A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Another time, Jesus said to his disciples, a rich man had a manager who was reported to him for dissipating his property. He summoned the manager and said to him, what is this I hear about you? Give me an account of your stewardship, for it is about to come to an end. You're being fired.
The manager thought to himself, what shall I do? My employer is going to dismiss me. I cannot dig ditches, and I am ashamed to go begging. Ah, he said, I have it. Here is a way to make sure that people will take me into their homes when I am fired.
So the manager called in each one of his master's debtors and said to the first debtor, how much do you owe my master? The man replied, a 100 jars of oil. The manager said, take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it 50. Then he said to the second debtor, how much do you owe? The man answered, a 100 measures of wheat.
The manager said, take your invoice. Make it 80. The owner then gave his devious employee credit for being enterprising. Why? Because, this is our lord speaking, because the worldly take more initiative than the otherworldly when it comes to dealing with their own kind.
And this is the gospel 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 Charles Baromeo of Milan. He died in the sixteenth century, came after that is, he had a great influence subsequently subsequent to the Council of Trent, of which, of course, we hear a good bit today about.
And most of what we hear about it is derogatory. Derogatory. Saint Charles Baromeo is a terrifically difficult man to talk about, because he in some senses is a bridge between the humanistic, the Renaissance in Italy and the papacy, and what I would call the church after or subsequent to the Reformation. The Council of Trent was the answer of the Catholic Church to Protestantism. Now by Protestantism, I mean specifically the doctrines of men like Zwingli, Calvin, and of course Martin Luther.
Not this is you do not include what was happening in England. England became so Protestant under Elizabeth, and that's a little bit subsequent to this. Now, here's a man, Charles Baromeo, who was one of the prime movers of the Council of Trent. But more than that, he was an extremely articulate champion of the church subsequent to the Council of Trent. Now, we are hearing a great deal about Martin Luther.
This is the anniversary of his birth. Well, five hundred years ago, and the the National Geographic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, these are some of the articles that I have seen. And you'd say, well, this is the popular press. Indeed, it is the popular press. And by popular press, you mean the press that the populace, the people read.
And this is what they are reading about Martin Luther. And much of it is very authentic, very authentic. Now the point that we the one thing that is not brought out in any of these articles is a fact that long before Martin Luther, you had serious churchmen who wanted a council, who wanted a reform, who were just as aware of the of the weaknesses in the church. I we should say in the weakness of the church men. And I'll give you some names, Saint Thomas More and and Erasmus of Rotterdam.
They're just two. And in many ways, Erasmus, antecedent, he was ahead of Martin Luther. The the the the obvious need for reform was known abroad to all of Europe, all of Europe. And there was demands for a council. Council.
But why there wasn't a council? The complicated picture. It has to do with nationalism. It has to do with the with the raiding, princes, principalities, trying to select a place. Notice, this was all before the Council of Trent, before even Luther died, before he died.
So the idea that that in some of its practices, in its administration, in many of the lives of its churchmen, the church needed reform was a self evident fact, fact, before Martin Luther even came on the scene. Now, what Trent did was a tremendous thing, tremendous. For the first time, we had an authentic declaration, not that the doctrines had not been taught, not that people hadn't lived them, but here we had authentic statements in Latin, in a language. And remember in those days there were plenty of people who spoke Latin. It was not a dead language.
We had a statement in clear cut language of what the Catholic church teaches. And let me tell you, that council is still viable. It is still viable. And probably no one did more than Charles Barra Mayo to push into action the decisions of the council, and one of them was the education of the clergy. If he had done nothing more than that, he would have been well known and had been notable.
He is the one who programmed courses of study in separate schools for the clergy. Of course, this has been discarded, you know, within the last twenty some years. Been discarded. But we'll have to come back to it, and we're coming back to it. You cannot have a viable, you cannot have an impressive church, you cannot have the representatives of Jesus Christ speaking in his name who are ignorant.
And yet, that ignorance can be cultivated. But Saint Charles Barraumaeus saw that this was probably the most necessary, the most vital effort that had to be made if we wanted to reform the church, get back into the schools, get back into creating. Notice the idea of a seminary came from from Charles Barra Mayo. That the young men should be gathered together in a special place, and he called formation. Formation.
And we had then the idea of the minor seminary and the major seminary, which would correspond to our four years of high school plus two years of college for the minor seminary, and for the major two years the last two years of college and four years of theology. And this was to create a priest who would be an educated man according to the times and the contemporary norms. Now we can have a young man who comes out of a university with an an AB degree in business administration and is ordained a priest in in four years or less. That's what we're dealing with now. You can see that's an enormous improvement.
And of this we will reap the harvest in the times to come. So today, as we celebrate this great man, who's downgraded of course in many areas, His his concept of education for priesthood has been has been rejected in many in many many instances, which doesn't surprise you, of course. But common sense says that it shouldn't be regret re the of course, it could be improved upon, but you don't improve a building by destroying it. You may destroy it and put a new building up, but you haven't restored the old one. So before we tear things down, we ought to realize, should they be torn down?
Have we something better to put in its place? And all I can say is just take up the Catholic directory for The United States Of America for the last twenty years and look at some of the statistics there. And the end isn't in sight. The end is not in sight. We are producing priests today who have had practically no philosophy whatsoever, none at all.
And yet they will then be plunged into reading some of these theologians who've had little philosophy too. And yet we say theology, which is the queen of the sciences, rests upon philosophy. So and that's the way the situation is today. And as we celebrate the feast of Saint Charles Barro Mayo today, let us pray fervently for the church because the church the church is not an abstraction. The church faces the world in the persons of its churchmen and Catholics the world over.
The church isn't just encouragement, but the the heart the channel of bringing the word of god to god's faithful is chiefly through the priest, or that's the way it has been in the Catholic church. And consequently, if we want those channels to be clear and forceful and urgent and flowing and authentic, we need an educated clergy and educated to be priests, not to necessarily to be business administrators or engineers or anything else. And so I say today as we celebrate this great man's feast, he was a great man. I've only touched on one facet of his life. His life is fantastic.
As I say, he's the bridge between the old and the new. But this is one point that I think is so important and essential, the education of the clergy of Jesus Christ for his church. And so as we celebrate this feast today, let us turn to him and say, and pray that he will, as he was so eager and urgent and enthusiastic and intelligent in championing the cause of the clerical education in his day, that as a saint with Christ in heaven, he will keep that same regard for our problems. I think our problems today are no less severe than they were in the latter part of the sixteenth century. In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit.
Amen.