A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus used images in speaking to his disciples. Can a blind man, Jesus said, act as a guide to a blind man? Will they not, both of them, fall into the ditch? A student is not above his teacher, but every student, when he has finished his study, will be on a par with his teacher and making more money probably.
Why look at the speck in your brother's eye when you miss a prank in your own? How can you say to your brother, brother, let me remove the speck from your eye. Yet at the same time, fail to see the plank in your own eye. Hypocrites, remove the plank from your own eye first and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother god. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I'm sure you can't fail but have ways of admiration for that translation. That's supposed to be an improvement over the previous ones, you know. Today is the feast of saint Peter Clay. SJ became a Jesuit on about the second flight, the second generation of Jesuits out of Barcelona.
And of course, it was around Barcelona, as you know, that Saint Ignatius initiated the movement that which captivated the world in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. He was on about the second wave. He knew men who knew Ignatius. He came as a unobtained priest to Cartagena, where the Jesuits had already founded and were successfully running a, well, call it a college. And that college, of course, was there to educate young men of Spanish origin to take their place in society and to save their souls, as we say, in the best line of neo placement.
So that's he came in there as a very intelligent, very well educated young man waiting to be ordained to the ordained in Bogota, you know, the capital of Colombia. And then came down to to Cartagena, which of course, I'm sure you recall, was one of the three cities of the famous triangle. It was probably the most important well, it was the most important port in South America. That's where the ships brought in the slaves and then carried back the wealth of the newfound land. That's so that's what he he was plunged into.
But remember, Cartagena was the main port of entry for these thousands and thousands of slaves that were being being captured in Africa by their own people and sold by their own people to the to the slavers. Keep that in mind. And there they were. When I the first time I went down to Cartagena, you could still see some of the old tents where they were where they were put put when they came in on the ships. That's all been removed now.
We have we have renovated the harbor. That's the world he came into. He came into a world of educated, cultured men, dedicated, very profoundly dedicated to educating the young men of that great city. It was one of the most important cities of the new world, South America. He wound up by being an or a maverick Because he again, we see the same pattern.
He saw a need and he said somebody's gotta do something about that. Why not me? It's that simple. Or let us say it is that tremendously difficult. Because it's not really simple.
It is not simple being a good parent, a good father, a good mother. It is not simple being a good living single person. It never has been. It may be a little more difficult today. Nothing about life is really simple.
Anything, any more than the the what we call life is simple. And yet in another sense, it is. It isn't that we miss seeing what needs to be done. It isn't that. In most instances, we know what we should do, but we hate to do it.
And here's what point I wanna make is that this is normal. Normal. Within the last forty eight hours, I met a lady who's going blind. She's almost blind. She can't read.
She can barely find a way around in her own room. And she was complaining to me that she could not suffer this patiently. Now you see here that this good woman wants to be patient with this tremendous tremendous thing which has happened to her. And I simply pointed out, look, was Christ patient in the Garden Of Gethsemane? He sweated tears I mean, and he cried.
He begged his father to be freed of what he had to do, what he had to do. He begged to be freed of it. He wasn't patient with it. He was awfully impatient. Impatient means not suffering, not accepting, impartial.
There's no reason to think that doing our duty should be fun and games. That accepting the will of god is going to be just easy and that I can say, yes, lord, and be tranquil and exuberant. That happens sometimes. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, on route to Rome where he wanted to be a a martyr. Of course, the psychiatrist now has made all kinds of studies about him but that's a fact.
He begged his fellow Christians in Rome not to interfere with his martyrdom. He wanted to die for Christ. He was exuberant about it. That's not ordinary. That's not ordinary.
What is most difficult is to do the ordinary things extraordinarily well because of Jesus Christ. Now that's a simple declarative sentence. But boy, is it difficult to put into practice. Now you come back to Saint Peter's favor. We look when you go into Cartagena today, the the most dominating thing in that city is the dome over his tomb.
What's happened to all those other fine Jesuits who were around there, who were scandalized in how he behaved? Because he didn't live up to their standards. He became one with those slaves. Now remember, when you use that word, let's not be romantic about it. These people were brought in after a long sea voice under the most horrible conditions.
And it wasn't just cruel. They what do you do with people on hundreds of people on a tiny boat where the decks are so close together you can't stand up? Where they die, get seasick, where there are no hygienic facilities as they say. And so these people were brought in worse than cattle being brought into into a cattle yard for slaughter. They had no conception of of language, of English language.
And furthermore, they had a conviction. This was something new to me. They had a conviction that they were going to be slaughters when they arrived in the new world. So they fully expected that. So they were scared to death.
They were you can't exaggerate the the turmoil, the confusion, the desperation, the hopelessness that was that got all of this in the minds of those victims of man proving to man. He simply did what he could. Now he's criticized today because he didn't move in the direction of eliminating slavery. He actually had a couple slaves. Why did he have them?
He wanted to teach catechism, the basic truth of of the Catholic faith to these people who had no conception at all. He wanted to save them. That's all he wanted to do. He didn't wanna lift them up. He didn't want them to be he was not a democrat.
He was not a liberal. All he wanted to do was to do what he could to save these immortal souls, immortal human beings for immortality. So he went and he tried to get a hold of several, what appeared to be intelligent young slaves and taught them what he could. First of all, some Spanish and then tried to give them an elementary knowledge of the Christian faith so they could then impart it to their fellow slaves. He's been criticized because he didn't rise up in holy horror and anger against slavery.
Remember, it's easy to be against slaves. That's an abstraction. That's like society. That's like community in these words. The only reality is the reality of the individual human being.
And so he made a a jackass out of himself. That's not an exaggeration. He did. He didn't conform at all to the ordinary normal ways of a Jesuit and Cartagena should live. He lived as one of the slaves.
He lived as one who was going to be executed on the scaffold. Anytime there was an execution, he would be up there with the with the person being executed. That was, of course, very scandalized. He scandalized a lot of people. He still does.
And he died. And now, when you go to Hercartagena, ask where all these friends of his were, these people who had conformed to the Mores of the day. Who remembers? He can't even find two. And yet the first thing that you see is the dome over his tomb.
Just recently, they yesterday or the day before, we had the beatitudes. Our blessed lord telling us how the poor in spirit will inherit the land. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought about it? Of all the parish priests who live in the century, the of ours, which ones remember most internationally?
Of ours. He was another maverick. He was so dumb. He couldn't be normally ordained. He was impossible.
Just a a one man, one man had confidence in that young man who wanted to be a priest. One person, he became a priest and he became the saint, John Dionne. You remember him? One, was he the most prominent ecclesiastic of his day? Well, in a certain sense, he became that in a certain sense but he was not a he was not a politician.
He never had a big parry. He never had any kind of a social position. He never ate a decent meal. He never courted the rich. He never courted culture.
Although that's been downgraded. He had a pretty good library in his little old record. The point is that our blessed lord wasn't wrong when he said the poor in spirit inherit the earth. They do. Take the Polish priest to gain his life up for one of the men who had been selected to to die of starvation.
He went and took his place. That man was a tremendous figure in his day in Poland. He was a missionary. He founded several different kinds of society. He was a writer.
He was an author. He was a great preacher. He but what is he remembered for? Why am I talking about him this morning? Not because he was a great writer, a great missionary, or because he made a name for himself on radio.
Because he was poor in spirit. He gave everything he had for a man he didn't know. I tell you again, let's look at these things. They're our companions. They are our fellow soldiers in the trenches.
They were no better than we are. The only difference is they tried harder. In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit, amen.