in the tremendous ecclesiastical struggles of the day of that century and as and also political, but certainly ecclesiastical. Because probably more than anyone else, this nun, this virgin, this unknown woman of Siena, she it was who brought about, not directly, but indirectly, and I don't mean through prayer or something like that, I mean she was manipulating things. She was in correspondence with the popes, and and she was working. She was doing what she could. That's important.
Just like the eunuch, doing what he could. And it was through this nun's influence, her direct intervention as an emissary of God that this frightful situation of having several popes was resolved. And at long last, Catholics could look to one man as the holy father. Now I wanna put these two things together. They are not separate.
Yeah. I come back to this question of voice. Because there's got to be a living voice if there is to be a living church. It can't be a book. It can't be a tombstone.
It can't be it can't be objects of paleography or anthropology or ancient history. It's got to be a living present contemporary voice if there is to be the voice of Jesus Christ. It can't be something that we're getting on a recording out of our tape machine. And so we come back to this question. Here you have the church of Jesus Christ, and this is what Catherine of Siena understood.
She was tremendously distraught, distressed by what she saw going on around her. So were plenty of people. She wasn't the only one. This was a disaster of the first quarter. This was much worse than the Protestant Reformation in a sense.
In a sense, it was worse than what we're facing now in the Catholic church because we're facing now something that I think is worse than the Protestant Reformation. But she had that concept of God's church. And if there's one thing God's church has to have, if it is God's church, is truth. And if it has truth, it's got to have a unity of truth. It can't have one truth plus its contraries and contradictories all put into the same pot.
Impossible. It's that's an absolutely absurd assumption, and yet that's where we are today. And so as the eunuch was traveling back to Ethiopia, trying his best, doing what he could to understand the what god has spoken to him. As Catherine of Siena, 14 in the fourteenth century, she understood too that she was the emissary between man and God. She understood that as I gather.
There we see the terribly importance of that living voice which she so appreciated and which so saddened her almost to despair. Because where was the voice of the living Christ in his living church when you had three of them? And that way, it was this woman, Catherine of Siena, fourteenth century, died when she was in her thirties, who was the main factor in resolving that tremendous and most difficult situation. And so today, as we today ourselves face, as the church of Christ, and I might say, especially in The United States Of America, is facing what one pope called suicide. Paul the sixth used that word, suicide.
We need to recall that it is god's church and that his voice still speaks if only we will listen and hear. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.