A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. This is the mass of for the feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It's not the mass of the day. Jesus said to his disciples, if a man wishes to come after me, he must deny his very self, take up his cross, and begin to follow in my footsteps. Footsteps.
Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would a man show if he were to gain the whole world and ruin himself in the process? What can a man offer in exchange for his very self? The son of man will come with his father's glory accompanied by his angels. When he does come, he will repay each man according to his conduct.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. The sixteenth century, my friends, was a tremendous century for the Western world and for the holy Roman Catholic church. It's the century of what is called reformation.
And it's such a complex, which means it's a combination of diverse things that the study of it just baffles you. It is so rich in currents which are so different. Now at the same time that you have an Ignatius of Loyola, you have a Saint Teresa of Avila. Up in England, you have John Fisher and Thomas More and the Carthusian monks laying down their lives for Henry against the calling Henry VIII the great man and head of the church. And then in Northern Europe, on Transalpine Europe, here you have Luther and Calvin, Zwingli, and all the rest of them flourishing.
It's an extremely complex thing. You have the whole new world opening up. You have the printing presses popping up all around, books, the translations of the bible which are changing. Just remember, to have to be in possession of the bible in some parts of the world in this century, it was to be liable to execution. Just think of that.
Anyway, here you have this vast picture, this ferment of the church. And then down in Rome you have the, of course, the Renaissance and all the rest of it petering out, of course. But it's a very complex period, and we're only talking about the Western world. Notice the Middle East and all that's not even in it from what I've said. So here you have this really an unknown little aristocrat up there in Spain.
He wasn't much in any way. And here he eventually finds himself, notice, finds himself. As the general, and that was his name he chose generally, Saint Ignatius was a soldier, and the group or congregation or the institute that he founded was founded on very militaristic basis and principles. And so here he finds himself in a very difficult situation. Now of all the things we might say this morning about Ignatius of what do you pick up?
Well, the first thing that strikes me, this is a very personal thing. I grew up with with Ignatius of Loyola. I lived very close to Woodstock on the Patapsco River, which was the heart and the soul of the Jesuits in The United States. It's no longer, it's disappeared. But I grew up with that.
Our little parish was very familiar and very used to having Jesuits coming down and giving us wonderful sermons on all topics, even teaching us how to love snakes. This is the simple truth. I went in to wish the superior, the convent, one Christmas a happy Christmas, and down from her long sleeve comes a big black snake. That was was through the efforts of Father Woods, who was a great scripture scholar but who loved reptiles. Anyway, grew up with these people.
The thing and then when I went to Montserrat here is Montserrat and I saw a tablet, Just a one tiny little tablet among all the rest of them covering a big wall that Ignatius of Loyola made a retreat here or did something, you know, he spent a night there before the altar. Just a tiny little tablet among hundreds of others. When Ignatius of Loyola went there in first half of the sixteenth century, Montserrat was about 800 years old. It was ancient, 800 years at least. And these years were continuous years.
You could at Montserrat you can go right down and you can see the remains of the original little church that was built there. This isn't guesswork. So here when Ignatius now he comes to Montserrat. Why did he go to Montserrat? Of course he spent the time in a cave near Manresa for nearly a year.
Manresa just walking distance from Montserrat. It's a good walk but it's that close. Ignatius didn't know what he was doing. Here's a young man who wasn't any better or much worse than the average who gets himself shocked at Paplona. And, well, he's got a bad leg so he can't move around so he goes to bed.
And not having a TV or comics or things of that sort, he took to reading books. That's a very dangerous thing to do, is to read a book. Remember Clive Staple Lewis says, if you want to be a good atheist, you have to be very careful what you read. He made a mistake in Rochester. But to come back to Ignatius, here he finds himself in a hospital.
Well, of course, was run by nuns. And of course, the reading material was to elevate his soul. So willy nilly, he read some books on spirituality. One of them was the life of Christ, and it changed his life. I don't mean the book did, but the reading of it did.
He left that hospital. He didn't know. All he wanted to do was to give his life to God. He had no idea what it was except to give his life to God and to go to the Holy Land. That's about as far as I can make out the chief ideas that he had in his mind.
So he takes himself to the holy place. Monserrat is the place, you know. It's the great holy spot of Spain, and it is most impressive, believe me. Just geographically to see that thing stuck up there way on the mountaintop when you leave Barcelona, you say, How in the world am I ever going to get up there? So anyway, now he goes there.
