A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, to his followers, avoid the title of rabbi. One among you is your teacher. The rest of you are learners. Do not call anyone on earth your father.
Only one is your father, the one in heaven. Avoid being called teachers. Only one is your teacher, the messiah. The greatest among you will be the one who serves the rest of you. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, but whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday, we had the feast of Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo. Whether or not she happened to be the mother of Saint Augustine, her she would have been a great lady. Because she had the makings of a saint, just the same as all of us have, the makings of a saint.
That's what we're called to be. Nothing short of that. Nothing short of it. Because we either succeed in that calling, in that vocation, or we are flops, miserable failures, and there's nothing in between. Let's not forget this.
You say that's a severe doctrine. It's what Christ told us. And let me assure you, his doctrine is severe. There's nothing mamdi pamdi about it. It's an either or situation.
Either you're for me or against me. Now, undoubtedly, Monica takes a great deal of her glamour from the fact that she had a son named Augustine of Hippo, Bishop of Hippo. And I don't know what you can say about a man of his stature. A man who died in April in Northern Africa. A man who almost as he was lying on his deathbed, literally, as he was on his deathbed.
The vandals and the Goths were coming in, had swept around Gibraltar, had moved around Northern Africa, and were battering on the gates of Hippo. See, it's a watershed in the history of western culture. The mighty empire of Rome was falling. It was on the way out. Now, here's a man who dies in 04/2030, and who today, in 1984, in a little place on God's earth, which I'm sure Augustine did not know much about, even though it is now a nuclear free city.
Here we are talking about him as a present reality. Because no matter how you look at it, he is a present reality. First of all, in the order of scholarship, in absolutely secular scholarship, there is nothing comparable to Saint Augustine. He is absolutely a gold mine of information for that period of Western history, and they're still mining it with PhD dissertations. From a linguistic point of view, he towers, So that people interested in languages and Latin and other forms of ancient languages, they go to Augustine.
Archaeologists go to Augustine. He's a gold mine for this information. If you want to know about what kind of dresses women wore in his time, who do you go to? Augustine. His his stature in western culture, leaving apart all religious considerations.
There's nothing comparable to Saint Augustine. You'd say, yeah, man's really exaggerating. 's up too early this morning. I am not exaggerating. I'm not at all.
He doesn't belong to Catholics, he belongs to Western culture. And Western culture had has certainly taken him to his heart. Now, of course, undoubtedly, he got a second lease on life through the Reformation. Because for certain reasons, Luther, especially Luther, found him very sympathetic towards his doctrines. But leaving that aside, Augustine still towers huge, incomparable, without appear in Western culture.
Now I'm not exaggerating this. Believe me, I'm not. But now when you look at him as a Catholic, as one of our own, then of course, he's all everything that I've said so far is true, but there's more so much more to be said. He is still he is still in the twentieth century, the doc the doctor of the church. Not the only the, but certainly among among a few.
The only one that comes to your mind is is Thomas Aquinas. And there remember, Aquinas is thirteenth century, and Augustine is dead in 04/30. And remember, Thomas Aquinas is extremely careful in trying to bring Augustine into his teaching teaching as much as he can. Aquinas didn't reject Augustine at all. Practically, in every article in the Summa Theologica, where August where Thomas Aquinas tries to give an argument from authority for the doctrine of the church or his doctrine as he sees it, whom does he quote?
Saint Augustine of Hippo. So from a theological, philosophical, psychological, pedagogical, catechetical, historical, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic point of view, Augustine of Hippo is at the top. The The cream of the cream is the cherry on the whipped cream. I'm not exaggerating this at all. And when I was studying theology or trying to, at least philosophy, Thomas Aquinas was the great name.
You don't hear much about him anymore. But the thing is that Augustine was strong then, and he's strong now. And there is I say this with deliberation. There is more August Augustinism in Catholic thought, if you can think of say speak of Catholic thought, than there is of Thomistic Aristotelianism. Because a Augustine represents the neo platonic movement, of which there there is plenty still among us, unfortunately, I may add.
But that's another question. I'm only saying that we're dealing today with a man who is present tense. Present tense. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Bishop. Now, I just finished well, not just several months ago.
I finished reading a huge book, very detailed, about Augustine Bishop. That's all it's about this thick, and that's all it deals with Augustine the Bishop. And that is what he is should be chiefly known for. He was a pastor of souls. When he first When he left his mother in a grave in Ostia, you know, the seaport of Rome, and returned to Hippo with his illegitimate son, Adeotus, gift of God.
His first impulse was to do what Saint Jerome did, and so many other people who were converted at that time. To traipse off into the Nile Valley and to become a hermit, to live in utter poverty, or at least that's what they said they were doing. Most of it of it was squalor, filth and dirt. But anyway, that was his first impulse, which he renounced because he felt he had a duty and obligation to others, to serve others. He became a bishop against his will.
He didn't want to become a bishop. And in his little well, not so little, but in his entourage, you have the beginning of a religious community. And let me tell you, every single rule of community life in the holy Roman Catholic church has its roots in Augustine. Every single one of them. Think of that.
Remember, was long before Saint no. He was two centuries before Saint Benedict. And Saint Benedict's ruled such has a lot of Saint Augustine, whoever did it. So I And remember, Saint Augustine represents an entirely different world from Aquinas, the thirteenth century Aquinas. He represents a very different world from the twentieth century USA.
But his world was real. His conflicts were vigorous and bitter and sanguinary, I mean bloody. His whole life was a a life of warfare. First with the Maniches, Pelagianism, the Donatists. And remember, when when Augustine came back to Hippo, the Donatists were in power.
They were the great church, the heretics. Augustine was a minor a minority voice. Well, what do you say about a Gotham? All we can say is he's one of us. We can only pray that we be one with him.
In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.