A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. As Jesus drew near Jericho, a blind man sat at the side of the road begging. Hearing the crowd go by, the man asked, what is that? Someone answered that it was Jesus of Nazareth passing by. The blind man shouted out, Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.
Those in the lead sternly ordered the man to keep quiet, but the blind man cried out all the more, son of David, have pity on me. Jesus stopped and ordered the man to be brought to him and then said to the blind man, what do you want me to do for you? Lord, he answered, I want to see. Jesus said to him, receive your sight. Your faith has healed you.
At that very moment, the man was given his sight and began to follow Jesus, giving God the glory. And everybody who witnessed it gave praise to God, And this is the gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Jericho's a very beautiful place. It's an oasis. And I happened to be in Jerusalem in February. And the night I arrived, we had four inches of snow up in Jerusalem, so don't let anyone tell you you don't get snow up there. And the following day was slushy and cold and miserable.
Now Jericho is only about a it's about a 30 or oh, say an hour's easy automobile ride. From the heights of Jerusalem you go down. Jericho is several 100 feet below sea level. And as I say, it's an oasis. That's the first thing that you is a that sweeps over you as you come down through the arid, almost desert areas between Jerusalem and Jericho, you come suddenly upon this place with the orange trees growing and the water and the brooks running around.
And and I'm not exaggerating this, this is the way it was. As we walked down the street, the windows were open of the school and the little and the children were singing a hymn in Arabic. It was a missionary school, a Franciscan school. It was an idyllic site. And of course, you always remember this marvelous happening there of the blind man.
Well, had to get that off my chest because it's such a happy, happy memory. I hope most of you saw sixty minutes last night, and at least a part of it devoted to the Sandinistas. Now, the first thing that was remarkable about it was that I think that sixty Minutes treated it fairly well. Fairly, but I mean justly. It wasn't loaded all in favor of the Secondly, there were three people interviewed.
These are the Sandinistas. These are the people, two of whom the holy father said were anathema, and the second one who is supposed to be still a nun. But of these three people who were the only ones interviewed, two of them are priests and one's a merino nun. Now if you saw that, you and seeing it's important to see the how these people talk, the the animation of their face, whether they have a good set of teeth or not. You know, that's very important.
But you do get impressions from visual contact. Now it brought out some very basic ideas. First of all, that this group is setting up their own church and it's called the Church of the People. Now Luther, whose birthday we were celebrating this year with a great deal of pomp and circumstance, Remember, here is the way Luther worked. He posted his theses, that was nothing extraordinary.
That was no that happens it corresponds to what you can do at any university, today even. And in a matter of fact, in some places they still have the open public defense of the doctorate we used to have at the Catholic U. There wasn't anything extraordinary about his publication of those theses that he was prepared to defend. Nothing extraordinary about it. Now he moves to defending these theses.
He's a good Augustinian monk. The first thing happens, he see, he lost every one of his debates. He lost every one of them. But you see this is another example of where you can win the battle and lose the war. The first thing he did was to reject the papacy.
In other words, when he defended his doctrine and his opponents, Cajetan and company, pointed out that this could not be sustained by the official declarations of the Holy Father, Luther said, well, we can get rid of the holy father. We don't need the holy father. All I need are councils. There I will find the truth of Jesus Christ in the councils. So the next debate he had, then it became a matter of appealing to councils.
And the result of that was, of course, that he was licked on that score. So then he said, after he refused to accept the official clear cut statements from the council, the next step was to the bible, Now I will accept only the word of God as it is in the written word of God. And there and you say, yes, but how does that get to home to me? There is the problem. Luther was aware of that problem.
I don't wanna simplify it and make him look foolish. He wasn't a fool. But there is the problem. How does god speak to me from the written word? It has to be some some kind of a direct line.
