A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When Jesus and the disciples met in Galilee, now that's, of course, up in the north by the lake, our lord said to them, the son of man is going to be delivered into the hands of men who will put him to death. And then he will be raised up on the third day. That's good simple language. Now at these words, his disciples were overwhelmed with grief, with grief.
That shows you how they understood what our lord was saying. Now then when they entered Capernaum, which, of course, is up in the northwest corner of the lake, the collectors of the temple tax approached Peter and said, doesn't your master pay the temple tax? Of course, does, Peter replied. Well, then Jesus, on entering the house, asked without giving him time to speak, what is your opinion, Simon? That's Peter.
Do the kings of the world take tax or toll from their sons, or do they tax foreigners? Peter replied, of course, from foreigners. And Jesus said, then their sons are exempt. But for fear of disobeying them, you go to the lake right there, throw in a line, and take out the first fish that you catch. Open its mouth, and, you will find there a coin worth twice the temple tax.
Take it and give it to them for you and for me. And this is the gospel of the lord, the good news. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I hope that well, I'm pretty sure some of you saw the show last night. It's an hour show, comes on every week.
And it had to do with this matter of how how much must you do to keep people alive. I I hope all of you saw it because these things are done very well. Sixty minute program, sixty minutes, I think that's what it's called. Don't take it all too seriously because it's it's well engineered, manipulated. But the thing is, it's done very well.
And what they do, of course, is have this person to person photography. You know, it's it's really taking a course in ethics through a codec. And there's nothing speaks to your heart the way pictures do. Think of Somalia. Think of Boston.
A picture's worth a library of print. Well, there's no there's no comparison. You can walk right through a library with a thousand books and not be impressed at all, but you can't pass pictures without being impressed. So we're now in the way of diplomacy by photography and theology by photography, and now we're doing morality by photography. They select a number of cases and then they give you close ups of the people weeping and crying and and all of that.
It's horrible. I think that's an absolute invasion of privacy, but anyway. But the point I wanna make is this, it's terribly important. Even old man Plato, who lived a few hundred years before Christ, he said no man can live well. He knows unless he knows how to die.
I know there's some people here who've read that with me, and so they know I'm telling the truth for a change. But today, you see, in our great land of the home and the brave and all that, we look upon death as the worst possible evil and to be avoided at all cost. I mean money, plain money. Of course, it's the public who pays. It's the premium people who paying these high premiums who pays and is putting the company the nation bankrupt.
Because we've got this idea that you can kill a million and a half unborn babies, but if one is born without a brain, you must do everything you can to keep it alive. And today, if that happens, you can keep the baby alive indefinitely, indefinitely. A person has a stroke, is completely calm, closed without absolutely any expectation of any kind of a cure. You can keep them alive indefinitely. Think of poor missus Kuntz.
They kept her alive for about five or six years. She outlived her husband who was perfectly well when she was overtaken with a stroke or whatever it was. Now with a if you saw it, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you didn't, well I cannot tell you, really. But what they did is gave about five, I think it was, instances.
There was this baby with half born with half a brain. There was the, a couple of other people. And then at the end, they had a 72 year old man who went out of a on a very calm, absolutely ordinary Saturday morning, got on an eight foot ladder, fell off of it, crashed his brain I mean, his skull, and that did did irretrievable damage to his brain and was in the hospital. And the mother with her children and even some grandchildren had to say, what shall we do about it? Now, of all of those people, it's only the the the wife of the man who fell off the ladder that had any sense, that had any principle.
Nobody else had any principle to solve the problem. Should we keep this little baby had been born with half a brain? It was it had been in the hospital for nearly two years, I think, and would never leave the hospital. The bill already was a half $1,000,000. And there were a couple of other patients.
Another one who would never leave the hospital. And if they left that hospital, they'd have to go to another one. He was 21 years old. But the doctors, the nurses, the relations of these unfortunate patients, none of them had any principle to appeal to. None of them.
It was only at the end the wife of the man who fell off of the ladder said, what do you the doctor said, what shall we do? What are our expectations? He said, well, we can keep him alive, he'll never leave the hospital. He'll never have a consciousness. So she rather threw her tears.
