A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Our lord entered a boat and made it made the crossing as the Sea Of Galilee and came back to his own town. There, the people at once brought to him a paralyzed man, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, have courage, son. Your sins are forgiven.
At that moment, some of the scribes said with themselves, this man blasphemes. Jesus was aware of what they were thinking and said, why do you harbor evil thoughts? Which is less difficult to say? Your sins are forgiven or stand up and walk. To help you realize that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he then said to the paralyzed man, stand up.
Roll up your mat, and go home. The man stood up and went home. At the sight, a feeling of all came over the great crowd, and they praised god for giving such authority to men. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Well, it wasn't of my making that this feast of Saint Maria Loretta comes a day after my well chosen remarks about the kite. But keep in mind what I said. A kite only flies and flies gracefully and with some excitement and with great beauty when it's firmly attached to something. Its greatest freedom is being attached to the to the string in the hands of a good, capable manipulator. When that string is broken, behold, the kite is perfectly free.
It's absolutely independent, and it destroys itself. Now that ties in precisely with the reading of Saint Paul today from that I chose from second Corinthians. No Christian following Christ has a lot of fun on earth. The best we can do, and rightfully expect if we carry the cross of Jesus, and he said you can't follow me unless you do it, is that we will have his peace. And that is something, believe me.
But it's the peace of Christ. It's not the peace that the world gives. It's the peace of struggle. It's the peace of warfare. It's the peace of Saint Paul describes how we are tormented, how we are persecuted, how we are disdained, how we suffer.
This is the lot of a Christian, and yet we don't we don't wanna think that. We don't wanna face up to it. The world is tugging at us all the time to identify with itself. As soon as you stand up and to be counted, then you are persecuted. And we are living in a world which doesn't even reject Christ.
It totally ignores him. It totally ignores God. That's the world you're living in. If you read the papers yesterday about this declaration of domestic partnership in San Francisco, which I will come back to. The life of a Christian means that you follow Christ.
And if you follow Christ, you're carrying a cross. That's that's the only thing Christ promised his followers in this life is his cross. But he said, if you do that, then you will find that burden sweet and light. That's the best we can expect out of life, the peace of Jesus Christ. Now this little girl, Maria Correte, canonized in 1950 Papyrus the twelfth.
And the first time in Peter's Square, nearly a quarter of a million people were there. Now this story is very simple. The girl was only 12 years old. She was born in 1890, about 50 miles south of Rome. She wasn't from Sicily.
She was 50 miles south of Rome from a very poor family. She was one of five or six children, the oldest. Her father died in in when she was only 10 years old, the same year she made her first holy communion. And she was left to to take care of her her her brothers and sisters while her mother went out into the fields and worked to put bread on their table. There wasn't any social welfare.
She didn't ask for a handout. She asked for a job. And this little girl on this particular day now remember, this happened in our own century. This isn't pulling upon the myths of the sixth or the seventh century. Next door was a to their farm.
He was only a tenant farmer. Let me add something else. I want to stress this. This little girl never learned to read or write. Believe it or not, she was illiterate.
Can you imagine that being illiterate? But she could not read and write. You see, today, that's the greatest crime you can be guilty of, you know. All all we have to do is to make good people is to make them literate literate, whatever that means. Anyway, next to them was a son, 19 year old boy, of the owner.
And here's a 12 year old girl, so he cast lustful eyes on her, and she would have nothing to do with him. One day while her mother was out in the fields, he came into their little house, had a knife in his hand, and threatened to kill her unless he she allowed him to rape her. She says, no. Now here is what she said. No.
God does not want it. It's a sin. If you do it, you'll go to hell. There's the almost the whole content of the Christian Catholic faith. So, killed her, stabbed her, 19 year old boy.
Now she she had you see, today, even if we had a good moral theologian on the on the scene, he would say, look, Maria, don't be a nut. After all, if he's raping you at the point of a dagger, you are completely innocent of all sin. Therefore, do what he tells you. Save your life. It's the only life you have.
You wanna be fulfilled. You wanna become a wife and a mother. You wanna have children. You wanna be a grandmother. It it it makes no sense to my little girl to I'm this is way a good moral theologian would say.
To to to give up your virginity. After all, what's that? It's gonna be given up sooner or later anyway. He is responsible, so don't make a big deal out of this. That's not the way this little girl who could not read or write.
That's not the what she did. She died rather than be raped. Because you notice what she says, you will go to hell. In other words, she is trying to tell this guy, this one of our violent kids, notice, she's she's trying to save him from going to hell. And as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, that's the main reason that a woman has to make some kind of a reasonable, defense against an attacker out of charity for the attacker.
But she doesn't commit any sin. Today, what do we have? Why, you the word chastity isn't mentioned anymore. You can read any number of books. We don't talk about chastity.
We talk about self fulfillment and sex as being self fulfilled. As I say in yesterday's paper, a huge article, declaration of domestic partnership partnership from San Francisco, California, one of the states of the union, I believe, where people living together, homosexuals or heterosexuals, made by signing this declaration in the city of San Francisco enjoy the benefits if they're employees of the city as married couples, more or less. It's very, very vague now what it really means. The basic line is health insurance, believe it or not. That's the driving motivation behind this, health insurance.
And, of course, it's very much the product of the civil liberties union and Matthew Coles, the lawyer, and of the homosexuals. But they are dominant. They got this thing passed. It's in the Washington Post yesterday, and you can't have an authority beyond that unless we bring down God and have a devout revelation. Now, in the hope it's about two pages long.
There's no even mention there that adultery is wrong, homosexual acts are wrong, fornication is wrong, living together without marriage is wrong. Not even the suggestion of these things. As a matter of fact, this declaration of domestic partnerships even allows for the partners to have two domiciles. In other words, one can be married. We are told in this article that Seattle and any Minneapolis, Washington DC, any number of other cities are considering the same kind of legislation or ordinance.
See, if you think you're living in a world that values chastity, then you are naive. And you can't afford that kind of ignorance. If there's a God in the heavens and if he has spoken, then his word is law. And if we disobey it willingly and willfully, we go to hell. And that goes for for interpersonal relationships.
That goes for intimate commitments. These are the words. See, they don't use words like fornication and adultery. Oh, no. Or even more vulgar terms.
You see, I'm a great believer in vulgarity because something as bad as a a willful disregard of chastity does not deserve a nice pretty name. But we don't even use the vulgarities anymore. We talk about it as commitment, as being intimate, as having a serious relationship. These are the words being used, absolutely being used. Read the paper yesterday.
So today, the church is holding up. That's why I'm wearing these red vests. A martyr. She didn't have to be a martyr. She didn't we don't have to lay down our lives.
All that God asks of us is to give him our lives with a permanent commitment, which is a relentless commitment, which is violent and turbulent like that kite swooping across the sky, zooming up and then plodging down and then floating serenely along. There's where we are when we're tied to Jesus Christ by his cross. And as long as we are tied to him with that string of faith and baptismal commitment, we will zoom and we will soar and we will pop down and we will dive and we will glide serenely in his peace. Cut the cord by denying Christ, and you'll have freedom. You will have independence.
You will be destroyed. The name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.