In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Our tainted natures, solitary boast. That's how William Wordsworth, the eighteenth century poet, expressed what he thought was the main characteristic of our blessed lady in his famous poem called the virgin. Our tainted nature's solitary boast.
Well, of course, remember that's not quite true because Jesus Christ was truly man. He had a complete and total human nature, and Jesus was certainly without sin. But as regards one a human being who was absolutely such as we are in every way except sin, the blessed virgin, our blessed lady, is indeed our tainted nature's solitary boast. If there's one thing that we have to bring home to ourselves today in spite of the world we're living in, is the actuality of sin, of downright grievous sin. That we can do it, that we do do it, that we are sinners, but above all, that we have a redeemer.
And the mother of that redeemer was our blessed lady. Now there's plenty of talk about guilt today in certain quarters. You just recall in eighty one of March when Reagan was shot, when the assassination attempt was made upon him. What was the reaction in in many instances? Not in all.
We are all to blame. This young man, don't blame him. It's society. It's his environment. It's his background.
It's his genes. It's everything except him. You see, the presumption is we're so good, following Rousseau, we're so good that we can couldn't be guilty of doing evil. So if we do it, then you've got to account for it. So in society, we are all guilty.
Take more recently the Roper case in Prince George's County. Here's a young college girl from Frostburg, kidnapped, raped, assaulted, tortured, murdered, and burned. What was the plea of the defending attorneys? These young these young men who did this absolutely monstrous crime, they're not guilty. We are all guilty.
Society is guilty. They are victims of their environment. They're the underprivileged. They're the poor. They're the uneducated, and so on and so on, until the bleeding hearts drip into gallon buckets.
So that's the kind of sin we hear about, society's sin. We are all to blame. We are all guilty. Remember, if that's true, then none of us is. And that's that's a very comforting attitude.
Very comforting. And you see, you only know evil by the good. Keep this in mind. You only know a perfect mirror by its an imperfect mirror, I wanna say. You only know the imperfect mirror by the perfect mirror.
You don't know how bad your shoes are until you go into a store to buy a new pair, or when you take your car in to look at a new car. Remember, let's keep this straight. You only know evil insofar as you know good, Because evil is the privation of good. It's a nonentity in itself. And so this feast today, take it to heart.
We can sin. We do sin. We are sinners. And yet time and again, I have people coming who are who are frankly and openly and publicly committing adultery, who are openly and publicly committing fornication, who are openly and publicly being guilty of some injustice. But what do they tell you?
Oh, no. I don't sin. I have no feeling of sin. We love each other. We have been living together for three years, and we love each other.
I have no consciousness. I feel no guilt of sin. Feeling, as if feeling meant anything as regards guilt or even virtue. This is what you hear. We have gotten away from the idea of sin.
Look how the confessional is vacated. And so this feast brings up a perfect image of a perfect human being who from the very first moment of her conception was without the slightest blemish of sin. Her relationship to God was perfect. From the first moment of her conception notice her conception was normal. There was nothing peculiar about it at all.
But from the very first no moment that that human being called Mary began to be, she was sinless. Our tainted natures, solitary boast. May she bless you all this day. Remember, Mary is the patroness of The United States Of America. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit.
Amen.