A reading of the holy gospel according to saint Matthew. Our lord said to his disciples, if your brother should should commit some wrong against you, go and point out his fault, but keep it between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. If he does not listen, however, summon another so that every case may stand on the word of two or three witnesses. If he ignores them, then refer it to the church.
And then if he ignores even the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. I assure you, whatever you declare bound on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you declare loosed on earth shall be held loose in heaven. Again, I tell you, if two of you join your voices on earth to pray for anything whatsoever, it shall be granted to you by my father in heaven. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
If your brother should commit some fault against you, go and point out his fault. Words taken from today's gospel reading. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Everything I have to say this morning after considerable thought rest upon this word, fault. Fault.
Now it's going to going back to language, I know it sounds pedantic, but remember, we're dealing with translations. Our lord, whatever language he used, he did not speak English. He never said what I've just read. That's for sure. And the closest thing we have to our an original is the Greek.
Now the word in the Greek for this word fall or however you wanna translate it, its basic meaning is to miss the mark. Armatano, to miss the mark. It goes back to archers with their bows and their arrows, and we can think of it as men in the armed services or other or civilians going on what they call a firing line. And then with a rifle or a pistol or some other firearm, you try to hit a target. Now these are important concepts.
They and don't be misled. What I'm saying now is very simple. But the application I'm going to make is not simple, and I don't wanna give you the impression it's simple. But it's rightfully important to our straight thinking and keeping our moral equilibrium and knowing what we're about and having and being conscious of what we have to do and our obligations. It's all put look, you can put the whole caboodle into this, metaphor or allegory or of going on the firing line and shooting at a target.
The first thing I wanna emphasize is that you must make a distinction between the guy or the woman who's shooting and what they're shooting at. Now that's very obvious. If if any of you have done any archery or if you've done any target shooting, you'll know very well that the first thing you have to do is to identify your target. What are you shooting at? Because you can't tell whether you hit it or you miss it unless you know what you're shooting at.
It's plain common sense, isn't it? But, of course, when it comes to morality, we throw out common sense, as you will see. So the point I want to make is the Greek here doesn't say the the the concept of sin is about a third or a fourth generation from the basic meaning of, which means to miss your mark. And there's a tremendous difference between there's a total difference between the target or your mark and the shooter or yourself. Now let us apply that to the situation, that we read about this that we have read just now where our lord says, if your brother commits a fault against you remember, the Greek there is to miss the mark, then tell him about it.
But what do you tell him about it? About his fault. His fault, not about himself. You judge what he did. You don't judge the man.
Our lord is not telling us here that we should judge anybody. What he's saying is judge the action. Now the point the distinction we have to make in any moral situation is this. We must keep the shooter, the agent, the subject separate from the target. Target.
He doesn't when you go on the shooting range, the firing line, you don't create the target out there. It's put out there. You may agree to it. It can be all kinds of things, concentric circles, the torso of a man or a woman or any of but you have to make a distinction. You well, you don't even think about it.
You'd say no sensible person confuses himself with the target. He doesn't shoot himself in the foot. If you do, you better go over to Saint Elizabeth and beg for admission. So what this is perfectly clear. We're not in that firing range, isn't it?
But now when it comes to our morality, when it comes to our distinct this making a distinction between what we do and who does it in our modern world of confused rationality, we identify. We identify. For example, today, in this very hot subject, and by Tuesday, it's going to be even hotter, of abortion. You you talk about abortion, and people will say, oh, so anybody commits abortion goes to hell. You see what they've done?
They are identifying the agent, the act the actor, the person with the deed. They are identifying the shooter with the target. And you it's very I I don't know why. But in any discussion notice I didn't say arguing. But in any discussion that I've had on this subject or any other matter of morality, 10 to one, the person you're discussing the subject with will identify the agent with the act.
10 to one. And you'll say, look, let us forget the person. We are talking about the action. And in our old scholastic terminology, we used to call that the object. And then referring to the shooter, the guy or the woman who's has the bow and is trying to hit the target with a narrow or the shooter with his pistol, revolver, sidearms, or rifle, we call them the subject.
