A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus appointed a further 72 and sent them out in pairs before him to every town and place that he intended to visit. And he said to the 72, the harvest is rich, but the workers are few. Therefore, ask the harvest master to send workers into his harvest. Be on your way and remember, I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves.
Do not carry a walking staff or a traveling bag. Wear no sandals and greet no one along the way. On entering any house, first say, peace to this house. If there is a peaceable man there, your peace will rest upon him. If not, it will come back to you.
Stay in the one house eating and drinking what they have to offer you, for the laborer is worth his wages. Do not move from house to house Into whatever city you go, after they welcome you, eat what they set before you and cure their sick. Say to them, the reign of God is at hand. People of any town you enter do not welcome you. Go into its streets and say, we shake the dust out of this from this town from our feet as testimony against you.
But know that the reign of God is near. I assure you on that day, the fate of Sodom will be less severe than that for such a town that rejects you. And this is the gospel according to Saint Luke. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Whoever put or had the decision of putting the feast of Saint Teresa of Lisie, the little flower, who died at the early age of only 24 following the feast of Saint Jerome, which we had yesterday, certainly must have had a sense of the comical. You can't imagine two people so different. Of course, a good many centuries separate them. Saint Jerome is a contemporary of Saint Augustine of Hippo, three fifty four to 04/30. Augustine is over in Hippo, Northern Africa near Carthage, the old city of Carthage.
Jerome started in Rome. He wound up in in Nazareth, where he devoted the rest of his life, besides quarreling with people, to translating the bible, the old what we call the old and the new testament into Latin. Now there had been other translations, but he did the whole job by himself. And believe it or not, he didn't have even a word processor. Now, Saint Jerome was a very difficult man.
He would have a job being canonized today. That's one thing I'm sure of. He was a bird of the first flight. He was a very severe man, even with himself. He was a man of all kinds of ideals, and he carried them to extreme, which, of course, becomes the absurd and which becomes the most grievous kind of error.
He was a man who had his own idea of what following Christ meant, especially for women. That amounted to their and especially noble Roman ladies, which amounted to them giving up all their wealth and jewels and becoming poverty stricken, and, of course, much of their wealth winding up in his coffers, which was a very convenient way of serving the lord. Saint Jerome was a character of the first water, believe me. He winds up at last supported by some Roman ladies' wealth over in Nazareth, and they'll still point out the room there where he did his work. And he devoted his the rest the major part of the of his life to bringing into Latin, which was the current language of most of the Western world, the the bible, the old and the new testaments.
Now as I say, there had been other Latin translations, but not of the whole thing. And now when you compare that man who was so so busy, who was in so many controversies, even with Saint Augustine, they were in controversies. Took a letter about a year to get between the two, but that didn't cool down his ire, and he was a man of great ire, I r e. Now then you jump all the way over into the latter part of the nineteenth century. To this little girl born, I think it was Lesia, I'm not sure of that, but near there, and in a large family she was the last of the brood, a modest family, not poverty stricken by no means, who lives only twenty four years, who has a very early age, about the age of 12, she wanted to go into the Carmelite this Carmelite convent in Nesia where two of her sisters already, were living as nuns.
They wouldn't take her too young, so she and her father went down to Rome, had an interview with Leo the thirteenth, and he said, you will go when God wants you to go. So at the age of 15, she went. Permissions were given, and he had nothing to do with it. So she winds up in this convent with her two sisters, and her great aunt this is one of the things that has always really amazed me. Her ambition was to serve the missions, not to be a contemplative.
But before she even went into the convent as a contemplative, she saw that the best way she could serve the missions was by becoming a contemplative. And this is just a little girl in the boondocks of France, a very little education. She didn't have time to get it. But she had a clear conception of that. Her life was about as quiet, as unspectacular, undramatic, no adventure that you can imagine.
The convent she went into in Lisieux was not a very tranquil place. They had a superior who was a tyrant and a politician in her own little world, and it was a hotbed of dissension and even bitterness. So she wasn't leaving. Her home was much more tranquil than the convent she went into in Lisieux. That's according to the latest edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Now and there, at 28 years of age, she was made a director of novices. And then at 24, she's die she died. And that's all. That's all. Now one thing remained after she died.
It was a number of writings she made at the behest of her superior, and that was published as her autobiography. It wasn't published. First, it was just sent around as a memorial of her death. But it attracted so much attention from the nuns who read it and then who spread it around hand to hand that a great demand was made for this document. It's not a book, really.
And if any of you read it, and it became very popular and then became extremely popular. And she was canonized in in a very in a short space of her practically, her whole family was living when she was canonized. One of the one of the popes called her her a hurricane of holiness, which is alliteration in English. I don't know what it was in the Italian. A hurricane of holiness.
Now when you put these two lives together, you can't imagine a contrast that's more violent. What did they have in common? It's much more easy to say what they didn't have, but they did have something in common. Here's the irascible, the man of the shortest temper in the Eastern Mediterranean. Here's a man who was a great scholar, who had great influence, who moved people, who changed lives, who wrote books, who argued, all that.
That's Saint Jerome over there in Nazareth. And here is this little gal, just a quiet little girl in a convent and a contemplative. All she did was the little job each day that was to be done. That's all she did. And they're both saints.
They're so declared. When you look at the two, you'd say, well, there's a great variety of sainthood. And you're right. There is a tremendous variety of sainthood. Anybody can be a saint.
And the fact of the matter is we are all called upon to be saints. Never forget that. You may not be a canonized saint. I don't know how Jerome made it. But the thing is we are all called upon to be saints and nothing short of that because anything short of that is we're missing our salvation.
That's the way it is. We don't think about that enough. We think of holiness as something for the other person, and And we put holiness in a in a separated category from the hub from the terrible turbulence of daily living. And it is terrible, and you can't escape it. Because when we say she gave her life to be a contemplative in this quiet, tranquil convent, it wasn't a tranquil place at all.
Not at all. And then not long after she was there, her illness started to attack her. So she had her warfare. Nobody goes through life without it. Believe me.
We have no reason to think we ought. Life is not that sort of thing. And so the church puts these two people back to back. Saint Jerome yesterday, the little flower today. And she says, be impressed with them.
Look at them. Look who they were. Look what they did, And take them as your model. There's something in them you can take out for your daily living. It's much easier to find something to identify with Saint Theresa of Lisia than it is with Saint Jerome, believe me.
But on the other hand, he had this tremendous, tremendous, overwhelming love for the scriptures for the scriptures. And he did his what he could to bring the word of God in the scriptures to the crowd, to the vulgus. That's what he tried to do. A one man job. He had no books.
He had no glossaries. He had none of these helps that we have today. And here's this little unknown French girl who becomes and for a while, she was known all over the Catholic world, but her son has sort of sat. I don't know why. Because we certainly can identify her with her and with her way to God, which he called the little way.
In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.