Reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. After Jesus' birth in Bethlehem Of Judea during the reign of king Herod, Astrologers, well, now that's just an attempt to translate the word for mag mag mag mag magoi in the Greek, which becomes magi in English, tells us practically nothing. So they were either wise men, they were kings, they were astrologers, they were soothsayers, they were fortune tellers. Take your choice. So these astrologers then from the East arrived one day in Jerusalem asking, where is the newborn king of the Jews?
We have seen his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage. At this, king Herod became greatly disturbed and with him all Jerusalem. Then summoning all of the chief priests and all of the scribes of the people, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. And they replied, in Bethlehem Of Judah. Here is what the prophet wrote about it.
Now this is a quotation, of course, in the Old Testament. And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means least among the princes of Judah since from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel. Well, having heard all of that, Herod then called the astrologers, the magi, the kings, the soothsayers aside and found out from them the exact time of the star's appearance. And then he sent them to Bethlehem after asking them, go and get all the detailed information that you can about the child. And when you have discovered something, bring it back to me so that I may go and offer him my homage also.
How nice he had very fine thoughts about the child because the word king is what hit him between the eyes. So the magi, after their audience with the king, set out. The star, which they had seen at its rising, went ahead of them until it came to a still stand over the place where the child was. They were overjoyed at seeing the star and on entering the house, found the child with Mary, his mother. They prostrated themselves and, paid him homage.
And then they opened up their chests or their coffers and presented the child with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. That's where we get the idea there were three of them. Then they received another message in a dream not to go back to Herod. So they went back to their own country by another route. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
And it's a wonderful story, believe me. Great. Now I have two texts I want to begin with because they summarize everything I want to say really. Of course, it all has to do with light as an allegory or a figure of speech for truth. Now the first is from Zacharias.
It's when just after John the Baptist has been born. John the Baptist has been born. Zacharias, his father then, speaks out as in the first chapter of Saint Luke and makes a prophecy about the Christ, the child of Mary. Now this is way what Zechariah said on that occasion, part of it. He says Zechariah says, for the darkness is past and the true light now shineth.
Now the the work the Greek word for shineth is epiphinae, which simply means it shines. See? It's that simple. Don't so that we get the word epiphany from epiphinae, which simply means to shine, to appear, to have the image of. It has a lot of it's well, sufficient it it mean or like it seems, all of those synonyms.
Now here's another text. Now the Zechariah is before Christ was born. Now I quote from the first letter of Saint John. And John says this, notice the tense. A great light has shone upon you in the darkness of death.
So here we have these two statements. One from Zechariah before Christ was born that he was to be the great light that he would appear epiphany, which means simply to appear. And then you have afterwards, after our lord's birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension into heaven, you have Saint John in his first letter saying, where I've just quoted you, that a great light has shone upon us in the darkness of death. See, that is a cloud that hangs over every human being who has a one third of a brain cell working and it works once in a while. There's nothing like the sermon of the open grave.
Now the one thing I have to say about life that I want you to keep in mind right through the well chosen remarks on this great Sunday epiphany. Remember, in some parts of the world, this is the in the Latin world, this is the great feast. I remember I spent it down in Puerto Rico one Christmas. I mean, Christmas and epiphany. And the the true blooded Spaniards all celebrated epiphany.
The neo Americans, USA people, they all celebrated Christmas. That's the great division in Puerto Rico. Well, anyway, the the point is that that that if there's anything that I am impressed with, is that on the bright the most the brightest dawn you can have over the Chesapeake Bay, you can see the sun come up in a tremendous ball of fire, of course, that means you're gonna have a bad day. But there it is on the horizon, absolutely magnificent. You've all experienced this or sunset, and you can blot it all out with your index finger.
Just put it close enough to your eye. It's not there anymore. You don't see it. It's nothing with your little index finger. And that's what we can do with truth.
It's easy to block truth out. You close your ears. Look at old man Pilate. He was a he was really a good man at heart. And he winds up by saying, what is truth?
Well, he didn't even wait to get an answer from anybody. He immediately he left and went out. Take all the disputations of our lord with the scribes, the pharisees, the leaders of the people. These were the remember, these men were good decent people, most of them. They really were sincere, and they could not take, you know, to heart what Christ was saying without looking upon it as blasphemy.
