A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountainside. After he had sat down, his disciples gathered around him, and he began to teach them. How blessed, he said, are the poor in spirit. The reign of god is theirs.
Blessed too are the sorrow. They shall be consoled. Blessed are the lowly. They shall inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for holiness.
They shall have their fill. Blessed are they who show mercy. Mercy shall be theirs. Blessed are the single hearted, for they shall see God. Blessed to the peacemakers, they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those persecuted for the sake of holiness. The reign of god is theirs. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice for your reward in heaven is great. They persecuted the prophets before you in the very same way.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father, of the son, of the holy spirit. Amen. Yesterday was the feast of Corpus Christi, when the church begs us to turn our attention to the corporeality of Jesus Christ, to the fact that the Son of God had a honest to God body. Now, in the early days of the church you had a movement which was a movement of the elite.
These people who were not just ordinary human beings, they were called Gnostics. And of course they felt they had a hotline straight from headquarters to the Holy Spirit. So they were not of the common stuff of human beings. And they could not swallow the fact that God had a body because they thought the body was sin, shameful, bad, evil. Well, you recognize that.
Take Martin Luther all the way down. Oh, then let's not get there's a lot of that in the holy Roman Catholic church. Well, anyway, that was the Gnostics. They could not accept the idea of thinking of divinity with a body, because they looked upon the body as one of the as a saint of the sixteenth century, and a martyr put it that believed that the body is just a satchel of dome. That was no Martin Luther, was John Fisher.
So the Church asks us, begs us, certainly since the thirteenth century in a very formal way, to recall the fact that God became actually and really in every total sense of the word except sin human. Jesus Christ was human and a human body. Now yesterday morning, I spent most of the morning when I wasn't in church looking up the origins of a familiar phrase, which you all have heard, Familiarity breeds contempt. Well, it goes back, as far as I can see, to a guy named Sirius, about '40 BC. And comes it's amazing how that phrase comes down through the Latins, through Shakespeare, and through other authors.
And usually the verb is the idea of beginning, of producing, of causing to be. Francis Thompson, as far as I know, the latest one who wrote a commentary. He wrote two sonnets on marriage, the holy state of matrimony, in which he takes this idea and shows, in one instance, how indeed familiarity breeds contempt. But on the other hand, he shows that it can generate love, respect, devotion. Take your choice.
Thomas Aquinas quotes it. Well, anyway, familiarity as far as the Holy Eucharist is concerned has brought about a certain amount of contempt. That's not my opinion. The Holy Father said that in his letter of Holy Thursday, And in the most recent statement from the sacred congregation, which we got just about a week or so ago, they emphasized this. It was it used to be unthinkable that a Catholic would come into a Catholic church where the Eucharist was preserved in the tabernacle and not genuflect.
Now some of the genuflections may have been a bit grotesque, but they tried. Today, they wander in just as if they were coming into a meeting house. Matter of fact, a man came in yesterday and said, Are you going to have a meeting here today? I'm not exaggerating this. Yesterday, he came in and said, Are you having I said, You mean the mass?
Just think of this idea. We talk about a celebration now. That's a now. You can celebrate anything. You can celebrate winning a good crap game.
Our holy father, in his letter of the last Holy Thursday, said there are two tables at the mass. I don't know what the word mass means. I have no brief for the word mass yet that I don't know what it means. I mean, it's etymologically. Nobody knows as far as I know.
But we the holy father said that the that the mass has two tables, one of bread and one of the word. And the one of the bread is sacrifice. You see, that idea of the mass as sacrifice has been downpainted. He mentions that in his letter of Holy Thursday. The mass is a sacrifice.
That's the teaching of the Catholic church. It's not just an assembly of the faithful singing hallelujahs or or having a confibio meeting. It's a sacrifice where the where Christ is priest and victim, and where the the priest is taking his place. And when he joins the laity, says, Made our sacrifice. The laity sitting in the pews aren't excluded from their priestly office.
