A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. As Jesus, our lord was teaching in the temple precincts, he went on to say, how can the scribes claim? Now this is a quote. The Messiah is David's son. David himself, inspired by the holy spirit, said, the lord said to my lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.
Now our lord continues. If David himself addresses him as lord, in what sense can he be his son? The majority of the crowd, when they heard this, were delighted. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
It Perhaps it's repetitious, but I wanna go back to yesterday's feast. The feast of Saint Charles Lavonga from Uganda and his 21 companions. Now I don't know what you heard about this yesterday morning, but I wanna bring it up again. Now these Luwanga was chiefly responsible. The the martyrdom took place in 1885 to 1887 over in Uganda.
And the king, I don't know what the African word for it is, but the guy who was running the show, he had a fondness for young boys. They called them Pages. Now Luonga became a Christian, a very fervent Catholic, and he inspired a lot of these pages to follow him in the Catholic faith. And the result was that the good king couldn't have his pages as he wanted to have them. Don't know whether he's a pedophile or not.
He wasn't that modern probably. I don't know. But anyway, the king couldn't have his fun with his boys because of Luonga. So in a very friendly way, he simply decided to murder them all if they did not do what he wanted them to do. And all of them, that is Luonga and 21 others of these young men were were absolutely brutally tormented.
I mean, they weren't just murdered. They were just terribly tormented and tortured with a very slow death. Now what I wanna bring home to you, I still am remembering what I saw with Walter Johnson on that wonderful, theater production by Kaiser Permanente of Secret. I don't know whether any of you went over and saw it or not. But the point I wanna make is this, the office of yesterday for Charles Luonga and his 21 companions, all martyrs, all saints in Uganda, 1885 to 1887.
Here's what the office says. They died. They were martyred because they loved Christ. Now there you have the whole thing in a nutshell. They didn't die because they didn't wanna have sex with the king.
They didn't die because they had some idea of virginity or chastity or to of abstinence. They died because they love Christ. Now what does loving Christ mean in this particular situation? It means that you follow Christ's law as regards the use of the god given faculty of sex. And god says through his church and through natural law, but let's say through his church that here's the way you the sex, the that wonderful appetite, this wonderful endowment, this absolutely essential faculty that men and women have.
Here's how you have to use it. And that's within my law. And you can't use it properly unless you're married. Is that simple? There's no virtue in abstinence in itself.
Abstinence is a negation. This pulpit never committed adultery. This pulpit never committed fornication. This pulpit was never a pedophile. You see the silliness of of of pursuing a negative?
Yet we're doing it all the time. We're talking about Catholic we're talking about sex education in Catholic schools. That's nonsense. We should be talking about our chastity because chastity is a virtue which unites me to God through the use the proper use of sex. When you talk about abstinence, you cannot refrain.
When I went over there to the Walter Johnson, there were people carrying placards out against the show saying abstinence. Of course, in the show they said that they there was one line that if you don't wanna get aged, abstain from sex. Well, the point is, if that's literally, how about getting married? Is it alright after you get married to abstain from sex? Are you supposed to abstain from sex after you get married?
You see how nonsensical this is? But there was one line in the show, you can't abstain. And the second was use a good first rate condom. You had to they explained which ones were better. And then don't use a needle that someone else has used if you wanna take a shot of something or other.
But my point is much more basic than this. We Catholics, we are not talking about sex education. They're having a heck of a time up in Pittsburgh right now about it. Parents are resenting. I'm talking about Catholic schools.
We should be talking about chastity. Sex isn't all that important that it takes all it's like the AIDS today. You think there wasn't any other affliction of human beings but AIDS. So we've got to get our thinking straight. God made me.
I have to go back to God. I go back to him by virtue. And one of those virtues in the Christian it's not a pagan virtue. A truly Christian virtue is chastity. And whether you're married or single, old or young, middle aged, or whatever, you're bound to practice chastity.
And chastity simply means the virtue, the law of God that I have to follow if I wanna use this wonderful appetite called sex, if I want to use it properly in god's sight, that it will lead me back to him. And that's all positive because a negative can't be the object of a virtue. I know some of the commandments are negative, but you've got to see them in the light of the first commandment, that you've got to love god and your neighbor and then yourself, three commandments. And so I ask you to think about this. We are so off the track.
I'm talking about Catholics and our Catholic educational system. This talk about sex education, it's ridiculous. Why don't we talk about appetite education? Or we talk about phys ed as if you could separate the physical side of a human being from being human, which is certainly not being on the level of a rattlesnake. You see how wacky our thinking is?
It's crazy. It's absurd. And here we say we're running our schools at great sacrifice and yet we're surrendering to the world. We're surrendering to the materialistic view. We are surrendering to the thing that health is everything.
Lose your health and you've lost everything. Used to be a full page advertisement. As if the beginning and the ends of life is to keep healthy. As if we don't need graveyards or at least some place where you can dispose of corpses. And so this feast of the lung is so fantastically appropriate today where we're hearing so much about homosexuality, pedophilia, and all that all those beautiful things.
I mean, some people think they're just wonderful, you know. You see, the basic thing is we've gotten away from god. That's the main that's the basic thing. We've gotten away from the meaning of life which is god, not me but god. We've gotten away from the idea of what true human Christian fulfillment means.
And fulfillment isn't having my way, it's having God's way, doing what he wants. He's the one who put me here. He's the one who wants to wants me to come back to him. He's the one who's helping me through Christ, through the mass, through the sacraments. That's what we need, and that's what we're not getting.
We're getting a lot of froth, foam on the beer, or as my dear friend CS Lewis said, moonshine. But it's not the good stuff that was produced in Howard County in the good old days of prohibition. This is really moonshine. Shine. It's the kind that makes you a lunatic, insane because of the mood.
Take it to heart. Think over these things. Get down get down to realities of your life. You can make a difference, but be sure that the difference you make is on the side of Jesus Christ. And let me add of common sense and straight thinking, there are no substitutes for this.
The contrary of these things is disaster. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit.