Reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. On one occasion, our lord spoke as follows. Father, lord of heaven and of earth, to you, I offer praise for what you have hidden from the learned and the clever you have revealed to the merest child. Father, it is true. You have graciously willed it to be so.
Everything has been given over to me by my father. No one knows the son but the father, and no one knows the father but the son and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal him. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
On July 7 in the National Catholic Register, there was a very thoughtful and if you are not aware of the situation, a startling article by Kenneth Whitehead, the July issue of the national Catholic register. And the title of it was Catholics leaving the church. Of course, a lot of them aren't leaving the church, unfortunately. You'll see why I said that. Now the article is rather long, and it deals with a poll unmentioned, but I think it was father Andrew Greeley's company who did it.
But anyway, the source of the poll is not mentioned, and it there's really nothing new in it. It goes down the list of, for example, that there's a that the divorce rate among Catholics and remarriage now is about equal with non Catholics. Catholics during the election, you know that one we had some time ago, that many Catholics, even more than non Catholics, didn't consider abortion a major issue. Artificial contraception is accepted just as much or more so than non Catholics. Remarriage after divorce, accepted.
Infidelity or lack of fidelity and going to mass on Sunday, forgotten. Lack of a conception of sin. These are the main issues. And that there are great numbers of people who still claim to be Catholics, and yet who are following those channels, which are very popular. It's really a commentary on the theme, do it yourself Catholicism.
Two things I want to very I'm watching that clock. Two things I wanna lay before you as clearly as I can. The first is this, that the only reason you have for sitting in those pews this morning and claiming to be a Catholic is that Christ lived and was the son of God and left us a church to speak in his name contemporaneously. Point number one. If any of those statements are false, let's go out and mow the lawn or do something useful.
It's not too early to get your golf clubs. Because if any one of those statements is false, you're wasting your time here. You're worse than that. The second point is this, the church has never been an advocate of popularity. She has never sought to be popular.
She doesn't she doesn't voice the will of God by consensus, by committee, by popularity, by taking polls. That's what everyone's expecting the church is going to do, that the church is going to succumb to this popular outcry. Everybody's doing it. Look, 85% of Catholics don't accept the church's doctrine on contraception. Eighty 70% don't accept it on abortion, and so on.
So what? You can go to any jail and find any number of people who don't accept the idea that you're not supposed to steal and drink and dope and all that stuff. What does it prove? The church is the voice of Christ. And Christ was so popular, his good news was so welcomed that they put him on the cross.
How nice. How comfortable. Now they're the exact words that people used it. I mean so called Catholics who think who call themselves Catholics. They say, Well, now, of course, you I know what the church teaches, but after all, the church, you know, it's so old, it's obsolete, you've got a bunch of senile ecclesiastics over there telling us in The United States what we're supposed to do.
We're democracy. You know, we had the Boston Tea Party. They haven't found that out yet, you know. And so eventually, they say the church will will acknowledge slowly but surely the popular views of morality. Don't you ever believe it.
Don't believe it. I'm saying this to encourage you, to give you security in your position. You're not on the losing side. You may be on the unpopular side, you're but not on the losing side. The church has been around two thousand years.
And Sunday, I emphasize this point that we celebrated the feast feast of saint Methodius and his brother, Cyril. They were ninth century saints. Cyril had a great devotion to Saint Clement, and Clement goes back to the first century, died in '97. That's the church that we belong to with its roots in Jesus Christ. And Christ our lord said to his apostles, who hears you, hears me, and who hears me, hears my father who sent me.
That's the league and the team we're on. You cannot lose. In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.