A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, if you want to avoid judgment, stop passing judgment. Your verdict on others will be the verdict passed upon yourself. The measure with which you measure will be used to measure yourself. Why look at the speck in your brother's eye when you miss the plank in your own?
How can you say to your brother, let me take that speck out of your eye, while all the time the plank remains in your own? You hypocrite, remove the plank from your own eye first, and then you will see clearly to take the speck from your brother's eye. 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 particular excerpt from our blessed lord's own lips as recorded by saint Matthew is one of my favorite topics, which I have to sacrifice this morning in behalf of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, a young man of the Society of Jesus who died at the age of 23. It's all he lived, twenty three years. Died of the plague trying to help his fellow citizens or fellow man in Rome. So at the age of 23, he's gone. He's born at the in the fourth quarter, third quarter of the sixteenth century into a very wealthy, noble family up in near Mantua, which is just midway between Milan and Venice, but a little south.
That'll get it's up in Lombardy. It's Northern Italy. And he had everything going for him. He was associated related to the Medici, and his father after his first two sons were murdered. It was a very nice peaceful age, something like our own.
Why, he had only alocious left, so he had very ambitious dreams for this young man. Unfortunately, the family took a little trip to Spain. And while in Spain, Aloysius is only 13 years old now, he became acquainted with the Society of Jesus and expressed a desire to join them. Of course, Ignatius, this time, had been dead for several years. But the society was in its earliest years of growth.
The family, of course, resisted it, but in vain. And finally, when they returned to Italy, the father reconciled himself to the sons joining the society. Now there are two significant facts I'd just like to mention. First of all, his first holy communion at the age of 12. He died, you know, remember, 23.
His first holy communion was at the hands of Saint Charles Barrow Mayo of Milan. The man who who was a very strong influence with the council of Trent and with the counter reformation. A man who in his own person represented the restoration of the religion of Jesus Christ in his church. So this young boy received his first holy communion at the hands of saint Charles Ballard Mann. We're told he was extremely impressed by that.
The second thing is that when he went to Rome after being accepted in the Society of Jesus, his one of his most outstanding teachers was Saint Charles Bellarmine, who was one of the great lights of this period of the Jesuits. And so these two men, one of them whose influence was almost as far as I know in the act of receiving his first holy communion, the other in the classroom had very strong influences upon this young man. There are certain mysteries about this business. You know, we hear so much about Alexander the sixth, you know, and the Medici popes and the Renaissance in Italy and how downgraded the church was and how it had gone to pot and how everything had broken loose, and a lot of it is true. But you see, you've got to realize that out of that milieu came men like Aloysius Gonzaga.
How do you account for this? Some of your greatest reformers of the church came from Italy, from the very milieu, from the environment, from the cesspool, or any words you want, and some of the words are pretty violent, of the church of the sixteenth century, the the the century of reformation. But anyway, here we come back to this young man who dies at the age of 23. That's pretty and that was young even in those days. What did he accomplish?
Nothing. Didn't accomplish anything. He didn't write anything to he wasn't he didn't achieve any great work. All he did was die at the age of 23 in the service of his fellow man. He's been declared the patron of youth.
But to come back to this mysteriousness about some of these people, at a very early age, by that I mean around 13 or 14, this man or young boy was spending two and three hours a day in meditation. How do you account for that? Gosh, I've been trying that all my life and it I don't it's awfully difficult. And he was doing it without any help, without anybody helping him or encouraging him or giving him books to read. Here he was doing it on his own.
It's very difficult to account for things. And this trip to Spain was completely fortuitous, but it brought him into contact with the Jesuits. So he and he wound up with joining them. And he winds up being in the classroom of a chain of Charles Bellarmine, who's the outstanding theolog one of the outstanding theologians of that period. And all he accomplished was to go down to Rome when the plague hit the city and die.
He didn't even accomplish he didn't even leave memorials as much as Saint the the little flower. This is a fact. What I'm trying to say is this, today, you don't hear very much about the pursuit of personal holiness. You hear so much about social action, the social responsibilities of the church. And remember, all of this stuff can be completely unchristian.
Completely. I don't say it has to be, but it can be. And yet what I'm what what we have to come back to whether we like it or not is that personal holiness means my personal pursuit of salvation. That's all it amounts to. And I can I can give my life and everything else for my neighbor and go to hell?
You we you hardly ever hear this word of their personal responsibility to pursue holiness. The very word turns people off. They say, oh, don't talk to me about that. Who in the world wants to be that? Well, look, I don't know.
You can use some other words, but I don't know any other word that's as good. And yet today, you hear very little about it. Practically not as a matter of fact, it's even spurned. As I said yesterday, the prayer petition is is rejected and disdained because some people say it's too egotistical because, you see, they're moving in the loftier realms of spirituality. And as cardinal Newman said, the first prayer you have to say is a prayer for yourself.
There is no substitute for personal holiness, which simply means your personal effort to follow Jesus Christ. That's what we're talking about, And that's what this young guy had. I don't know where he got it. Saint Teresa of Avila had the same thing. It just seems to come out of nowhere.
You can't explain it coming out of the environment because in since with our wishes and with Saint Teresa of Jesus, we should say, why it certainly didn't come from her environment. But we all have to get to that however we get it. There is no substitute for it. And so today, when we talk about this this man who accomplished nothing, just remember that the main thing we have to accomplish in life and the only thing we have to accomplish in life is to save my soul, which I prefer to say is to save myself, which means the pursuit of holiness. That's what it means.
Now you'll say, well, this is you're just preaching a doctrine of egotism. Am I? The first commandment is love God, and the second commandment that Christ says is to love your neighbor as yourself. I was just reading a document that that the bishops of The United States have issued on the tensions in the priesthood or something like that. And one of the first statements in that little booklet, which has a lot of good stuff in it, is this, that the priest cannot love and esteem other people unless he loves and esteems himself.
That was just that just came in the mail last week. And so if we can't learn anything else from the church giving us this saint, we can learn the greatest, the most important, the most essential, the most exclusive truth in our lives. That success, achievement, is to be weighed in God's terms, not in the currency of the world, of what have you accomplished, what is my worth to society. It's what I am worth before god, and that translates into personal holiness. And that is what Saint Aloysius Gonzaga presents to us.
He gives us a life of holiness, which you see absolutely spreads out to love of neighbor. He died in serving his neighbor at the age of 23. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.