But that was the end of the line for Luther, that book that book that you can hold in your hand. Now what do we find down in Nicaragua? They are leaving the bible behind. And I if any of you saw it, then you would I hope you caught it. Where one of them, whether it was one of the priests, cardinal, or the other one, or the Severino sister, I don't know which one, but was saying, we take our religion not coming down from a hierarchy down, but we take it from the people coming up.
So now we have a standard of Christ religion of of a volcano effect. You have an eruption of the so called people, whoever they are, and that's gonna give us our religion. So make no mistake about it, and then you you I hope you heard how they tried to defend. Remember, these are two priests and a nun talking. They were the only ones interviewed.
These are supposed to be Catholics. It's unbelievable. And then when they try to to defend the idea of a Christianized Marxism and this idea that Christ was a great revolutionary. Now you see, they'll admit it that they can't prove that from the bible. They can't prove it from a council.
They can't prove it from the holy see. Then where do you prove it? Well, they say we prove it become because that's the way it is. That's the way the human development is taking place. So we appeal to the people.
Who in the world is the people? A bunch of ignorant peasants or what? Now this is standing up here and talking to you people, it seems so almost silly, this stuff, But this is winning the minds of people. It's putting people up with enough of persuasion in their heart to sacrifice their lives for this. I was down in Columbia when the Holy Father went to Nicaragua, and the Colombian papers from Bogota, they gave it a big a big spread.
How when the Holy Father came off of his plane, they had lined up. They had about six or seven well, they had all the bishops and the archbishops lined up on one side. On the other side, corresponding to the bishops, they had military men from Cuba. And then you know how he was interrupted during his speech. That was all on last night.
And then the sister comes and blames the holy father for showing his, well, anger at the way the crowd acted, and everybody agrees. They they said it last night that that the reaction of the crowd had been fomented. It had been planned. Yet these people call themselves Catholics. Now these things can happen.
These things can happen. And they had another priest who's joined them down there. So there were three priests interviewed how they how he explained when he came back up here and was helping out, someone said that, well, you you you talk like a Marxist. So he tried to explain to them how it was possible for him as a Catholic priest to talk like a Marxist, but the poor dummies couldn't understand him. Well, you can really be hung from your ankles, and you still won't understand how in the world a Catholic priest can call himself a Marxist because either Marxist becomes a Catholic or the Catholic becomes a Marxist, And the two are slightly different, slightly different.
Now I bring this to your attention because there is so much propaganda about these things. I'm not saying the problem is simple. I'm not saying the Sandinistas are all wrong. I'm not up here on a political harangue. I'm only saying I hope you saw it because what's you see, what I want what I'm saying is the whole thing is truth.
What in the world is truth? Your feelings, the right of the people, because someone reacts to an injustice, does that make me right in what I'm doing? Always? These things are very complicated. And let me tell you, when the chips are down, for the most part, we make these decisions on our feelings, on our emotions.
I agree to that. I agree to it because I have histories all in that direction, all in that direction. People are self centered. There are idealists. But in all of these movements, everybody uses everybody else.
Now this is not foreign to our situation in The United States. The church in The United States, the Catholic church is facing a crisis within itself, within itself. The first inkling I had of this was when they brought out the confraternity bible. They called it the American bible. I don't want an American bible.
I want the bible which gives me what Christ said and did. What's an American bible? And now you are hearing talk of the American church. I don't wanna belong to an American church. I wanna belong to the church of Jesus Christ.
As I say, the church in The United States, we Catholics, are facing a crisis. It's not future tense. It's present tense. You have what are called they call them papal priests, and that's a term of opprobrium. Where did I hear that?
I heard it right in Saint Peter's Square, not more than a month ago, by a doctor from Denver, Colorado. So I'm not there I'm not at all, building erecting windmills to have some fun running at them after a Don Quixote fashion at all. And we're going to come back to this. Where is the church of Jesus Christ? And where do we find its truth?
That's the heart of the matter. And it's very simple. It's in the living Christ, and the living Christ is in his living church. It was, it is, and it shall be. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.