Now here's the point that strikes me. He goes to this monastery which was already 800 years old. Now in other words, Ignatius, when he wants to give his life to God, he doesn't go and retire into his own little room and ask, What am I going to do to fulfill myself? That isn't what he did at all. He tried to go to a holy place and ask God, what do you want me to do?
And so and here's another very interesting thing. It was in this period when a man of no training, of little education, as we use the word, because the great centers of the academic world were not in Spain. They were in Italy and up in France. So here's a man of little learning, of no of scarcely of little education, in a sense of little experience, and here's where he did most of his spiritual wrote most of his spiritual exercises. Now this is a fascinating thing.
Where did that come from? So anyway, the one thing that Ignatius seemed to have in mind was to get to Jerusalem to the Holy Land and maybe to stay there. He finally got there, but he wasn't allowed to stay. The Turks kicked him out. They didn't want him.
So then what did he do? Did he get it? Did he go before the Lord and say, Lord, I want to be fulfilled. Tell me what you want to do so I can be a fulfilled man. You know, that's the way we would do it today.
Self fulfillment self on up. When when he was kicked out of the holy land by the Turks, then he hide hold to Rome and went to the pope, to Paul, and said, What do you want me to do? And then you see things developed. Then he remember he still wasn't a priest or anything else and a man of practically no education. So he went up to Paris, the University of Paris where everybody would go and wanted to learn something.
So he went up to the University of Paris. Then lo and behold, had already vowed to taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, obedience to God, but very informally just as an individual human being. And there he got associated with a couple of other young students, And then a couple more joined him. Then they had a company of about six or eight. So they studied there for a while living a community life, then they hideaued back to Rome.
Notice, back to Rome, to the Holy Sea, and put themselves at the disposal of the pope. What do you want us to do? Because you see, here's my point. I wanna go back. I'm talking from a very personal point of view, so forgive me.
I went to the Monte Casino a couple years ago, spent a week there. And the guest master in the Benedictine monastery is appointed to be nice and hospitable to guests. So I came to know this priest who was the guest master, as they call. Well, we would after meals, we would walk very formally for fifteen minutes or so. So one day I asked him what he thought of Hans Keynes.
Now here I am in Monte Cassino, which goes back to nearly 400 AD. It's had a continuous history there for all of those years. It's been destroyed three times. It's always come up. So he just looked at me and smiled as if Hans Kung couldn't have bothered him less.
Hans Kung is just another little ripple on that current of the river of time. He'll pass. Look what you have here. We've been we have been down to dust and ashes three times. Look what's here.
I'll pass. I mean, he didn't say all this, but this is this is what you get from the actual living fact. So when we see here's my point. Here is Ignatius of Loyola, just a nondescript little old guy who's tied in with some nobleman, gets himself shot and turns to God. He has several, several very mysterious religious experiences, quotation marks.
Don't underrate that. They were absolutely transforming. And where does he go when he feels he wants when he's called in a special way to do something? He goes to the church, to the living church. He goes to Montserrat, which is already as I say is eight or 900 years old, something like that.
Then that goes back to Monte Cassino, which is only about 400 years removed from Christ. So here's my point. We today at Garrett Park settle down here to offer the holy sacrifice and the mass. This is the company we're keeping. This is where we belong.
This is the church. It isn't the church of the twentieth century. Names come and go. I've just been fooling around with George Kelly's book, you know, and then also the decline and fall of Catholic radicalism, and you see these names that have been blazoned over your papers and all that, what will they amount to one hundred years from now? What?
The church is here, and the church is a tangible, physical, worldly reality. World. It's of this world. You can feel it. When you go to Monser Rock, there's the stones up there.
There's a building. But the spirit didn't come from the stones. The stones came from the spirit. And there's a continuity there of practice. You are at home when you go into those places.
You're not an alien. Of course, you are now to some certain extent since we gave up the Latin. But the thing is you still feel this is us. And if you dig in the doctrines and all that, we're one. We're one.
It's the church of Jesus Christ. And to me, this means a lot. It helps you to keep your course. It it keeps you on on on your on target when you're sort of pulled apart by a lot of things happening around you. These things pass, but the church of Jesus Christ endures.
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.