A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, you will be hated by everyone on account of me. Now guess what? This is Christ speaking, and he's telling you that you are going to be hated by everyone on account of him. But whoever holds out till the end, he or she will escape death.
When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next. I solemnly assure you, you will not have covered the towns of Israel before the son of man comes. A new pupil outranks his teacher. No slave is better than his master. The pupil should be glad to become like his teacher, the slave like his master.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Saint Athanasius, many people, good fervent devout Catholics included, is not even a name. It's it's sort of an odd looking name, Athanasius. He comes from a part of the world that up until recent days, recent weeks or months, wasn't too familiar to us, at least not on TV.
Now it's almost becoming a second home. This man Athanasius, Greek, lived in the fourth century. And my friends, he would be very familiar and recognize a lot that's going on in the twentieth. Athanasius, without any I'm not at all downgrading the men who found himself opposed to Athanasius. I'm not at all imputing their sincerity, not in the least.
Because anybody, I've said this time and again, anyone who sits down and quietly tries to think about Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, and then you quietly say, son of god and son of man, truly god and truly man, there's only one way of avoiding confusion, and that's not to think about it. If you think about it and try to put the two things together, try to reconcile them, you are going to be in a morass of doubt, of questions, and most of them unanswered. Now in the this is fourth century, in the three hundreds. You have the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon and Ephesus. Now the big question was, who is Jesus Christ?
Who who and what is he? Some said he is truly god, son of god, divine. Alright. If you say that, then how do you reconcile the fact he had a body? And especially if you have a conception of the body that is something lower than dirt, which they had and which people have today.
Every first class Platonist has that idea of the body. This is the idea of a Thomas More in the sixteenth century that were satchels of dung. That's a quotation. So how can you say that god almighty tied himself up to a satchel of dung? Well, you see, it's impossible.
You say, well, then then how what was this person Jesus Christ? You'll say, well, he was truly the son of god, but his body was just an illusion. Of course, this is nonsense, but this is what some people said. They were trying to safeguard his divinity, and they couldn't reconcile it with their conception of humanity because they had a very distorted view of humanity. Now on the other hand, you had those who were very much impressed with Christ's humanity and couldn't reconcile his divinity with it and therefore invoke various kinds of theories so that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, was not truly divine in the sense of one person.
Here you have then the emphasis is trying to preserve Christ's humanity. Now this is a very anyone who faces this great problem is going to to face this kind of a situation. So I am not at all condemning those who we say today were heretics and so forth. It was a it's it was and is a difficult problem, and it is still with us when we will not listen to the voice of the living church. I've just been spending a good many hours with a book by Monsignor Kelly called The Battle for the American Church.
It's a it's a very thoroughly annotated volume of the last twenty years or so, twenty or thirty years of what's been happening to the Catholic church especially in America. Now one of the big questions is, who is Jesus Christ? We have men like Hans Kung. I've just been reading him. To be a Christian is the title of the book, which is not a a good translation of the German.
I think maybe my German 's wacky. It could well be. But the thing is, the very divinity of Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, is today being seriously questioned by people in the so called Catholic church. And I'm not exaggerating. Go and read the book yourself.
And it's been going on for at least fifteen or twenty years because so so much emphasis is being placed upon a book, upon the written word. Christ never wrote a book. Christ never told anybody to write a book. He never edited a book. Nothing was published over his signature.
Nothing was published with his approbation. He left nothing in writing. He left a living institution. Ah, but this is one of the big questions that our great and some of our fine friends deny that he left an institution. Why do you have this return to Gnosticism?
These are words which people weren't even they didn't even see these words. This is stuff which is with us today because one of the basic tenets of Gnosticism is to reject institutional church. Now I'm not fighting windmills. The New York Times at the around January and February had at least two reviews in its book section on this matter of of gnosticism. One of them was a review of the book by father Brown.
The other one was a reply from the author in which there was a conclusion of a rebuttal by the author. This was in the New York Times just around New Year's. So the question today as it was in the fourth century with Athanasius, who is Jesus Christ? Was he just a good ordinary man? Was he just some kind of a conception of God almighty but not divine?
You can get plenty of text out of Hans Kuhn to to verify this in the translation. I'm not reading the German, but I have Hans Kuhn's book before me. Where do we stand? Where did Athanasius stand? What did he get for defending the divinity of Jesus Christ just as much as as he as he defended his humanity?
He got booted out. It was an object of persecution. Jesus Christ said, the world will hate you. The world will hate you. What did they do to Thomas More?
Now don't mistake Thomas More was no great philosopher. I maintain he wasn't even a great theologian. He was a great saint. What did he die for? He died for the supremacy of the holy father over a king.
This is the thing in a nutshell beyond all ambiguity. Who had who had charge of the sacramental system of the church, a king or the pope? He knew the pope as well as anybody. He knew what was going on down in Rome in the Renaissance. Erasmus was his great and good friend.
There was no more of a critic of the papacy than Erasmus, but Erasmus never became a Lutheran. Now we are living in times which are as critical. We don't recognize it. We don't recognize it because for that's for several reasons. But I tell you the very things which Athanasius stood up for are being today not only challenged, but the things that he fought are being maintained within the church.
And when the holy seat at last, at long last, stands up and makes a declaration about Hans Kung, all the great liberals throw up their arms and said, where is the freedom of religion and thought and all that malarkey? There is no freedom as regards truth. There is only freedom if you deny an absolute, and that's what's being done today. Just don't get don't mistake all this malarkey about contraception. The basic issue here is who has the right?
Where is the origin of law? That's the issue. Does the church speak with authority of God? Who does? Is there a God?
You say, who can ask that question and be a Christian? They're doing it. And you say you're exaggerating. If you think I'm exaggerating, get Kelly's book and read it and don't forget the footnotes. He gives you the names, he gives you the dates, he gives you the books, he gives you the magazines, and everything else.
This is the world you are living in. I'm living in it. So today when we recognize Saint Athanasius who stood up, gated he wasn't a martyr in the sense in which he had his head chopped off like a moor. We're with him. The things that he defended need defending today.
We need to stand up and be counted, and the world will hate you. It's the liberals who control the media. And how that is done is is done with a great deal of intelligence and smartness. And a lot of the followers of Jesus Christ aren't very smart. More wound up on the block.
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.