But there's where the confusion comes. Because in English today, when you say subject, they think it's fictional, subjective. You see, this is this is crazy stuff. Anybody can get confused. Unless you think.
Unless you think. And that's when I call I have I refer to a very close friend of mine, a man of high honor, he's a good sailor, who says when he went to Saint John's school with the Christian brothers, he had a brother who incessantly said that most people would rather die than think. At least he got something out of his four years. Now that this is a tremendously important distinction that you have to make in your own lives. Now the first point I wanna make is this, as regards this target business, the harmatano, the committing of a fault.
When you go on the firing range or wherever you're doing the shooting, you don't create the target. You don't create the target. You aim to hit it, and when you miss it, you miss the target. You didn't create it. It and so it was I mean, whatever's put out there is is is separate from yourself.
You may go and get a bale of hay and stick it up and put a a piece of paper with concentric circles, But the point is you don't identify that with yourself. You're going to shoot at it. You're the shooter. That's the target. Now how about morality?
The same thing. We don't create the moral law. It's not the product of our thinking, of utilitarianism, of pragmatism, taking our neighbor or our brother's word for It's none of those things. It's a target. And I have to know it.
You don't take a person and put a bow and arrow in his hands or give him a rifle and then blindfold him and say, now shoot at the target. He's got to identify the target. He has to discover the target. He has to make sure what he's shooting at before he has a chance of shooting or hitting it, I should say. And it's the same thing with morality.
You've got to keep the law, whatever words you wanna use, separate from me. It's my problem to hit the target. It's my responsibility to know the target, to identify the target, and then try to live up to it, not to fall short of It's that simple. It's that simple. But that's totally contradicted today.
I mean, totally. Whenever I'm not exaggerating this, though. Whenever I have the golden opportunity, and I love it, to get into a good argument, notice, I said argument this time, about moral matters, you have this very great difficulty that they tell you, I have to be loyal to my conscience. I do what my conscience says. You hear it all the time in the paper, even in the Washington Post, and I can't cite a greater authority than that.
Now, of course, there's a truth in that. There's a truth in everything. There's a truth in the devil. The truth is that I have to follow my conscience, but I have an equal and a prior responsibility responsibility to to have have a a true true conscience. Conscience.
And I don't get it with my mother's milk. I don't get it with wishful thinking. It is given to me in some way or other. I discover it. I identify my target just as objectively as that target on the firing ring, the firing line.
Just as just as objective. And I get it either from god, from natural law, from revelation, or from God's church. Whatever you bound bind on earth is bound in heaven. You're reading today. But it's my responsibility to know that.
It's not enough just to say I follow my conscience. What do you mean by conscience to begin with? Of course, a lot of people think that just in terms of what I'm comfortable with, what fulfills me, what what's what's helpful to me. Well, utilitarian and pragmatism or whatever, following the environment. Or as we have now, coming out of Notre Dame, we have what we call this morality of proportionality.
There's a lot of fluff and moonshine at CS Lewis would say. Moonshine. It's ridiculous. Absurd. Now this is terribly important because the world in which you're living, this is it's not only foreign to them.
They reject it. Because you're living in a world, Brian speaking by and large, who rejects even the possibility of well, first of all, they reject the idea of even there being an absolute truth or an absolute anything. That's the first thing. Remember that the two great names today in logic are Wittgenstein and Eyre. Wittgenstein came over and was a professor at Oxford, I think it was at Cambridge, and Eyre was there and became his disciple.
But these are the great names. And what do they stand for? The rejection of the idea of anything that's absolute, any absolute truth, any possibility of my knowing the truth, and any possibility of my communicating the truth. That's the world you're living in. And so we are reduced to what in this country we call, for the most part, secular humanism.
Now this is the world you're living in. And it's not easy. It's not easy. Because to have a true conscience, conscience, you have to think, you have to work, you have to read, you have to listen, you have to ponder, and you have to do all of this about the profoundest things. Or you can take it simply on the authority of the church and do pretty well because not every man, you know, is born to be his own theologian.
Even no more than we are born to be our own paper hangers or electricians. Now this is terribly in actuality. Now let me give you an now remember, in any given instance, you can't actually separate these two things because I operate as a human being. All my actions have to be attributed to me, but not in the same way. Not in the same way.