Just think of this when tell people tell you that Christ was only a good man. That's nonsense of the first water. But the point is that it when our lord, remember, he never lost an argument. He never took a course as far as I know in logic. A matter of fact, I don't think he had a college degree.
But he never lost an argument with the best brains, the best of the best well informed men of his day, the leaders of the people, he didn't lose one argument with them, not one. What was their what was their reaction? They closed their ears. They ran away. They wouldn't answer him.
So the fact you that the truth is out there, the fact that the the sun's on the horizon magnificently large, you can blot it all out with your index finger. Now the best commentary on our age came to me by Bill in Bill Buckley's National Review by an article there on the 12/28/1992, written by his five nephews and nieces. That's the total of five. Three girls and two boys, I think it is. And they are the sons and daughters of his sister, Eloise Heath.
Now these five children are aged six to 12. Now keep these little things in their their ages are six to 12. Boy, she sure was a busy lady there for a while. Now, sometime before Christmas, the five of them, apparently, they're going to the same school. The school is not mentioned.
I think the school breathed a sigh of relief at that. Anyway, the, these five of the assembly, They got a Christmas gift from the United Nations, and it was the United Nations declaration of the rights of the child. Each got a copy. And then they were asked to to report either in writing or spoken their their free thinking quotations, free thinking on the constitution that they had read, the declaration. Now at the same time, their mother asked them to write an article on the true spirit of Christmas.
So that's the name of the that's the title of the article in the national review for December 1992. The True Spirit of Christmas. Now right at the beginning of that article, they give they they notice the article is written by all five of these, six to 12. And just as they wrote it with their spelling, with their capitalization, and their inimitable grammar and syntax. But it's theirs, not their mother typed it.
She takes credit for the typing. Now so early in this article on the spirit of Christmas, they refer to this assembly. They refer to getting this declaration. But and then they incorporate this in the beginning of their article. I hope you're following me.
But here's my point. Now these are five little children, ages six to 12, from some school. I don't know what the name of the school is. And here's how they begin this particular paragraph. Nothing is simply black or white but gray.
Do you get it? There's no in other words, there's no right and wrong. There's just something in between. There's no truth and error. There's just something mishmash in between.
That's from five little kids, ages six to 12. They are already victims of what we today call destruction. I don't know what missus Heath thought about that. I don't know what Bill Buckley thought. He certainly is no destructionist.
That's for sure. He that poor devil thinks in truth and and error. He thinks there are absolutes like God, you know. That's Bill Buckley. You all know him.
Conservatives love him, but he has his enemies in the other camp that remain unmentioned. But that what I wanna bring out, this is terribly significant, that we can talk about pragmatism and utilitarianism and materialism and secularism. We can talk about Dewey's instrumentalism and all of that stuff. And you say, that doesn't touch me. That's that Keep that in the old classroom.
Do you see what's happening? Here are these five children from a good, well educated family who in this article on the true spirit of Christmas has a paragraph in there beginning with words to this effect, there is neither nothing is either black or white, there is just gray. How many times have I heard that from the elite of our high schools, private ones at that, and Catholic at that? Don't talk about things being right or wrong. I've heard it explicitly like this.
Explicitly. So you question whether this is academic? This is this is what's happening in the Catholic church today. It's a matter of truth. As doctor Clarence Walton told me about the first day he came to Catholic Uphrican Columbia, this is about forty years ago, thirty five.
He said the main the chief problem of our age is epistemological, meaning simply that it's a problem of truth. And that's what these poor little kids are talking about. But they say there's no such thing as truth because you see if there's truth, then there's possible error. All they say is you have approximations to something on one side, you have approximations to something on the other, but it's all in between. Just a mishmash, or whatever you wanna call it.
In other words, a mess, m e s s, mess. And that's the world we're living in. This is 12/26/1992. That's not ancient history. That didn't come from an academic background or, I mean, from some woolly headed professors.
Even if they're bald, they can be woolly headed. This comes from five little children. At this age, they are already relativists. Now you come to church and they go to church on Sunday, believe me, they do. Missus Heath is a very devout Catholic and a very energetic one.
