In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Today's reading, both the excerpt from Saint Paul and this and these parables of our blessed Lord, especially the concluding sentences of our blessed Lord speaking in no longer in a parable, are extremely pertinent to the feast day we celebrated yesterday of the of those eight martyrs. We call them the North American martyrs. Six priests who were Jesuits and two laymen.
Why did they come in cold blooded decision? Not one of them had any personal obligation to come over here. Secondly, after they came on the these men were educated men. They had a work to do in Remember, this is seventeenth century. They had a work to do in Europe, plenty of work to do.
They had their calling over there. They had their responsibilities there. And let me tell you, the work they did there gave some promise of producing some fruit. When they came over here, they were giving all that up. And you say, yes, but they didn't know about it.
That's true, they didn't know what they were getting into when they came here first. But you know they had a chance to pull out, and some of them even returned to France and came back. Then they came back with full knowledge of what they were facing over here. From a human point of view, it seems total waste. What did they accomplish?
Can These men didn't die altogether, you know. There were at least three groups, and maybe there was even more than that. So they didn't have the esprit de corps which would go from a united front. And we know how we can support one another in a crisis situation. Of course, we know it.
It's a whole point of social worship. They didn't have that. Can you imagine how alone, how isolated, how abandoned, how frustrated those men must have felt when they were horribly, horribly, murdered, murdered by the Indians. To to read to read the description of their martyrdoms, you don't do that before you're sitting down at the dining room table. Their torture was extraordinary, even in those days.
Now why did they do this? As far as those men could see, when they in the crises of their lives, when they were giving their lives, and remember the actual death was a blessing. In all that period they could what could they see? What have I done? Today it makes me sick to hear people tell me we should take care of deprived children, of children who are not up to par, in order to make them productive members of society.
Do we all have to be productive members of society to be have to have respect? Well, look at their lives. What did they do? What did they accomplish? And think of the loneliness, loneliness, the isolation.
And I ask you to think of Saint Thomas More. His death was a was a picnic compared to theirs. And yet how alone he felt in that Tower of London when in the whole of England, only one bishop sided with him. All the other bishops took the oath of supremacy. Only Fisher did not.
Only one bishop did not. So it was Fisher and Moore and a few Carthusian monks. Out of all of England, out of that whole Catholic England, they were the ones who said, We cannot take that oath. And they paid for it with their lives. Why?
Because of truth. Those missionaries who came over here from France or from Germany or from Spain or Portugal or Italy, they came over here to transmit truth, the good news of Jesus Christ, which is not ambiguous. And yet today I can pick up a catechism as I did yesterday for our for our young Catholic people, and they talk about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. And let me tell you, any good Lutheran, any good Calvinistic Calvin, follower of Calvin, could take that up and agree with it 100%. But what do you mean by real?
That's the ambiguity we're being faced today, and yet these men who gave their lives under severe torture, there was no ambiguity about the truth. And there's no ambiguity about the truth of the church Catholic church today. This book I'm talking about remember, this is absolutely odd rim to to what Saint Paul told us this morning and what our blessed Lord says. What has been given to you? Our blessed Lord said, go and teach teach all nations.
Well, you can't. You can't teach without teaching something. It's only these so called educationists can do that. And and remember, this this so called catechism, they don't call it that, it has some fancy title. Up in the upper right hand corner in a block, it says doctrine.
And that's where this occurred. It reoccur as speaks of the real presence. And then it says that in modern times there has been disagreement among Christians about this what the about the Eucharist. And it leaves it there, as if all these opinions as if there was some doubt about Catholic truth. But you see, that's a quizzling where we talk about real presence.
Is God really present in this church? Of course he is. But is he present in a different way in the Eucharist? There is the question. And yet what that so called Catholic doctrine says could be accepted by all the Protestant reformers.
Every one of them could have accepted it. What do you mean by the word real? There's not a word there about the the bread being changed into the body and blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. Not a word about it. Where where what have we come to?
Where are we going? And when you think of these men like Moore and these these North American and these are just a tiny little handful. These are the ones we know. How about the millions of anonymous saints and martyrs? Martyrs.
A martyr is one who gives his life up for his faith. There's plenty of ways of doing that besides being tortured by Indians. So our lord says, be on your guard. Be prepared. You are the servant of the lord.
You are the servant of your master, Jesus Christ. Paul says, I have passed on what I was given, and what you have received, pass on. And when the church itself, I say church itself, not church men, puts its seal upon its doctrine, it's not ambiguous. It's not grave, hodgepodge of something between black and white. It is not.
It is the doctrine of Jesus Christ, being voiced by a living voice, a contemporary voice in our day. The name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.