There's a huge difference between saying my heart beats and saying that I committed murder. Take this test take for this example, this idea of murder. Now I'm not talking about the legal definitions because those definitions come out out of the law. And when you go into a court of law in The United States, remember, you're not what the the the you're not facing justice, you're facing legality, law. And in this land, the law is the definition of a judge.
Now, what is the difference between homicide and murder? There's no difference in the corpse. The corpse is equally dead whether they whether it's homicide or murder because the word homicide and the word murder are being predicated not of the corpse. The corpse is equally dead. It's being predicated of you, the agent.
Of the agent. Here's an illustration. I'll never will forget. I've used it. You probably get tired of my writ but it's a good example.
It happened years ago up in I think happened in Delaware, perhaps Wilmington. Anyway, a young mother came out of her house in the morning to go shopping. She went to her car. She looked all around the car to make sure her baby was not she knew the baby was around her, to make sure the baby wasn't near the car. Then she opened the car and got in and, you know, prepared to drive, started the engine this takes a little time and, started the engine, started to back down the driveway, she felt a bump.
So she got out and she'd run over her baby. She picked the child up, rushed into the house, ascertained the baby was dead, and then she shot herself. Now I'm not exaggerating this. Not exaggerating. Let me give you another instance, because this is very personal what I'm talking to you.
Yeah. I'm talking about your own moral lives. It was my first summer of ordination. It was an and at that time, the church over in Tacoma Park was a mission from nativity down Georgia Avenue. And we went out there.
We took turns going out. So this it was a tiny little church then, and we were surrounded by you know what. This is Tacoma Park. And, I'd just been ordained, and we came we were coming out of church, and there was a lot of hustle and bustle, you know, around the little vestibule when two young women came up and one was crying almost hysterically. And, she was she was very obviously pregnant.
So and here we are surrounded by all the good people who were leaving Mass. And in some, it was this: this obviously pregnant woman who was almost in hysterics was had had an abortion. And she remembered from her girl daughter to some place that if you had an abortion, then the baby that you wanted and wanted to keep would be born deformed. So she was absolutely sure that she had a deformed baby in her womb. I don't can you say?
There's nothing I could say to disabuse her of that idea. But, you know, she had it. She didn't know where she got it. But there there it was. It re it was reducing that poor young woman who had troubles enough.
It was reducing her to almost hysterics. And how do you how do you how can you meet it? How can you wipe it off? I don't know. But this is the consequence of error.
The consequence of thinking you know when you don't know. And so to know to to talk about following your conscience, you bet you have to follow your conscience. It's the court of final and last appeal. But you have an equal and prior obligation to make sure that your conscience has the truth, the moral truth. And while on one side, I can make a big case out of it being difficult to get a hold of, I can ease also argue that our lord did not come to bring us the way and to say I'm the way, the truth, and the life, and then make it practically impossible for us to see the life.
He was not an absurdity personified. The truth is not all that difficult if we take a little time, and you have to have an open mind. As G. K. Chesterton says, the whole idea of having an open mind is to close it on something, not to have it so open that it's nothing but a sieve.
That's our old friend, the illogical positivist. Goes in one ear and right out the other. So there's a great deal in today's reading in that one little word, fault. That's I I I think it's a bum translation, but anyway. The basic idea of it is you miss the mark, and that's the essence of sin.
You miss the mark, but you have to know the mark. And just one little tiny conclusion, but a very important one. Remember, the actions that you perform as a human being are of two immensely different categories, immensely different. On the one hand, you have the category of actions for which you are not responsible. Either because you're mentally unbalanced, because you're worried, because of ignorance, because of error, any and remember, this is all solid stuff.
You don't have to go to modern psychologists. Aristotle has it, and as Saint Thomas has an awful lot on it, that there are many actions that that that have to be attributed to me as the agent, but for which I am not the moral agent. In other words, I did not do the action with knowledge, full consent, and willing it. Willing it. And and to the extent that any one of those factors or conditions is missing, to that extent, that action becomes less attributed to me.
I become less responsible for it. I am less guilty. That poor woman in in in, Delaware, when she murdered killed