But they come there and they hear talks about God and morality, and yet what they're saying is there are no such things as standards. Pardon. There are standards, of course. People they don't even have any kind of a standard. But there's no absolutes.
There's no such thing as a true morality or a false morality, which we call immorality. That's from these five little children, 12/26/1992. And so Christ came into the world, so what? You can blot him out with your index finger. You refuse to listen.
You refuse to hear. And that's what's happening today. Now in the last couple of weeks, I have no knowledge of the validity of these statistics. But whenever I use statistics, I like to introduce them by the words of my late friend, Israeli. That there are liars, then there are damn liars, and then there are statistics.
Israeli was right on target. But we all use statistics. That's the key word of today, you know. Nobody knows how they were gathered, what the definitions were, none. But all you have to say, statistics tell us this.
Everybody says, yes. Amen, brethren. 88% of Catholics now that is these these figures are supposed to refer to Catholics who are who are practicing Catholics. 88% do not accept in total the teachings of the Catholic church. 88%.
That only leaves 12% that does. Didn't have my computer here, I believe that's about right. 88 per no. Supposing you have that. Now see, here's my question.
These good Catholics who pick it and they're this seems to be the name of the game. They call it, you know, sporgasbord, cafeteria, all this stuff. The point I wanna make is this, what is their standard of choosing? They don't tell you that. They don't tell you that.
But they've got to have some if you go into a cafeteria, you go into a smoker's board and you make some choices, something's guiding your choice either a diet or you can't eat salt, you know, all the rest of the stuff. So what is their standard? Ask them that. Of course, there's no use asking them that. They'll say, don't don't ask those silly questions.
Just get out there and act and do. See, what we are today, we are living in an an age of what we we politely call relativism. But that's really too polite because, you see, if you say that this business of things approximate truth, approximate error, approximate the good, approximate evil, If you use remember, even when you say something is relative, you've got to say what's it relative to. That's a correlative term. It implies something else.
It's like fatherhood implying that he has father and a baby. What is it? Of course, they don't ask these questions because here is the basic problem today. Following, here's the way it goes. You you you start with with Mill, utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham in in England, then that jumped over the Atlantic and took up at in Harvard with William James and his pragmatism.
John Dewey got his instrumentalism from William James, and Dewey was president of Hunter College, Teachers College in New York from which he exercised a tremendous influence upon The United States Of America. Dewey was hailed and is hailed as the common man's philosopher. Well, I ask you folks, who wants to be a common man or a common woman? But Dewey was the great light, the great great godfather of the, you know, progressive education and this business of instrumentalism. And as William James says, died in 1910, don't ask what whether a thing is true or false.
See, that's what those crazy philosophers talk about. Willie James says, just ask what's its cash value. There you've got a definition in the in the flesh of primitive. Don't ask about truth and error and all that. That's wishy washy.
You can't get to anybody. Just ask what does it bring at an auction. Dewey comes along and says, oh, he and they remember, these men were good. William James been a bright light of my whole life, setting against the Saint Thomas Aquinas. Now Dewey comes along and says, with about all this classical education, Latin and Greek and, you know, math and literature, he said, what's important is that boys and the girls of the he died, you know, in 1952.
He was very old and very active. He said, what is important is to is to give them the stuff they need to make a good salary. That's boiling it down. In other words, education is simply a tool to what we Americans call the good life. That's reason it's called instrumentalism, tool.
And what's the next step? Meanwhile, over in in Europe, you had a men like Wittgenstein, you had men Bertrand Russell talking about what? What we call today logical positivism, the analytic approach to judgments and propositions. You'll say, don't talk to us on a Sunday in Garrett Park. This is all academic.
Is it academic? Then remember the then remember Eloise's five children. Take remember they are not academic. Even although they're victims of it. That there's no truth.
There is don't talk about anything except what is gray. And you know, just look up a catalog of paint and see the different colors of gray. It's that thick. Literally. I've seen it when I went to buy some paint.
Then you have the ultimate goal now where, you see, they've torn they they have they have destroyed that even the possibility of truth. So there's no use about arguing because there's no such thing as truth. And then Wittgenstein and followers, Wittgenstein died a few years ago. And then, of course, De Rida and his deconstructionism. De Rida died, still living.
