A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, none of those who cry out, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of God, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven. When that day comes, many will plead with me, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? Have we not exercised demons by its power? Did we not do many miracles in your name as well?
Then I will declare to them solemnly, I never knew you. Out of my sight, you evildoers. Anyone, our lord continues, who hears my words and puts them into practice is like the wise man who built his house on solid rock. When the rainy season set in and the torrents came and the wind blew and buffeted his house, it did not collapse. It was built solidly on rock.
Anyone who hears my words but does not put them into practice is like the foolish man who built his house on sand. The rains fell and the torrents came, and the winds blew and lashed against his house, and it collapsed, completely ruined. He has finished this discourse and left the crowds spelled bound by his teaching. The reason was that he taught with authority and not like the scribes. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. When you think over the mission of our lord, the few, the two or three years, possibly only two years, that he spent on the mission. A number of facts come to the surface. One of them is he went after the people.
He didn't sit down up in Nazareth or in Jerusalem, or sit down and build himself a complex around the Sea Of Galilee and wait for people to come. He went to them, point number one. Second, he didn't write a book. He didn't send messages around. He went and taught by word-of-mouth, and he constantly refers to the teaching.
He never refers to a book, unless it be what we call the Old Testament or the Bible. But he himself did not leave us in the least or in any way a written document. Not not anything remotely like it. And at the and and at the last, when he is leaving, and when he's assigning the the mission of the church to his disciples, he he tells them, go and teach all nations. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit, and teach them everything that I've taught you.
And behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. That is what I've just said, you can't possibly escape from the New Testament. This doesn't rest upon this text or that text or who wrote this or or what it is in the original Greek. This is an observation which you cannot escape. Our Lord was constantly moving north and south, east and west.
He went to the east beyond the lake and he went as far west as the sea. And he went as far north as Palestine went, and he went all the way south to Jerusalem, or we say up to the capital. He was on the move, and he was teaching. And so is our Holy Father today on the move. As no other pope, at least in recent times, has moved, John Paul the second has moved.
And no movement of his to the sheep of the fold had more danger in it. More threats, took more courage than his visit to Poland which ends today. This is the last of it. Now, there is a word that is being tossed around a lot today, and that is political. People will say that's political.
You'll say the the decision of the Supreme Court on abortion was political. You say this man sides with President Reagan, that's political. You say the Holy Father going into Poland today and proclaiming the working man's right to form a union, that we say, or some say, is political. And in saying that, invariably they're downgrading it. In some way or other, that word political has an aura, a climate, an atmosphere, a frame of reference which is pejoric, downgrading, unfavorably critical.
Well, first of all is what in the world do we mean when we say it's political. The word political comes from a good Greek word, polis, which means the city. And things having to do with the city is called political. And in the time that the for example, Aristotle or Plato was writing, the word city was almost identified with the state. The city state.
Athens was a city state in the time of Pericles. So political then, we say, has to do with the state. Is there something wrong about that? Is that pejoric? Is that a critical term, or what?
I can remember very well when Leo XIII's encyclical was a hot potato, rarum no barum. Now in Leo XIII, the end of the nineteenth century, he maintained an ad encyclical Well, let's say, the Rerum Novarum of Leo the thirteenth was a manifesto of the teaching of God as regards human rights as applied to individual men and women whom we call working people. It was a declaration of their rights in virtue of the natural law, in virtue of being human beings, in virtue of being sons and daughters of God created to his image and likeness. And therefore, because they're human, not because of their worth to society or how great or how little they are, but because they're human, they have human rights which are unalienable. You cannot take them away from them.
Oh, you can you can keep them from operating, but you cannot destroy that right. This was what Leo the thirteenth came out with. What was when I was growing up in mill towns around Maryland, what was the great cry coming out of Bethlehem Steel? What right has the Holy Father to interfere with my business? Let him stick to his religion.
Let him talk about the Bible. But his is political. And many a Catholic employer was greatly aggrieved with Reverend Navarre. Believe me, remember, it was not accepted with open arms, even by some of your your your most prominent Catholic industrialists. That was at the end of the nineteenth century.
Then we had the Quadradesi Moano, which reinforced this doctrine, that because working men are human, they have rights which you cannot deny them, simply because they are human beings. Again, we had something of a human cry, but it was much tempered. Forty years had gone by. And now what was revolutionary in Leo the thirteenth was accepted as unimportant doctrine, and when Cuadro J. Simoane came out forty years later.
So don't be misled when people throw around political as if it automatically and ipso facto condemns something. It's a very good word. What is more important than being concerned with the essential welfare of the state? And another way for saying welfare of the state is to say political. Now our Holy Father went into into Poland.
He didn't send a book. He didn't run off a lot of Xerox copies. He met people face to face as our blessed Lord did. Here indeed is the living voice of Jesus Christ. At the beginning of this year, when he was preparing to go into Central America, he prepared a a videotape that would be broadcast in Central America before his coming.
And the opening sentence was, I come to bring you the faith and the salvation of Jesus Christ. Could he do less? Could he do more? He didn't send a book. He didn't send emissaries with a lot of documents.
He came to give them the word by word-of-mouth. He carried the message of Jesus Christ in his person as Jesus Christ. And that is what he did and has been doing. And that is what he did and has we can use the perfect past tense now almost. That is what he has done in Poland.
He has spoken out not as the politician in quotation marks. He has gone to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to a nation that in all the world, I dare say, is the most faithful to Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.