Also with you, a reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Glory to you, Lord. Jesus said, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, on the other hand, who is no shepherd nor owner of the sheep, catches sight of the wolf coming and runs away, leaving the sheep to be snatched up and scattered by the wolf.
That's because he works for pay. He has no actual or real concern for the sheep. I, our lord continues, I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep, and my sheep know me. In the same way that the father knows me, and I know the father.
For these sheep, I will give my life. Still, I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must lead them also, and they also shall hear my voice. There shall be one flock then and one shepherd. The father loves me for this, that I lay down my life to take it up again.
No one takes my life away from me. I lay it down freely. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. This command I received from my father. This is the gospel of the lord, the good news.
Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. Every day that a cleric or anyone else recites the divine office, he begins or should begin with a prayer which includes this verse or stanza. Come then, let us bow down and worship, bending the knee before the lord, our maker. For he is our god and we are his people, the flock that he shepherds. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. When you look around you, when you recall some of the events of the last fifteen well, we better make that twenty five years. One is shocked, saddened, depressed even, or even more so, more than that, by what he sees or she sees that has happened to the church of Jesus Christ. If Christ is our shepherd, he's been pretty busy these days trying to corral the flock. That is for sure.
And it would be a very grievous mistake for us to think it isn't so. Things are not what they ought to be, and in some instances they're in bad shape. Don't take my word for it. I want to read just a few sentences from Michael Davies, an Englishman who published a book in 1976. The situation hasn't improved since then.
And let me point out to you, the title is Cranmer's, you know, the English reformer, The Cranmer's Godly Order. The subtitle is this, the destruction of Catholicism through liturgical change. Keep that in mind. Anyway, here is the opening paragraph. The church is at the present time undergoing what is certainly the greatest crises since the Protestant Reformation.
Pope Paul himself has said has spoken of the self destruction of the church and of the smoke of Satan having entered the church. Priests and nuns are abandoning their vocations by the thousands. That's declined some since '76. The number of vocations continues to decline. That's true.
Mass attendance is plunging throughout the Western world. Still is. The most outlandish beliefs are put forward as Catholic teaching, but what I by what I call pseudo or half Catholics, and there is there's no diminishing of that. The church no longer makes any appreciable impact on society, as the dwindling conversion figures make clear. This is also a time of confusion, especially among Catholics.
There is hardly a traditional belief or a traditional practice which has not been questioned or reversed, and that's still going on. Now that's the opinion of one man, an Englishman. Michael Davies is the man's name. Again, the title of the book, Cranmer's Godly Order, and the subtitle, The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change. Any of you who have read Monsignor Kelly's book, The Battle for the American Church, or his latest book, The Crisis of Authority, there you will have a completely documented record of what Michael Davies says here in generalities.
Here's the truth. But don't mistake what I'm trying to say here today. What I see in the bottle is not a half empty empty bottle. What I'm seeing is the half full bottle. I am not presenting a message of pessimism at all today, not at all.
I want to present a message of complete hope, trust, confidence, even joy in Jesus Christ, and only in Jesus Christ. I offer nothing else because I don't know anything else to offer you. Don't let us mistake the church for a country club. Don't let us say religion is a good thing because it keeps us civilized. Don't tell me that that religion is good for me in some way.
Don't tell me that religion is a great has great value as a cultural component in our existence. That's hogwash. If religion means anything, it means God. First, last, and in between. And me.
That's what religion means. And all these other things may well be true. I don't dispute it. But that's not why I'm a priest, and that's not why you should be in those pews. You don't come to church because it you you feel better for it.
You come to church or should come to church because it's your duty to almighty god. He is your creator. You are his creature, and you owe it to him. He owes you nothing. And yet, this great god who owes you absolutely nothing gave you his son, and his son gave you a church.
Not a book. Christ didn't write a book. He didn't write anything. He didn't give us the bible. Christ gave us himself, and he established a church.
