A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, teacher, tell my brother to give me my share of our inheritance. Our lord replied, friend, who has set me up as your judge or your arbiter? Arbiter. Then turning to the crowd, Jesus said, avoid greed in all its forms.
A man may be wealthy, but his possessions do not guarantee him life. Jesus then told them a parable. There was a rich man, he said, who had a good harvest, very good harvest. What shall I do? He said to himself.
I have no place to store my harvest. I know, he said, what I'll do. I'll pull down my old grain bins and build bigger ones. All my grain and all my goods will go into them. And then I will say to myself, you have blessings in reserve for years.
Relax. Eat heartily. Drink well. Enjoy yourself. But god said to him, you fool.
This very night, your life shall be required of you. To whom then will all this piled up wealth go? That is the way it works with a man who grows rich for himself instead of growing rich in the sight of god. 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. Today, we have the feast of the Jesuit martyrs, six priests and two laymen. They were martyred about between about 1625, no, it's more lay more than that, About 1642 to about 1649, there were as I say, there were six Jesuit priests and two laymen who had devoted their lives to helping the missionaries at that time in Lower Canada, which is now Aurisville, New York, where there now is a shrine to these martyrs. Now as I was thinking this thing over last night, the contrast between these remember, these seven men, at least six of them, I don't know much about the the two laymen, but the six priests, they were they were very cultivated French. They they were all French.
They were very cultivated gentlemen. They had the best education that you could get in those days. They had behind them illustrious careers in teaching, in seminary work. And then for some reason, they decided that they ought to come over here and give their lives to try and convert the Indians. Well, meanwhile in France, this is the period, you know, of Henry the fourth and Louis the thirteenth.
This is the period of Descartes, Rene Descartes who dies in 1650. This is the period when Saint Vincent de Paul was very active. This is the period of the thirty year, thirty years war. This is the period of Cardinal Richelieu in Mazarin. France was alive.
Remember, France came to be called the elder daughter of the church. She can't claim that anymore. But in those days, she certainly could. And here these men, Adolf, they give up all of that life, which was which was a very valuable life. Here you had especially around Paris, you had a tremendous intellectual life.
You had men like Descartes, very mistakenly, of course, but he was certainly earnest about it and very much of a genius, who was trying to save France from the inroads of Protestantism and skepticism to save it from the atheists. Here you had all the turmoil over in England and Northern Germany of the Reformation, which of course was being felt by the Huguenots in France. And you say, well, these men had plenty to do if they had just stayed in their own country. Why talk about going over and save the pagans when you had plenty of work to do right in the threshold of Paris? But these men left that all of that and went into the new world, to the new France.
And not only did they go in, but they spent a number of years there So they got well acquainted, firsthand experience of what life there meant. And above all, what what what always strikes me, it was the frustration these men must have experienced. As far as we know, they made very few, if any, converts. Very few. And here they were you'd say, here these men with all their valuable background of learning experience, of ecstaticism, Here, what they were throwing their lives to the dogs.
Worse than that, dogs would have reacted better. I mean that. Our lord said, don't throw your pearls before swine. And that's exactly what they seem to be doing. And they have been criticized for this, believe me.
Some of our, you know, the these very elitist people that we have with us today who are trying to remake Christ's church. And then after they went back to France, they came back here to get more of the same. And that's when they got clobbered and clobbered good because their execution was, it was pretty hard. Now we have all of this in in the writings of the early Jesuits they call the Jesuit relations. We're not drawing upon fiction here or going way back to January or 2000 AD or something.
We're not fictionalizing at all. Now, we've had just since in the last week or so, we've had the little flower, Therese of Lisia, we've had Saint Teresa of Avila, we've had Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Notice the just look at the how we're the centuries we're talking about. And yet I stand up here this morning in Garrard Park and talk about these people as if they were sitting in the pews. They are that real to us today.
That's what we ought to get into our heads. These people did not die with their death. They came to life with their death. Ignatius couldn't wait till he got to Rome to be thrown to the wild animals. He begged his Roman Christians not to interfere.
They could have gotten him off with with no without any trouble. But he begged him. He says, even if I get down on your knees and beg you to do something for me, don't do it. Don't listen to me. Listen to me now.
And I tell you, leave me alone so that I can go and meet my lord. Now the one point I wanna make about all this stuff about the saints, which the church keeps bringing before us with vestments, with memorial services, with special text, trying to keep alive in our minds and in our lives. The proper perspective towards living. Now the first thing about living is it's your life. And your life is an individual thing.
It's different from everybody else's. That lit that world in which you live and in which you are some kind of a center, some kind of a center, that is the world for you, for me. Let's not get out into some artificial, fictionalized, romanticized, sphere of influence. That's a that's a very, very that's a big scandal. I mean, obstacle scandal.
Just last night on sixty minutes, I hope you saw it, there was a good section of it given to sister Emmanuel, meaning god with us, a nun over in Cairo, Egypt who was told to retire at 65 or wherever it is. And she she couldn't think of doing nothing for the lord, so she asked the lord, begged Christ to tell her what to do and let her go into the worst possible situation. She wound up in the dumps of Cairo. I hope you saw it. She wound up in the dumps of Cairo, the garbage heap where where there are 30,000 people living off the garbage of Cairo.
I mean off of it. They eat it, they get their clothing from it, they get their their housing from it, they get everything from it. They get the stuff to feed the pigs and they eat the pigs. So she moved in there one single person to live with them. And she has accomplished wonders, absolutely wonders.
So much so that I my interpretation is that he she has shamed the government, so they're going to try now to convert the place into some kind of a city. 30,000 people on the dumps, on the garbage heaps of Cairo, where something like 20,000 tons of garbage comes a day, gathered up by these people, mostly kids. Emmanuel, God with us. Now when we look at these people, the biggest mistake we can make is the two mistakes. First of all, is that we should imitate them.
Exactly. And the second mistake is is that we shouldn't imitate them. This is the contrariety of being a good Catholic Christian. Because in many ways, it'd be silly for us. This has all been done down the centuries.
In Saint Jerome's time, the point is we must work out our salvation in my world, in the world I exist. The daily troubles, the daily trials, the good things, let us not forget the good things of my little world, which is my world. That's the world I have to work out my salvation. Now how I do that, this is what the saints teach us. We all have this one thing in common.
We all are told to bear the light of Christ's truth. We are all Lucifer's. We have we all have the same goal. We all have absolutely the same destiny of being saints. There is no difference in that whatsoever.
The only difference is how we do it. And in a certain sense, that's immaterial. In a certain sense. In another sense, it's far from immaterial. It's extremely important.
As that handless statue of Christ over in Belgium has it, I have no other hands than yours. So the way we do it is important, but not the most important part. It's only the way to the end, the means to our ultimate destiny. And that's what we must seize and make the best of it. And only god knows the definition of the best.
Believe me. Let us not try to judge it. And so as day after day, the church tries to bring home to us what it means to be a follower of Christ. It should inspire us with hope, with courage, and above all, with joy. I ask you, when if any of you saw mother Teresa in those pictures, I never saw her face to face, there would she's this she has a smile.
She is full of joy. This sister Emmanuel down in the dumps, the garbage heaps of Cairo, she's full of joy. She has nothing. She doesn't even have running water in her little old hut. She has nothing.
But she's full of joy because Christ said, if you take his cross up and follow him, you will find that burden light and sweet. And the saints prove it. And the church says, look at them. You can do the same in your world. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.