A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The angel Gabriel was sent from god to a town of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. Upon arriving, the angel said to Mary, rejoice, oh, highly favored daughter. The lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women. At these words, Mary was deeply troubled and wondered what this greeting could mean. Then the angel went on to say to her, do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with god. You shall conceive and bear a son and give him the name Jesus.
Great will be his dignity, and he will be called the son of the most high. The lord god will give him the throne of David, his father. He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his reign will be without end. Then our lady said to the angel, how can all this take place since I do not know man? The angel answered, the holy spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you.
Hence, the holy offspring to be born of you will be called son of god. Know that Elizabeth, your kinswoman, has conceived a son in her old age. She, who was thought to be sterile, is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with god. At this, Mary said, I am the maidservant of the lord. Let it be done to me just as you say.
And with that, the angel left her. 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, first off, let it not let this morning not go without recollecting what happened at Pearl Harbor over fifty years ago.
And for many people who are still suffering from that terrible day, keep them in your prayers too. It's very easy to forget. Once in a while, we who live in this area, once in a while we ought to shoot over and take a look at Arlington, and then you will know the cost of war. But those crosses just mark part of the cost, just part of it. Think of those who are left behind, and in many instances, they suffer more than those who have departed.
And so let us remember this day. This of course, it was the seventh, but that when the the thing took place, I think it was a Sunday, but it was a terrible day. Some of us here had friends and relatives out there. I had a couple. The only thing saved one of my best friends was the fact that his car wouldn't start and he had to take his wife's car, which had a steel top, to go to mass.
He was a doctor in the navy. He got plenty of bullet holes. If he had been in his opened opened roaster roaster, he would have been finished. And so let us give a thought today before god of these people living and dead who gave their lives for this country, and in a very real sense for us. Think of that in terms of what's happening in Somalia today.
And see you see, I can never disengage the emanatic conception from Pearl Harbor. I should, of course. The two things I want to say about your presence here this morning. You're just sitting in those you're getting up in the middle of the night is what he just said to me. In the darkest of night, piling out on this cold day.
It's your living argument, your living testimony to two facts of life. Life. And one is that we live in a supernatural world, God's world, a a transcendent god, but it's his world. It it's contingent upon him for everything. And secondly, your conviction of about sin.
Because that's what this feast is about. It's about sin. I don't have to tell you. It has nothing to do about that is the the virgin birth of our blessed lady. Don't mix those things up.
But the thing I mean, of our lord. But the thing about this is sin. The world today denies, apodictically it. They consider it so trivial that it's not worth paying any attention to. You still have these lunatics running around in the world who think there's a God Almighty, that there that God created the world and, you know, all the rest of it.
He had a he he established a church, believe it or not, which speaks with his authority today. You your presence here is an absolute contradiction of that contradiction. You are standing up against the world because the world is not supernaturally oriented today by no means. By look what's happened to Christmas. Think of this.
The United States government has decided you can't have a crucifix. You can't have a a Christmas scene on public property. Yet, you can take the cross of Christ and put it in a in a glass of urine, and the government pays for it. That's the world you're living in. You're living in a completely secular world which means a world world as opposed to God's world.
Don't you ever forget the what the battle lines are. That is the absolute gap, the canyon, any word you wanna use. Because the whole idea of a Christian's life is God, God's son, and salvation. The whole idea of a worldly's life is this world, make the best of it, and say goodbye as you enter the crematorium or the ground. So your presence here in the middle of the week where you break your regular routine, you are a witness and above all to yourself.
If you think you do your faith does not need to be bolstered up by prayer, by sacrifice, by thought, by reading, by by trying to get some kind of an adult appreciation of God, your life, the world, you are wrong. And so that's the first thing we're affirming with this feast of the immaculate conception, the sinless of our blessed lady. And that is that we live in a supernatural order put there by baptism or its equivalent. Now the second thing is sinlessness. The world can't remember.
You can't use the word virtue anymore. It's a verboten word because, you see, virtue implies the ability not to be virtuous, which means to be sinful. Sin is the contrary of virtue. We can look at our answer to put it in the most concrete term, look at our answer today to the to young girls in high school having babies. Now notice there is no immorality in a woman having a child or a baby.
Think of that. There's no immorality. The immorality was the fornication. And what is our answer to all the problems, the tragedies of these young girls having babies? What is the answer?
Contraception. And the latest thing, put a couple of things in a girl's arm and she's she's good for five years. Go out and do what she wants. That's the world's answer. But but what I'm I'm not into talking about the contraception there.
I am talking about the the world's conception of sin. And the reason it has no conception of sin is it has no conception of virtue. You say you're crazy to say that. No, I'm not. In the last issue of the New York Times, there's a review there of two books on sexuality, human sexuality.
The book reviewer, her specialty is mating with animals, animals to animals. So she's the one reviewing these books. And she begins by saying that's that we have changed our landscape. She says, we we some of our thoughts are almost divine. And then she said, but we forget we are just animals made up of water.
And something else, I forget what she says. That was just last week. Now that's the world you're living in. Don't think it's different. It isn't.
The world is worldly. You get it for you well, the news is going into it. But the point if you think that I'm exaggerating this, then please believe me. You've got you've got to rethink what's going on in your life. You're just very lucky.
That's all I can say. You're very lucky because all of this is tugging at you. All of this is telling you forget all this stuff about heaven and hell, sin and this that's a nonsense. Look. What you're sure of is this world.
So make the best of it. And that's applied to scripture by Boltman. This great eliminates Jesus Christ as God's son, even by our Catholic scripture scholars, father Meyer to begin with. And so let us remember today. It was a protestant poet who said this.
William Wordsworth in 1850. Well, that's when he died, so he said it before he died. When he said to our blessed about our blessed mother, our tainted nature's solitary Of course, was wrong. Blessed mother is not our tainted nature's solitary boast. You know who is?
Jesus Christ, her son. So she's not the only one. Remember, Jesus Christ is truly human. He has a truly 100% total human nature. And he certainly was sinless unless you follow some of these, late scripture scholars like Scorsese and is that the last temptation of Christ.
And so that's what you're doing today. You are standing up and giving voice to your faith. First of all, that you're living in a supernatural world. As our lord said, my kingdom is not of this world, and you're in his world. Second, you are giving your witness to virtue as man's goal and women's goal.
Virtue and collaterally, the avoidance of sin. And this feast accentuates that. This is the remember, the back is the national feast of The United States. It was never more needed today when we affirm once again our conviction, our faith, our lives to Jesus Christ, the son of that Jewish girl who was from the first moment of her conception, sinless. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit.
Amen.