A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus went down to a town called Nai and his disciples, the large crowd went along with him. As Jesus approached the gate of that town, Naim, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of a widowed mother. A considerable crowd of townsfolk were with him. The lord was moved with pity upon seeing the widow and said to her, do not cry.
Then he stepped forward and touched the litter. At this, the bearers halted. And Jesus said, young man, I bid you, get up. The dead man sat up and began to speak. Then Jesus gave him back to his mother.
Fear seized upon the crowd, and all of them began to praise god. A great prophet, they said, has risen among us, and god has visited his people. This was the report that spread about Jesus throughout Judea and the surrounding country. 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.
Today, we are celebrating the feast of Saint John Chrysostom, bishop, doctor of the church. And it's an opportunity of reminding ourselves that the church of Jesus Christ did not begin in Rome, that it did not begin with the Latin language, that it came out of the East, and Greek was its language. We often forget this. Now Saint John Chrysostom lived from March, roughly take a few, more or less, and died in 04/2007. Saint Augustine in Hippo, Northern Africa, is born in March and dies in 04/30.
So you see he's about two generations behind Saint John Chrysostom. Chrysostom is Greek speaking, is in Constantinople and in Antioch, at the farthest Eastern end of the Mediterranean. Augustine is in Northern Africa, and the contemporary of Augustine is Jerome. And where did he spend most of his adult life? In Nazareth, in the Far Eastern end of the Mediterranean.
To hold those things together, Augustine was Latin speaking. As far as we know, he didn't know Greek. Jerome was competent in Greek as well as in Latin. Chrysostom represents the Greek world, Antioch and Constantinople. I make no pretense whatsoever of comprehending the life of Saint John Chrysostom.
If anybody is, scandalized, now you know that means to have a block put in your way. If any Catholic today is scandalized by what they call the confusion in the church, all I can say is they will find their utmost consolation if they go back and read in English the history of Saint John Christensen. As I say, I don't pretend to comprehend it. It is the most complicated, bitter, severe, and actually bloody, I mean literally bloody, story. And he wound up in exile.
And the only and here is one instance where where overwhelmingly, and this I can assure you, overwhelmingly the opponents of Saint John seem to have the upper hand. As I say, he died in exile. They burned his cathedral. You have here the whole business of Arius, and it's a very mixed up picture. Extremely mixed up and violent.
I mean literally violent. They didn't stop merely with calling each other names, that was Jerome. And here is an instance where overwhelmingly everything seemed to be opposed to Rome, and yet it was Rome that backed up Chrysostom, and Houlehou endures today. How many in the pews here even recognize the names of Miletus, or even Arius today. But many of us do recognize Saint John Chrysostom, the golden mouth.
You see, we used to have the mass in Latin, in English, and in Greek. Much of it was in Latin. A wee bit of it was in Greek, the Kyrie Lacey, and a good bit of it was in English, the mother tongue of some fraction of the world's population. Of course, we think the whole world speaks English. If they wanna talk to us, let us learn it.
Let them learn English. It's a perfectly Catholic attitude, very democratic. But you see, we've lost that. The church has become too parochial. We have lost its catholicity with a small c, its universality.
I was impressed with this when we heard the cardinal archbishop of Manila speaking on the occasion of Aquino's death, assassination, murder. He's one of us, and yet in many ways, he's not. He's oriental. Then you hear bishops from South Africa, good and black and intelligent men. Unfortunately, they are not too intelligent.
Some of them don't speak English, you understand. That's, you know, we're very fair in that matter. But we have lost that view of Christ Church as universal. The last time I was in Roman was part of this vast audience gathered in this magnificent auditorium. People were separated according to different tours and all that, by nations.
I was with the I was one of the cosmopolitans of the world. But anyway, they were separated out and the holy father spoke to each one briefly. He gave a discourse, and then he spoke to each one briefly a summary in his own or her their own language. But what did we do when we all wanted to pray together? Together?
We were the Catholic church there. Language is important. What did we do when we all tried to pray together? Well, we didn't use Greek. What did we use?
Well, what what could we use except Latin? So we said the Lord's prayer in Latin. Now how many of the highly educated, intelligent, and and superior people of The United States could join in the lord's prayer in Latin? Yet the the populace did. See, we have lost this.
It's a very great pity. We have become very language, you see, is important because it does parochialize. When people want to identify a people, when they wanna bring a people together, which means to bring them together and to exclude others. That's what it means, you know. What do they use?
Language. Everybody recognizes that. And vice versa, if you look at the thing from the contrary point of view, what is the most important cohesion of people? Well, it's a medium of communication. It's what it is.
And the church, at least in the West, came to use Latin. It wasn't always that the early church spoke Greek. Greek was the language of Rome. And so let us today try to recover, try to recover some of our Catholicism, our universality. The church is not the church of Antioch.
The church is not the church of England. It is not the church of Constantinople. It is not the church of Washington, nor is it the church of Rome. It is the church of Jesus Christ for the world. For the world.
And we ought to remind ourselves of it. We can lose this view. I often think of this. What was Colby in that dungeon when he was starving to death? How much did he think of this vastness?
I can tell you that I'm sure that until he was overtaken by his starvation and couldn't think at all, I am sure he realized this truth. Now this is just not an idle statement. I just finished reading a a very informative life of it, and there was lot more to Colby than the than that immense and magnificent gesture when he laid down his life for an unknown sergeant. He had a life behind him. He realized that he belonged to the church universal.
I'll give you one instance. When he got things going with his special movement of his in honor of the Immaculate Conception, what did he do? He took off from Japan. He left his native Poland and went to Japan. So let us today whatever St.
John Christendom was a man who suffered profoundly. He appeared to be on the losing side. He was a minority. He was a tiny voice in the midst of the tumult. He seemed to have lost everything.
Yet, he clung to the church of Jesus Christ in union with Rome. See, it never occurred to Chrysostom to think of the church divided. Chrysostom's view of the church was as one complete total cloth, and to him schism was just as bad as heresy. And that's what he faced. And yet here, remember he's dead in 04/2007.
He's born in March. That's the conception he had of the church of Jesus Christ. Here he is over in Constantinople fighting a very lonely fight, a very lonely fight, and to all appearances losing it. But in the end, he stood by the cross of Jesus, and we remember him and honor him and celebrate his memory today. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.