A reading of the Holy Gospel according to Saint John. No one, our lord is speaking. No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the son of man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For god so loved the world that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
For god did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. And this is the word of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. We are celebrating today the feast of the holy cross. But remember, just you you see, we have to remind ourselves that the cross was the most ignominious, the most disgraceful form of punishment that the Roman world could imagine.
They didn't invent the cross. They merely inherited it. There was nothing glamorous or romantic about the cross. It was hideous, absolutely hideous. Think of the repulsion that a normal person has towards even looking at an electric chair.
I mean, the real thing in which men have been electrocuted. They recoil from even looking at it. Well, that's hygienic compared to what happened on a cross. It was a bloody, horrible, stinking, hot mess. It was the death of an ignominious criminal, not just an ordinary good criminal, but the worst of the lot.
And that's what the son of god voluntarily submitted to. Think of that. That that god became man and died on the cross. Now we're told in this morning's gospel by Saint John that Christ came to save the world. Notice the world needed saving.
Rousseau to the contrary, notwithstanding, and all the people today who who don't realize what they're doing or saying in many instances, when they treat our human nature as if it was in some way perfectible. That in some way, it got off the track, but we can bring it back on again. What nonsense. And we have so we have all kinds of empirical proof of it. We don't have to rely upon Genesis.
Remember, even that is now being rejected by some members of the holy Roman Catholic church. We had a priest visiting us here Sunday from Rock from Erie, and they had a meeting up there called by their bishop in which two people came from Oregon and gave them the new reading of Genesis. God didn't create man. He created it, and on it goes. Any resemblance to the Genesis of the Bible is perfectly coincidental.
Christ came into the world and is the son of God. And if there's anything we can say about our holy father who explicitly says, I am Peter, the two hundred and sixty seventh successor of Peter, the vicar of Christ. And my message to you is your need of holiness. Your need of holiness. We don't even hear that word anymore.
We don't even hear the word virtue. We don't even hear the word the imitation of Christ anymore. Or we're told is to realize our potentiality as human beings. What is the potentiality of a human being? Look at Auschwitz.
Look at Dachshund. There you'll see what human beings can do, and it can happen again. It's happened up in Russia. It's happened in Romania. It's happened in Lithuania.
I see the good and approve it and do the opposite. Now that is not Saint Paul. That is an ancient Roman poet. Saint Paul said, the good that I would, I do not. And the evil that I would not, that I do.
How do you account for such contradiction in a human being who's supposed to be so perfect? God came to save the world. What world? The world of two thousand years ago Or the or the world of the next century and the next we're only twenty centuries away. And in the history of the world, that's nothing, really.
Are we to be saved today? Then where is Jesus Christ? If he came in the world to save if he came into the world to save the world, and if I am in the world, but he told me I shouldn't be part of it, where is he To save me me, individual me. Holiness isn't collective. I resent what we read in the in this the mass when we say that god took away the sin of the world.
He took away sins, And there's only individual sins. And if a thousand people commit a wrong, it's an individual for 1,000 individuals. A collectivity is an abstraction. It doesn't exist except in the mind. And so if god came into the world to save the world because we needed salvation, then where is it today for me?
Now if there's one thing that's come out perfectly clear from our holy father's visit to The United States, the Southern Circuit, as people who've been watching it on cable TV can tell you, and as they have told me, I do not have cable, I've not been able to see it. But the thing is, don't believe all you read in the paper about it. Far from it. It's not what that the paper paper tells you lies. As I've said, you know, no sensible person ever tells a lie.
You tell the truth. That's the greatest kind of a lie. It's what you don't say that may be the important thing. And our holy father has stressed strenuously in season and out of season since he's been here, The simple dogmas of the Catholic church. You see, when they talk about the holy father as being or stressing or preaching his truth, that he can change it just as much in one way as another.
That's absolutely absurd. He is the vicar of Christ. He's bringing a message. He isn't creating it. He didn't make it.
Some of it, of course, he can. He can change the idea of eating meat or not eating meat on Friday. He can change at a squiggle of a pen, the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy. We have plenty of good practical I mean, good practicing Catholic priests who are married in other rites. There are some things the pope can do by his own authority.
But when he's coming over here, he's speaking as the vicar of Christ, giving us the truth of Christ, and the truth of Christ remains unchanged. Immorality is immorality, sin is sin, and virtue is virtue. And you can't change one into the other by changing the name. Adultery, extramarital intercourse, premarital intercourse, fornication, These are immoralities that he cannot change and no one else can because these immoralities are in the very nature of their frustration of god's own given creation and nature. Our holy father is giving us the truth of the Catholic church.
It's the church he is speaking for, and no one can deny that. Theologians don't give you the truth of the Catholic church. The people of God, contrary to a current opinion south of the border, do not give us the truth of God. The truth of God came from his son, Jesus Christ, and come to us through his successors on this earth. Peter, living on the rock.
In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.