That's my second point, that we have our lord's promise, not that the church will be completely passive, enjoying a lovely quiet summer afternoon behind beside some pearling brook with a mint julep. It means that the church will be persecuted. You go back to the to Saint Matthew, where our lord is with his disciples up in Caesarea Philippi, up in the northern country beyond the Lake Of Galilee, way up there. And here he's looking at these 12 men, two of whom are going to betray him. And he pitched on one of those guys, and he says, you're called Simon.
I'm gonna call you rock. Just remember with the the rock that Peter turned out to be in the beginning. And yet Christ said, thou art Peter. Thou art rock. And on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
Christ didn't say they wouldn't try. Christ didn't say that those waves of hell wouldn't come right up and smash and crash against the church. He didn't say that at times the church might almost disappear in those ways. All Christ said was, the gates of hell will not prevail. They won't prevail.
That's all he said. But he did say that. And it's on that that I ask you to put your confidence and your trust in his promise. Second, at the last supper. Here we have probably the most intimate, the most loving moment in our lord's life.
He's surrounded by his disciples. He's facing his his passion, his death. He sees two of these men who are going to betray him, the loud mouthed Peter and Judas, the guy who couldn't let money slip through his fingers. And he's speaking his last words. It's his final meal with his disciples on earth before the resurrection.
And his message in Saint John is one of complete love. It's a long passage, this this last statement of our lord. Read it. And time and again, our lord comes back to this theme, peace be with you. He keeps hammering that peace be with you.
But the point I wanna make is, yes, says several times, do not let your heart be frightened. Do not be afraid. Oh, he keeps saying that. And, you know, these fellows don't know what's hap in they they don't know what they're in for. You remember, Peter says, Lord, wherever you go, I'll follow you.
Oh, I'll lay my I'll lay my life down for you, says old man Peter. And what happened? Within hours, he denies that he even knows Christ. Judas never did that, you know. And so our blessed lord, knowing as he does as the son of god, all that's ahead, his seeing down the centuries, timing, there's no time with him as god at all.
There's no before or after. There's no future with god. He sees the future. He sees his church. He sees the rock on which he built his church, the human Peter.
He sees all of this. And he says, peace be with you. Peace. Do not let your heart be affrighted. Do not be afraid.
And finally finally, we have our blessed lord just before his ascension. He has his disciples around him. And I wanna read the the the whole thing. It's from Saint Matthew chapter the twenty eighth. The 11 disciples notice Judas is gone.
The 11 disciples made their way to Galilee to the mountain to which Jesus had summoned them. This is after the resurrection. This is just before the ascension of our lord. Now listen. At the sight of him, those who had entertained doubts about him fell to their knees in homage.
Notice even after the resurrection, they still have doubts about Christ. So then Jesus came forward and addressed them in these words. Full authority has been given to me both in heaven and on earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Teach them to carry out everything that I have commanded you, and know that I am with you always until the end of the world.
And having said that, Christ, I repeat, did not hand them a book. He ascended into heaven. All he left was his church, that living voice founded upon that stalwart soul, the great Saint Peter, who turned out to be the great Saint Peter, the rock, the rock of Peter on which the living voice of Jesus Christ Church rests. Now that's the Christ's promise. And on that, I will rest my case, that he he has seen that the church is going to have its troubles, and it's going to be it's going to be threatened.
It's going to be almost submerged. It will, at times, be almost obliterated. And I'm not over overdrawing this. This is no exaggeration. The church has been declared dead.
I don't know how many times. And lo and behold you, he comes back to life. Now let's let's go to facts. Instead of talking about promises, you know, plenty of promises have been made. People make promises.
One said the definition of a promise is something that you break, like resolutions, you know. But our Lord's promise is a little different, you see. We have a few centuries of history back at this. And let's just take a few of them, and I select only the more recent ones, very recent. For example, the fourteenth century.
Here you have Rome, the Vatican, the Pope, the Cardinals. They up stakes and go up to Avignon in France, about 70 miles north of Marseille. And they stay up there for nearly seventy years. Seven popes were up there. You talk about confusion.
The church seemed to have capitulated to the French king. Was called the Babylonian captivity. The Babylonian captivity of the church, and it lasted for nearly seventy years. The church survived. The pope went back to Rome.
