A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus spoke as follows. Come to me all you who are weary and find life burdensome. And I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart.
Your souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. 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. There's a great deal of talk today about process theology, about making the church contemporary.
The idea of process theology is it's a direct contradiction of the teaching of the holy Roman Catholic church that there was one deposit of faith by our lord and that that has not been added to. There has been development, as Newman pointed out in his wonderful book, Development of Doctrine, but that the deposit of faith once made was made for good. Process theology says that's not so. And these are these are ecclesiastics talking. What matters is the theology that we draw out from the people of god, and that's an ongoing revelation.
So that is the church, the contemporary church that we're supposed to be lining up with. Now I'm not pulling these straws out. I just I can give you page and number on a on a publication just of this week. So the idea is we must be contemporary. We must be with it.
Now if there's anything, being a Catholic means is not to be contemporary, but to be with Jesus Christ who lived and died something less than two thousand years ago. Who wants to be contemporary if you are aligning aligning yourself with Jesus Christ? He lived in history. He died. He rose from the dead as a fact of history at a certain date, at a certain time, at a certain place, or some of these very fine religious don't even accept that.
I think it's frightfully important that a Catholic has recognizes, is consciously aware of his roots. A tree is not worth anything without its roots. And the this all this talk about of being now there's a very good and real sense in which the church should be contemporary. We are if I stand in this pulpit, I'm not speaking to people two thousand years ago in a Greek or a Roman culture. I know that.
But when you're talking about faith and doctrine as we read as we had in the opening prayer of this mass, the light of god's truth well, if you're talking about the light of god's truth, then your ambition should be to line up with that truth, not with what some Tom Dicker Harry calls himself a theologian, spouts out or gets published. Now, in the last three days, the liturgy of the church has been frightfully I notice, I said frightfully. It puts a wholesome fear into us. Fear, about a good fear, of what the church of Christ is. Today we are, although I'm saying the mass of the day, it is the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Yesterday we had the feast of Saint Bonaventure, Franciscan. And the day before that we had the feast of an Indian girl who died at the age of 24. In 1680, up at Aurisville, New York, about 40 miles west of Auburn. Put those three together. Here's this young Indian girl, born with her brother from an Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father.
The play hits their tribe. She loses her father, her mother, and her brother. She herself is disfigured for life by the disease, and her eyesight is impaired. She is then turned over to an uncle, I presume a Mohawk, and is brought into his home and is brought up by him. One night some missionaries come through and yet a lot of the books today, they don't call them Catholics, they are Christians.
They were Catholic priests. They were they were old time Jesuits. Her father, her uncle, gave them lodging for the night. That was her introduction to Christianity. Her mother, incidentally was a Christian.
This was her first contact with a priest. The upshot of it was that a little later she met another Jesuit missionary and was baptized, became a Catholic. What was the result of her becoming a Catholic? Her life within that tribe, that Mohawk tribe became impossible, became miserable. Because the ideals that she was trying to live were so contrary to what they had been used to.
And so one of her spiritual advisors said, Look, the best thing for you to do is to leave here and go up into Canada. So that young girl trekked over some 200 miles to a Catholic village near Montreal where she received her first holy communion, where she took a vow of chastity. Now for an Indian girl to take a vow of chastity was a tremendous step because there was no way she could maintain herself without a husband. But she did it and in three years she died. Now she's a blessed now and she will be canonized.
So she dies in 1680, up here in near Montreal in a whole new world that Saint Bonaventure in the thirteenth century had no idea of, believe me. Now here's Saint Bonaventure, a Franciscan. He was a boy of about 10 when Francis of Assisi died. He was down in Italy. He became a Franciscan.
He went up into the beginnings of the University of Paris, where he became a doctor, a master, a magistera of theology. Where at the same time, Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican, another mendicant, was studying and became a magistera. There's no record that they ever met, but they must have met. But there's no record that they ever did. Here's this man, the Franciscan, dies in December, the same year that Aquinas died.
Here he becomes a master of theology, he becomes a master general of the new, relatively new Franciscan order which he tries to bring back to the ideals of the founder, Francis of Assisi. He becomes a bishop and a cardinal. He becomes what is called the prince of mystics. He certainly is no Aquinas. He leaned heavily on Saint Augustine.
And Saint Augustine is three fifty four to four thirty, remember, in Africa. And then he dies at the Council of Lyon, December. A council that Aquinas died en route to. What a contrast, what a contrast between this Indian maiden up near Montreal in the seventeenth century and a Bonaventure in all the new of the old world at its best and dies in December. And then today we have our the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Well Mount Carmel, you know, a big cape that comes out near Haifa into the Mediterranean about 1,800 feet high. Some of you may have been there. And it goes way way back as a religious center or a religious place of some religious worship way before Christ goes back into the Old Testament. The earliest record we have of it of a Catholic group of brothers is about 1206. When the patriarch of Jerusalem gives them a rule.
Now they were there before that, that's obvious. And then they leave, have to leave in about 1500, December something, about 1240, they left and went to Cyprus. They were at Cyprus to 1270, I mean 1570 when they when the Turks came. So then they were dispersed. They came back Discalced, sister to Sister Theresa of Avila has has reformed the Carmelites down in Spain.
This is way over at the end of the Mediterranean. And then they come back. The Descouse Carmelites come back in about 1570 or a little later than that. In sixteen hundreds, they come back to to Mount Carmel, and they've been there ever since. And there's a certain amount of controversy about all of this too.
Let me tell you. But, anyway, that's the rough outline. Now this here is where we are with these people. We are not contemporaries. We're Christians, and we're Catholics.
We go back to Jesus Christ. We don't go back to some, fluttering theologian, male or female, because that n o w movement is very much alive in this area. Believe me. And so I've just given you a brief summary of the last three days. An Indian girl appear dies at the age of 24 in the seventeenth century.
Here you have Saint Bonaventure of Franciscan. Think of what's going on in Brazil in the name of Saint Francis. But the here here was a man who was at the peak of activity, scholarship, of piety, of holiness in the thirteenth century. And here today, we are commemorating a religious institution based and has been, at least since the beginning of the thirteenth century, on that 1,800 precipice jutting out into the Mediterranean Sea. And that goes back as a religious foundation, probably very certainly to the Old Testament, to Elias.
They that is the company we keep. These are the men and women who saw the light of truth and adhered to it. And that's the light of truth that must light our way. Because if there's any truth in this world of time and space that is going to lead us to the world that is timeless and spaceless, it is not your philosophers. It is not your scientists.
It is going to be the word of god given once and for all by his son, Jesus Christ, and transmitted by his living voice, the church founded on the Rock Of Peter. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.