A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they assembled in a body. And one of them, a lawyer, in an attempt to trip up Jesus, asked him, teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him, you shall love the lord your god with all your heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.
And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these two commandments, the whole law is based and the prophets as well. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
As far as I could judge, and my judgment isn't very good in this matter or in many matters, our media, at least our local media, gave scant attention to our holy father's visit to Africa. They take very scant attention. Scarcely knew it happened. And yet this was a this was probably one of the most, tendatious of his visits. It was even, in a sense, worse than his visit up to The Netherlands, which was bad enough.
Because here he moved into a non Christian world. He moved into a world that in many instances his congregation was a majority of Muslims or of the various religious cults of Africa. And yet, you know, the Catholic church is extremely vigorous and growing in what we call the third world. That's why he went there. It's probably the hope of the church, because we're losing a lot of what we call the Western world, USA I mean.
Now, after reading from the New York Times, that's my chief source of information, and that's it. Remember that's my practically my only source of information. The thing our holy father was driving at in season and out of season, was to try to hold together diversity in the unity of faith. Now this is something we've got to get through our heads. There is a unity of faith.
Now by faith, I I know this meaning this word is in the same category as the word love. It's almost meaningless. I assure you, it it certainly is. It has so many meanings that it practically has no meaning anymore. That is this word faith.
But the Catholic church is extremely clear in its concept of faith. That means an ascent to truth on authority. An ascent to truth on authority. Now, truth cannot contradict itself. In spite of what you see you see a lot of it around today.
But remember, the it's in The United States, a great deal of this relativism because people don't accept the concept of truth. They'll say everything is relative. Then they'll throw out the word Einstein, you know, or his theory of relativity, of which there's probably, in most instances, no absolutely nothing. But anyway, that's the tenor of the day, and I mean it's the tenor of the day. I meet young high school boys and girls coming from Catholic high schools who tell me, well, know, there's you know, it isn't a matter of black you know they're just quoting thinking of somebody else's words.
They never made this up. You know, it isn't a matter of black and white. It's a matter of gray. It it isn't an either or. You know, that's they don't say that.
But they do say this black and white thing. In other words, there's no such thing as it as an absolute truth. It's it's what you feel. What are you comfortable with? What makes you happy?
What gives you a sense of fulfillment? Are you comfortable in going to mass in tattered blue jeans? That's exactly what happened one Sunday, where this intellectual conversation took place. I'm pardon me, dialogue. We had a dialogue.
That puts it in a very elevated state, you know. Our holy father was he went into Africa as the vicar of Christ on earth, the successor of Peter. On this rock, I will build my church. He didn't say rocks. That was not addressed to all the and yet some scripture scholars tell us, well, he was talking to all the apostles.
How can you say that when Christ said, thou art Peter and on this rock? Can you have a more singular test than the proper name? And then when he did speak to all of these, he said, go and teach what I have taught you. What I have taught you. You go out and teach.
Not what you feel comfortable with, not what you like, not what is conformable to your cultural traditions, what I have taught you. And anyone who reads the New Testament with half an eye open will know there are many hard sayings in the New Testament. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you won't have life in you. The flesh that I give you will be your food, and the blood that I drink it will will be your drink. This coming from a Jew to Jews.
Is that a comfortable saying if you take it seriously? So what our holy father went into Africa was to do two things. To and he did it unequivocally. He set himself firmly against bigamy. He set himself firmly against artificial contraception.
He set himself up vigorously against abortion. He set himself up vigorously for the sanctity of the family. Vigorously. He set himself up vigorously as the speaker of Christ on earth without any equivocation. He knows who he is.
At the same time, at the same time, he stressed the fact that Christianity is for all men, not for Westerners, not for Gentiles, not for Jews. Remember, as I said Sunday, when Saint Paul came to Corinth, that little isthmus only four miles wide, there's where you had the Hellenistic world, the Greek world coming confront in confrontation with Christianity, with the message of Christ. I remember Saint Paul says, I got it straight from Christ. I didn't get it from any proto apostle or from men. And so our holy father, in speaking to these various congregations that he and some of them were huge in Africa, he brought this out that Christianity is for all men, and it it uses what it finds.
It adapts itself. An African isn't expected to become a Frenchman, although there were French missionaries who did exactly that. There were German missionaries who came over here and thought they had to make to make a good Catholic, you had to make a good German. This is kind of natural. But this isn't the way it is.
The the the message of Jesus Christ is for all men, and it has to come in their vernacular. So you have to put these two things together, and that's the rub. How you do, you do it. And that this is a tremendous simplification, but that's the impression I got from reading the accounts of what our holy father said in Africa to try to bring these things together. It was a tremendous gesture on his part to even attempt this, to even attempt it.
Imagine getting up for thousands and thousands of people, all of Muslims. And then you think, these people are they know their history. When you think of the history of of the conflict between the the world of Islam and Christianity, and our holy father plopped himself right down in the center of it, just as Paul did in Corinth, just as Paul did in Ephesus, just as Saint Peter did in Rome with his friend Saint Paul. It's the church of Jesus Christ, nineteen hundred and eighty five August. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit.
Amen.