And then a fellow named Paul DeMond came over to Yale, and he is the one who chiefly decimated or disseminated, I mean, this so called destructionism in The United States Of America. At the present time, DeMond's reputation is in, let us say, a bit of a trouble. But the point is this, now we are at the end of the line because these good people and this is what is going on in our academic institutions today, right now. There's no use talking about truth or falsehood because even if there were such a thing as truth, even if there were such a thing as goodness or beauty, even if these things were, we couldn't talk about them because we can't con we can't convey any truth by words. Because every truth is a simple and existential moment.
And when you use the word man and I use the word man, in these both instances, they can mean totally different things. Of course they can. Just remember Humpty Dumpty and through the looking glass. They didn't make the discovery but what they have done is to carry this thinking to its ultimate and now we are in a situation where the best we can say in the best circles about truth is that it's just relative, relative. And they don't tell you what it's relative to.
It's like talking about values. You can't have value without us being valued for something. And that's the state that we are. We call it relativism today. The holy speak see has spoken out against this at at least from about the beginning '9 about 1889, was the thirteenth.
Because he saw what was happening and it's happened just as it was predicted. Just as it was predicted, men like men by doctor Richard Cabot. So where do we stand today? We are told that a great light has shone upon us. Where is the light?
You're not gonna find it in your philosophers. You're not gonna find it in your criticisms or the the critiques or the critique critics in your in your classrooms or in your newspapers or in your book reviews. You're not gonna find it there, I'll tell you. You're not gonna find it in your literature courses, in your English courses. That's where much lots of this stuff is.
Where is it in a world that denies there's even the possibility of truth? Where do we stand or sit or lie prone, passive, inert, impotent for the most part. That that the great Catholic church as we refer to, and it is great if you talk about numbers, and it's enormously great if you talk about its founder, a baby called Christ. It's perfectly magnificent if you talk about it in terms of what it says and promises and so forth. Oh, if only it were true.
That's what they say, if only it were true. So they say, for example, William James praised Newman for his descriptions of god and so forth. Of course, James says at the end, well, of course, it's just rhetoric. That was remember, he died in 1910. That's when all this has been accumulated.
So where do we stand? You've got to answer that. Are you among the 88? Because if if you are, then ask yourself. Of course, you know what I'm I'm talking about chiefly, the Humanae Vitae.
That's the one that's, as far as many Catholics is concerned, upset the apple cart. They said, oh, we can't accept Humanae Vitae. That's encyclical. Of course, most of the people that talk about haven't even seen the book, haven't even seen it. Never have taken a book in their hands and saw Humanae Vitae in its title.
All they're doing is echoing what they heard. They say it's the encyclical on contraception. It is not an encyclical on contraception. It's an encyclical on Christian marriage where it simply tells married people, listen, you you are destined for heaven, you are destined to be saints, and here's how you do it. That's what caught upset the apple cart.
The church in The United States hasn't been the same since. Where do we stand? If we are among the 88, then ask yourself, what makes what it for the 12% that I do accept, what makes me accept it? Because in very simple dialogue, dialectic, either the church of Jesus Christ speaking through its through Rome today, the Rock Of Peter, is either speaking in the name of Christ as Christ said it would and is truly the light of the world or it's no such thing. And if it's no such thing, then off with its head.
Don't let don't try to defend it because it keeps us civilized as a young Yale student told me. Where do you stand personally? Are you living your adult life, your career life, your professional life as an an adult mature informed Catholic? Or are you simply living on the faith that you took up when you were in this grammar school if you were lucky enough to get it? Because we've given up teaching catechism as truth.
We have gone over to the experiential, to the emotional, to revelation that the people of god can talk about. Conclusion. Our lord said to his apostles, going you the going therefore, teach ye teach. Don't feel, not the emotions. Teach ye all nations.
Baptizing them in the name of the father, and of the son and of the holy spirit. Teach them everything that I have taught you. Notice he didn't write a word. It was all oral. Teach them everything that I have taught you.
And behold, I am with you all days even to the end of the world. Thou art Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Look the situation over, and I hope you'll take this your stand with Peter and not be a cafeteria Catholic. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.