So I can recall when I was first ordained in 1935, how we still had a certain amount of reluctance on the part of certain people to go to Holy Communion frequently. And in our little parish, one of the most devout women there in a couple of years would not go to Holy she went to Mass every single morning. But the pastor could not get her to change her attitude about going to communion because she felt that she was totally unworthy, this was something you only did once a year, and it was downgrading to think that you could do it as so many people around her. Do you see that idea of being better than others? She couldn't do, you know, lower herself to that level.
So I paid a visit to the good lady, thinking that the holy oil of ordination still being on my hands might work wonders. Well, didn't. She agreed with everything. I took the encyclical of of Saint Pius and read it to her. Of course, he was only the holy father, you see, speaking.
It didn't change her mind at all. But the point is, and I can remember hearing confessions one night, Christmas Eve, and there was a man, and he said he hadn't been to communion for a year, and yet he he got it as far as I could see it. He looked very like so I said, why haven't you gone to communion for a year? Because, he said, I'm not worthy. Now, I'm not defending that.
That's the church says that's not the right attitude. We don't go to communion because we're worthy. We go to communion because we're unworthy. We need food. You don't eat food because you're servanted with food.
You eat food because you need it. And so the food of the food of the Eucharist Christ said, I'm your I'm the bread of life. Well, you give bread to those who need it, who are hungry, who need sustenance. So that's the way so don't misunderstand my position. I'm only saying that here you have this great contrast.
And that the fact is that familiarity has bred contempt. Just listen at the young people, now that we're giving communion under both species, how they refer to the wine and the bread. They don't seem to know what it's all about. And we don't even have the terminology to express these things. Because we're well, we may not get into that, but the thing is this is the fact of the love life.
So that more and more we are professing things with our lips and not acting them out in our lives. Now that little thing like a gen I have seen in Baltimore City, people when they walk past the Catholic church with gender effect in the street, I'm not saying that's a good idea or a bad idea. I'm really saying I've seen that in certain parts of Baltimore City when I was growing up. Why were they doing it? Because it was a nice building there that their dimes had helped to build?
Of course not. They were doing it because they were making an act of faith on the real presence of Jesus Christ, the Corpus Christi. Now, we're losing some of this. And I I say the holy father pointed this out in his letter on Thursday and the sacred congregation slams it around, that we're losing that sense of sacredness. Of course, every building is the house of God.
The whole world's the house of God. We all know that. You don't have to run around finding God. But there's a very special kind of presence of Jesus Christ in his humanity. And we make an act of tremendous act of faith when here we bow down and say, My Lord and my God, we're something that's like a little quarter sized piece of bread.
And yet that's the essence of Catholicism. I don't care whether you I'm not putting into any kind of verbiage about how we explain it, but Christ said, This is my body and this is my blood. Eat my body. Drink my blood. And let me tell you, in January, one of the great charges against the Christians was they were cannibals.
This is 01/1976, at the Nagalus in his Apologia. And because the Christians had in 01/1976 they said that they were so devout and of course look at our terminology that we used yesterday it makes us out to be cannibals. If you take the words absolutely literally, and yet they are literal in a sense. Do you think about these things? Of course we do.
It's all become it's become such a formality that we're forgetting the essence shadow in substance. So let us once again, in our own lives we can't do much about it about other people but we can do a lot about ourselves. Let us reaffirm our faith in the youth it's a tremendous act of faith. As Aquinas says, Sight, touch, taste, and thee is each deceived. And as he says, the heart alone is to bleed.
In other words, an act of faith which involves the will. So let us reaffirm our faith in the body of Christ and act it out in church. It isn't that we put on a funerial doom. The Catholic church isn't a funeral parlor, but it is the dwelling place of god in the Eucharist when the priest at mass has changed that bread and wine into the body, the blood, soul, and divinity of the son of God. You feel almost embarrassed when you say things like it.
It is absolutely so tremendous. Thank you.