A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, be on your guard against false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but underneath are wolves on the prowl. You will know them by their deeds. Do you ever pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from prickly plants? Never.
Any sound tree bears good fruit, while a decayed tree bears bad fruit. A sound tree cannot bear bad fruit anymore than a decayed tree can bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. You can tell a tree by its fruit. This is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. While today, we might bring up some examples to contradict this statement. For example, you'd go out and get pears off an apple tree, you know, by doing a certain amount of adjusting. Nevertheless, by and large, what our Lord is saying is true, and it has to be judged in the light of his time and what they knew about growing grapes, what they knew about trees, and they knew a lot.
Now, the theme here is by their fruits, you shall know them. You'll know the wolves by their deeds. And in reading this, there just flashed through my mind with great vividness the name of Erasmus. Daisy Darius Erasmus, sixteenth century. The man who has been very correctly described as the man who laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther hatched.
He's putting it very well. Now Erasmus, you know, prays a folly, that's that's what he's chiefly known as for. But here's a man who was probably the outstanding humanist of the sixteenth century, and who was one of the most severe critics of the church, and as what I would call popular religion in the first half of the sixteenth century, the century of Reformation. And when Luther got going and Calvin and Zwingli and all the rest, the great thing was on whose side is Erasmus? Because in the beginning, many of the reformers took their took their initiative, took their inspiration, got their ammunition from Erasmus, who was a great friend of Thomas More and John Fisher, just remember that.
At the same time, the Catholics or those who were abiding by the old ways, they looked upon him too as their champion because from one day he blew south and the next day he blew north. You couldn't tell precisely where the guy stood. You know, today, the liberals love him, including the liberals in the Catholic church. Some of them would canonize him. But the thing is, you just didn't know where the man stood.
Towards the end of his life, he was considerably disillusioned, considerably. And what was his test? What why did he reject the protestant movement? Why did he, at last, definitely side with the papacy and with the old church? Why?
The one thing there may have been other reasons, but as far as I've read his letters, and there and he was a great letter writer. The great thing that impressed him was this. Look what you guys have done. Luther, Calvin, Dwingli. Remember, you couldn't get two or three of them together without having an internecine fight.
They couldn't agree on the most important doctrines of the church, especially the doctrines of the Eucharist, the mass, salvation, predestination. They couldn't come to they couldn't come to terms among themselves. Furthermore, a great political conflicts were mixed in with their religious convictions. But remember, the Reformation was had its political and national side. And so what Erasmus, who was a man who was always talking peace, who wanted to be left alone, who didn't want to be disturbed, who was a man of tremendous compromise if just as long as you didn't hit each other over the head with two before's.
He just could not bear to see the fruits that were dangling from the tree of the reformation. It was one of the his big arguments. He said, look. If you people have got the truth of god, why why where you go are there so many awful conflicts? He couldn't buy it.
He couldn't accept it. That this is just a matter of fact. And so when our blessed lord is telling us that these wolves are gonna be running around in sheep's clothing, and it's going to be very hard to disguise, I mean to discover the wolves, our Lord becomes a pragmatist. He's just as much a pragmatist as Willie James was a pragmatist or Charles Perce. He says, by their fruit, you'll know them.
Don't look at their clothing. Don't look at their appearances. What are the consequences of it? Now you ask yourself this question. What have been the consequences of so many of the so called reformations in the Catholic church in the twentieth century, in the last fifteen or twenty years?
Have vocations increased? Are our seminaries being crowded by seminarians? If you want to buy a seminary, there are plenty of them or they'll almost give them to you. They're empty and the numbers are still going down. Or have the sisterhoods blossomed with vocations that they can't take care of?
Many sisterhoods are doomed to extinction in our own lifetime. What had been the fruits of this great new wave of the window that is supposed to have been opened? Our Lord said, judge the wolves by their fruit. Judge the tree by what you get out of it. And the tree that doesn't bear good fruit, cut it down.
That's what our Lord said. And notice yesterday, don't forget what he said, don't throw your pearls before swine. And Christ didn't stop there. He went on to say, the pigs will trample them, and they'll trample you. So don't do it.
So today's the good news of Jesus Christ today, let's take it to heart. Let's take it to heart. And as in the sixteenth century when there was so much confusion, you can't exaggerate it, even in England, confusion there became worse and of course it endured longer. Because you see in England, the great question is, where does the Protestants begin and where does Catholicism stop? And that question went right on down into Newman's time and is still with us in the High Church Episcopal part of that denomination.
So speaking of the continent where you had this wide severed but you see, this severance was not at all clear in the beginning. It took good many years, at least until Luther died, and until Calvin got going, to bring out very clearly that this was something new, that this was not just trying to to bring back Christ's church and to eliminate the abuses. That's what Erasmus wanted to do. And there were plenty of abuses, and Erasmus lashed out at them, just as Luther did. But you see, I don't think Luther had any idea where he was gonna wind up, nor but of course, Taliban's a very different picture.
But the point is this, by your their fruits, you will know them. But you're not going to be able, you see, to judge a tree unless by its fruit unless you know what the good fruit's supposed to be. How do you tell the difference between good fruit and bad fruit? You've got to have a concept of that, don't you? Where do you get it?
How do you know what a good pear is as opposed to a poor pear, or a good olive against a rotten olive, or a poor olive? Or poor grapevines as opposed to good ones? If you're gonna judge by the fruit, you're going to have to have some standard or norm. Where do you get it? Where is truth?
And how do you know it? Erasmus, and as an old man, disillusioned, came back to Rome, the living voice of Jesus Christ set on the Rock Of Peter. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.