A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. A family record of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. And Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Perez was the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram.
Ram was the father of Amminidab, Amminidab, the father of Noshon. Noshon, the father of Salmon, and Salmon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth. Obed was the father of Jesay, Jesay the father of king David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been the wife of Uriah, to which there is that beautiful story, you know.
Solomon was the father of Reboam, Reboam the father of Abiah, Abiah the father of Asa, and Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat. And Jehoshaphat was the father of Joram, and Joram, the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah was the father of Jothan. And Jothan, the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh. Manasseh, the father of Amos, and Amos, the father of Josiah. Josiah became the father of Ichaniah and his brothers at the time of the Babylonian exile.
Now after the Babylonian exile, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel was the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim Eliakim, the father of Azor. Azor was the father of Zadok, and Zadok, the father of Akim. Akim, the father of Eliud, and Eliud, the father of Eliazar, and Eliazar, the father of Mathan, and Mathan, the father of Jacob. We're getting down to some names we recognize now. It's reading them going fast.
And Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. And it was of her that Jesus, was called the Messiah, was born. Thus, the total number of generations is, from Abraham to David, 14. From David to the Babylonian captivity, 14. And from the Babylonian captivity to the messiah, 14 generations.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. We often think of the good news as the gospels, the four gospels, and maybe include the epistles. I don't know.
Suit yourself. But as a matter of fact, you see, the good news is the good news of the resurrection. You didn't have the gospels for at least sixty years after the resurrection. And so when the gospels when Mary or Magdalene or or when the the apostles who saw Jesus, when they brought the good news, they were bringing the good news of the resurrected Christ. The messiah had proved and justified himself by walking out of the grave.
The resurrection is the heart and the soul of Christianity. The risen Christ, it's not the cross that's the end of things. It's the, it's the resurrection which is the beginning of everything. Because as Saint Paul says, either Christ is risen or our faith is in vain, and we are miserable men and women too. So Christianity is a is a religion resurrection of Christ, the son of God, and it is basically a religion of joy, basically, because you can't have the resurrection without that cross.
This is something we forget. Some people complain, well, you know, to be a good practicing Catholic, you know, it's a it's a it's an awful kind of miserable life. Well, it may be. I don't know. To be a mother and a father can be a very miserable life too, you know, and yet it can be an exalted life.
So, now I'm gonna come down to that terrible accident of Gander. 258 servicemen and 255 servicemen and three servicewomen died. They were paratroopers, notice. There were three women with them, and then there were eight other people on the plane. Now last night, there was a very touching, anybody who's human would be touched, where the president and missus Regan went down to Fort Campbell and met the families of the men and the women who lost their lives in Gander last Thursday.
Now there was a great deal, it has been for the last few nights on the news and all that, about this tragedy. Now there's one thing I have missed about it all. That is the words of a pagan Latin poet. Cicero well, maybe you won't go on Cicero was the man, he was maybe he wasn't a poet. He says, Dulce et decorum es propatria mori.
Now when you translate it, it becomes sloppy. And I I I can't do much better than what I'm going to do, and no one else has. Dulce, it is sweet, decorum, and proper to die to die for one's country. To die for one's country. Dulce is sweet.
Is is that word, it's it's untranslatable. It certainly doesn't mean the English word sweet. And, Dulce et decorum. Decorum means it's in total that it is in total conformity with man's perfection, with all that he wants, with all that he ought to be. Decorum.
That was a Latin pagan said that. And the most we can say about an that accident in Gander is that it was a tragedy. All we can talk about are the tears and the grief of the of the relatives. Now remember Christ wept at the tune of his tomb of his friend Lazarus. He wept.
He wept over the city of Jerusalem. There's nothing wrong with being sad. There's nothing unchristian or uncathic about tears. There is nothing wrong or immoral about grieving. But there's something radically wrong when we lose our orientation.
These men who were on that plane died for their country. Is there a how when did you hear the word patriotism as a virtue mentioned? You can't mention it today. If I got up in a classroom and told this duty the young men especially, look, that it is a wonderful and noble thing for you to die for your country, do you know the reaction I would get because I've tried this? I would get a laugh.
