A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. As, Jesus was speaking, a pharisee invited him to dine at his house. And those there wasn't always this tremendous friction between our lord and the pharisees, and we mustn't make the great mistake of condemning all because of the sins of the few. So anyway, our lord entered. He he accepted the invitation of the pharisee and reclined at table.
Seeing this, the pharisee was surprised that he had not first performed the ablutions prescribed by the law before eating. The lord said to him, notice he's talking now to his host and to others who are around him, you Pharisees, you cleanse the outside of cup and dish, but within, you are filled with rapaciousness. Fools, Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But if you give what you have as alms, all will be wiped clean for you. 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. I want to go back to something I merely touched upon yesterday because I think it's so tremendously important that we keep in mind some of the truths of the holy Roman Catholic church, and that is the communion of saints. You hear a great deal about community today. You get sick and tired of hearing about it.
You don't hear much about the community of saints. And yet that's an article of the Catholic faith. Of course, at the end of this month, November 1, everybody will be thinking about it. Then we all forget it for the rest of the year. But we shouldn't forget it.
If we're Catholics, let's live the joy of our Catholic faith. Of course, there's a cross in it. Let's not forget it, and I'm not the you're not going to forget the cross. You're gonna get clobbered with it time and again. It's how you carry it that's important.
The point is we are not alone. You hear so much today about isolation. People depressed because of loneliness. Now I'm I firmly believe this. I have no reason to doubt it at all.
More than one psychiatrist has told me this personally: The number of people who get they come into his office, they're they they feel so alone and forlorn and isolated and lonely. Remember, it has nothing to do with the multitudes around you. I can say this from my own humble experience. I was never so alone in my life as I was in Saint Mark's Square Venice on a Saturday night in in the summer. I'll landed there around 07:00.
I didn't have any hotel reservations. This is St. Mark's Square in Venice, and it was Saturday night. And he the place was was jumping with lights and song and music and I'm not exactly if you've been there you know. It it was a tremendous.
I was surrounded with people, and everybody happy and joyous and all that. I never felt so alone in my life as that when I stepped out of that gondola. Incidentally, I was befriended by a little German boy and his father, and everything turned out just perfect. But the thing is, I this is a fact. But it shouldn't be a fact for a Christian.
This is my point. We belong to the community of saints, not of saints. We shy away from these words. Yet that's what we're called. That prayer we opened this mass with.
I mean, the the three invocations. That Christ came to call me to holiness. He didn't come to call me to a hygienic life. He didn't call for me to be a man of of a state, of property. He didn't call me to be a a paragon of good health, or a good parent, or any of these things.
He they may be involved, but he called me to holiness. He came for holiness. That's what we prayed in that opening prayer, the second Kyrie. That Christ came for our holiness. What do we mean by this?
Let's not wait till the end of October and the beginning of November to think about the company we keep. It's not the church's fault if we forget these things. She keeps hammering it that time again. Yesterday and, you know, the Catholic church and the saints, you have a choice there. It's like a kid going into a magnificent candy store.
Pick We've got all kinds of saints. Now I'm going to say something that sounds a little vulgar, but we have saints who were stinking, repulsive, obnoxious. And this was a man who did his best to be a, I think, a Capuchin or a karma like monk, but nobody would take him in. So he became a vagabond in Italy, and has been canonized a saint. And yesterday we had Saint Teresa of Avila, doctor of the church, you know, and all of that.
Well, there's no you there's no he's going into. Take your pick. Anything you want, we've got it in stock. And if we don't have it, we'll get it. But think of the company you keep, the church militant.
Now that means not just the people here in this life. It means those who have made it, those who are triumphant, the saints who have made it. And in between us here struggling and bearing our cross, trying to get along, trying to do what we can, not maybe doing even our best, but we're trying. And between that those who have made it and atrovent, the church by her her infallible authority says, there's an in between, those in purgatory. And we call that the church suffering.
Thus, that word church is even being minimized today. One of our most important publications called Origins. They won't capitalize the word church when referring to the church of Jesus Christ. I don't understand these things. Church with a small c can mean any old thing.
Look, this is a church. Church with a capital c has an entirely different meaning. Why not use it? But what is this church of Jesus Christ we're talking about? It isn't just good.
Well, whatever we are, we Catholics who assemble, we baptize Christians who assemble on a Sunday. That's a very important segment segment. That's important that we be part of that community, of course. But that's not the church with a capital c. It's a little bit of the church.
And then the church itself tries to bring home to us week in and week out, remember the saints. Remember those who have gone before you. They have done everything that you have done. They have faced everything you have faced. They have survived, and they have made it.
They are saints. And the church puts its official seal on it. And in between the church suffering, the souls in purgatory. Do we ever think of it? That used to be a great devotion.
That by our prayers, by our indulgences, that we earned by saying the rosary, by making the stations, by doing works of charity, by offering our works and sufferings of the day, that we could help our brethren in purgatory. Do we think about that anymore? No. We're so busy with this world, we forget two thirds of the other world. And we can't afford to do it as Catholics.
We cannot afford to do this. I keep coming back to old Maximilian Kobe when he went into that starvation bunker, and when one by one his companion starved it and died. How lonely he must have felt. I have no idea how he felt. We we have some firsthand records of this.
But the thing is he never felt alone as long as he could feel anything, as long as he was conscious. He never felt alone. We have this on the testimony of the jailers and people who knew him, and who who served him, fellow prisoners while he was down there, and that doesn't until they murdered him. Now so let's read let's keep this in mind, that we are baptized into the church of Jesus Christ with a big c. That's baptism.
Let's not forget that. We don't have to go out and say we have discovered ecumenism. We've had it all along. Every baptized person, however that or its substitute, is a member of Christ's church belonging to this community of Christ. I don't care what language, what your complexion is, where you come from.
This is the unity of Jesus Christ Church in which we all are together. And I just was recently talking to a convert, and what amazed him was the diversity in the Catholic church. See, we take these things so much for granted. He said he said, I go into a church and I see all kinds of people in there. He wasn't used to that.
See, a lot of churches are like country clubs, and Catholic churches are in the same category sometimes. I met a pastor from the whole big state of Michigan. He says, my big struggle is to keep this parish from being a country club. And I knew what he meant. Because just down the road was a I say this with respect, was a magnificent Presbyterian complex, magnificent.
But you couldn't get in there without being voted in. We belong to the church of Jesus Christ. We belong to the community of saints. Saints who have made it, saints who are in between, and saints in the making, and that's where we are. We are in the making.
And think of the company we keep. If any of you've ever sung in a choir, if you played on a team, if you've done anything as a team, you will know the vigor that comes from doing things together. And that's what we should always think. We should never forget it no matter how alone we are physically. Remember that there's no there's there's no comparison between being alone and loneliness.
The two things are totally different. I was surrounded with people in the Saint Mark's Square. I wasn't alone, my golly. But I was very lonely. And so I beg you to keep this in mind, that you're not alone.
You're not isolated. Unless you isolate yourself, you can do it. But I don't know why you'd want to do it. If you do it, don't complain. You're doing it yourself.
Keep in mind the company you keep. Yesterday was Saint Albert. We will soon have the great Jesuit martyrs of Canada, Isaac, Job, Raybuff, and the rest. We have martyrs day in and day out. They're not all martyrs.
We had the little flower recently. She was no martyr. She was just a plain ordinary little peasant girl from Normandy, I think. Anyway, she's leaving Brittany in Normandy. We have all kinds.
Take your pick, but keep in their company.