Things got in order again. But be even before that actually was accomplished, we had another phenomenon in the fifteenth century called the Western schism. The cardinals get together, they elected a pope. They got together a few hours later, decided that wasn't a good election, so they elected a second pope. So now the church had two popes, two voices, and where was the voice of Christ?
So in order to settle it, they said the only thing to do is to eliminate the first two and to elect the third one, which they did. And the result was they had three popes now. Oh, joy. How many do you need? So those who enjoyed that kind of thing, they had a heyday.
That lasted for thirty some years. Thirty eight years and three popes. So the thing is can you imagine the confusion of this? You had bishoprics with two and three bishops claiming it was their bishopric. You had abbots claiming two and three abbots claiming certain monasteries.
Whose voice were you following? There were three of them. Pisa, Avignon, and Rome. Talk about a mess. You didn't know where to turn.
That was the church of Jesus Christ. Let's not hesitate to say it. And at the end of it, you have the Medici popes, Alexander the sixth, Julius the second, Leo the tenth. Anything could survive them must be divine. And then finally, the council of Constance in 1414 to 1418, they threw out all three of them who had advocated and agreed to resign.
We had the fourth. We had a the council of Constance voted in another pope, so the church started over again. That's about that's 1414. At the end of the fifteenth century, you have Erasmus coming on the scene, the man from Rotterdam. The man who Franciscan monk from Belgium said laid the aid of the reformation which Luther hatched.
And if any of you have read his praise of folly, you'll know how true that is. Not that Erasmus was wrong, not in the least. The fact is he was right. He was so right that the world took him to heart. And Luther all Erasmus had not influenced Luther too much, but he influenced him some at that at this beginning.
In 1517, you have the theses on the Wittenberg so called cathedral. And then you have the great conflagration of Northern Europe. And you have your Lutheran, Calvin, and Melathon. You have your Kramers and the rest of them in England, the Karlstadts. So you have the whole of Northern Europe.
You have England. You have some of Switzerland, all of the northern countries separating from the Rock Of Peter. The church of Rome seemed devastated. The church of Rome seemed dead. Dead.
But it didn't die. We're here still. Now, Cardinal Newman was the man who was selected by the bishops of England to grace the occasion when three hundred years after England separated from the Church of Jesus Christ, when once again the Church of Jesus Christ in England came into bloom. Once again the hierarchy was restored, Newman stood up in 1852 and presented one of the finest things that's been written in English called The Second Spring. 22 page sermon.
I have a few sentence from it I wish to read to you. Remember, Newman could speak from his own life. Newman knew what it was to fight the battle. Newman knew what it was to be an object of the utmost suspicion, even by his co religionists. He was nearly thrown out of the Catholic church, you know.
It was Leo the thirteenth who saved him and made him a cardinal. He was no cardinal when this sermon was given. Cardinal Newman knew what persecution, what abandonment was. His second greatest sermon, you know, in the parting of friends. It'll make you cry.
So he this was his sermon on the second spring, three hundred and some years after England had left the church. He said, three centuries ago, when the Catholic church stood in this land, had pride of place. It had the honors of nearly a thousand years upon it. It seemed destined to stand and outlast even England's greatness. But it was the high decree of heaven that the majesty of that presence should be blotted out.
The old church in its day became a corpse. All seemed lost. It was a miracle, I might say, to have pulled down that lordly power, but there was a greater and a truer miracle in store. The fall was wonderful. Its rise again would be even more wonderful, but different, for it was in the order of grace.
Shall the past be rolled back? Shall the grave be opened? Yes. For grace can do what nature cannot. The world grows old, but the church is ever young.
One thing alone I know, that according to our need, so will be our strength. One thing I'm sure of, that the more the enemy rages against me, so much the more will the saints in heaven plead for me. The more fearful are our trials from the world, the more present to us will be our mother Mary, our good patrons, our angel guardians. The louder the more malicious are the devices of men against us, the louder will be the cry of supplication ascending from the whole church. We shall not be left orphans.
We shall have within us the strength of the paraclete promised to the church and to every member of it. Let not your heart be affrighted nor be afraid. I am with you. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.