They think it's ridiculous. And I'm not exaggerating it. It didn't happen in a class, but it's happened individually. Now I'm not exaggerating. What does Christianity do?
What does the Catholic church teach you about patriotism? It teaches you indeed that that it is a sweet and noble thing to die for your country. Christ said it was a noble thing to give your life for your neighbor. Well, remember, the common good takes precedence and is more valuable than the individual good. That's good, solid philosophy.
Christian, Christian speaking as a Christian. And therefore makes sense to to give your life for your country. It is a noble and glorious thing. And I'm not talking in terms of empty rhetoric. I'm talking in terms of solid religion because there's it comes back to the virtue of justice.
Patriotism is a daughter of the virtue of justice. And just as I have duties to individual human being, injustice, I have to give you your rights. I have to fulfill my obligations, so I have an obligation to the state, and the state has a right to me. And if the state needs me to save it, it can say come out here and be killed. You you come out and you give your life for me.
The state can do that. But you see, from a if you if you have nothing else to say about this, remember, if you are a human secularist, don't talk to me about virtue. They have no answer to this. Because if you're a human secularist, and that is the best word I know to describe the milieu in which we're living, the worst possible evil of all evils is death. And losing your health, let me say too, because because that'd be a form of death.
You become an unproductive member of society. What does the church teach on this? And this is nothing new that I'm making up, ye God, you will find it in page after page in Saint Thomas Aquinas, that patriotism is a virtue. It's no patriotism, patriarch country. That I have an obligation, that I'm serving God in serving my nation, that I am fulfilling my life in giving my life to my country, that it is a noble and a very proper thing for me to suffer death in behalf of my country.
I I'm not exaggerating this at all. But believe me, I haven't heard anything even remotely resembling this on all that's been said since last Thursday. So that here Christ gives you an answer to a great what we think is a tragedy. If you had heard that 258 military people had lost their lives in a very brave attack on some town or city or hill or something, we would have said, Oh, what noble men and women will give them the Purple Heart or something. Well the people who went down on that plane and gander were just in the same boat.
They were in uniform. They weren't serving themselves, they were serving their country. Patria, patriotism, which is a virtue which leads you to salvation. Just as much as purity and justice because it is a daughter, as we say, of justice. You hear a lot about justice today, you know, peace and justice.
And doves, we're getting a lot of doves this Christmas. I feel strong about this. And it comes back to what my well chosen remarks last Sunday on that or the Sunday before, in regard to the Life's Magazine Time Magazine article was Children Having Children. Nine pages. Nine pages of all the horrors and the tragedy of pregnancy and little girls in their teens having babies.
Not a word in there about adultery or fornication. Oh, no. The great evil is having a baby, and it's not an immorality at all. There's no sin in a woman having a child. It's being it's happened pretty often, you know.
Even I had a mother, you know. That's the way the world is twisted. That's the world you're living in. And you try to you try to fit that into Christianity or you fit Christianity into it, it cannot be done. Either the world becomes Christian or your so called Christianity becomes the world.
So our blessed Lord has an answer. The problem of pain and evil is with it. I'm not up here giving a flippant answer to it, but I'm saying the only answer that I know of to this problem of pain or evil is right there on the cross of Jesus Christ. And he gave an answer with his life. He didn't philosophize about it.
He's no Immanuel Kant. He's not even a C. S. Lewis. Christ gave us the answer of suffering.
He may he gave he gave meaning to it. And that's the important thing. That pain and evil I'm not I'm not saying I'm always going to see the light through it and understand what it's all about. Why this should have happened in Gander. I don't know why it happened in Gander.
That these two two hundred and fifty six people were suddenly their life physical life was extinguished. I don't know the answer to that. But I have a solution that gives meaning to it. It doesn't become a a heinous mystery. It isn't something that's the end of the world.
I look upon that as something in the way that Christ is and and God almighty and his providence is running the world. And the suffering that's involved makes sense if I have a savior. If I have a savior. And the whole point of Christmas is that I have a savior. And the whole point of Easter is that he proved it.
He rose from the dead. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.