They were all distraught. Said, well, let the lord take care of it. Let the lord take him when he wants. She was the only one that had now I'm I'm not saying they all ought to had to be Christians or this. I am simply saying that none of the others had any major ethical moral principle on which to solve the present case.
Not a one of them. There was no principle enunciated. Everything was up in the air. Everybody was uncertain. Now the I'm gonna I'm not talking about I'm talking about what the Catholic philosophical stuff.
The church teaches, and this is completely in accord with natural law, is that we are bound to take reasonable care of our health, period. We are bound under the pain of sin to take reasonable care of our health. And the the keyword there is reasonable care. That's not an absolute. That's a relative.
A father and a mother with three children certainly have more of an obligation to keep stay alive and keep well than an uncle or an aunt who is not married and who's perfectly free. If they wanna die, go ahead and die when the lord takes me. I don't want anybody cutting up my good body. That's exactly the decision a good friend of mine who was a nun said, I'm not gonna have people I'm not gonna have that surgery. She died.
She said, the lord wants to take me? Fine. If he wants me to stay, it's it. Let him I'll be alright. Because you see, there is nothing immoral about dying.
Every time I go down to Galesville, I pass five or six cemeteries. And to keep everything in in in you know, to keep everything convenient, there's also a funeral parlor and you can also buy your monument there. So it's well, it's a very convenient thing to do. Selection of six great, you know, graveyards plus your undertaker plus your tomb, everything in one fine package. We are all destined to die.
There's nothing in moral about dying. Death is a physical evil. It is a terrible blow to people. And I'm not up here to Christ wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He wept.
Christ wept. So we're not talking about we're the grief, the mourning, the separation, the loneliness, the isolation, and especially loneliness of a widow or a widower. These things are terrible. But the point is they are terrible, but they are not immoral. And if we're living for God, as we're supposed to be doing, I mean, that's the whole purpose of life for a Christian or for everybody else, then we ought to keep in mind that death is just as Keller, the blind, deaf, dumb woman who was such a marvel, as she said, for me, death means just going from one room into another.
The only difference is that then I will see. Now so there's the first point that there's nothing immoral about dying. We but we have to take reasonable care of our health, and everything hangs now upon that word reasonable. Every Catholic theologian agrees to to what I've said so far. Now the difference of opinion today among Catholic the and I mean these are differences.
The church has not solved this settled this problem, and it all depends on your view of natural law. What do you mean by reasonable? Or to put it in another way, we are bound to use ordinary means to take care of our health. We are not bound to extraordinary means. Alright.
Now the question is, what's extraordinary? And here's where the great minds of the theologians differ. Some say that ordinary means today means medical ordinary means. That is putting a lot of tubes in your body, cutting your throat, putting some more rubber down there and feeding you through your arm, going through this whole business of what they call, you know, this intensive care stuff. The traditional view of ordinary, it means ordinary.
It means putting some oatmeal in a person's mouth and they swallow it through their mouth. It doesn't mean sticking a tube up their arm and giving some kind of a liquid. Drink means it's something you take in through your mouth and you swallow it. It doesn't mean something that, again, they they open up your body and put a put a hose in there and give you a slushie. Now here's where there's a very there's a difference of opinion about what is ordinary and extraordinary, but that is a problem that you can go either way on today.
We all agree you're bound to use ordinary means. You are not bound to the extraordinary. What is extraordinary? Well, I just told you, it's either you you look upon ordinary as what is ordinary. What is traditional?
What is how do you eat? How do you drink? How do you ordinarily take care of your body? Whereas people leaning more to a medical profession, especially if they're doctors or nurses and things, they considered sticking things in your arm, getting a lot of needles, putting hoses in and out of you, having all kinds of machines, electronic devices, and all of this stuff, perfectly ordinary. It's what you do.
And remember there's another factor that comes in here, and that's the liability to suit. Because if a doctor or a nurse or a hospital doesn't do what is ordinarily ordinarily prescribed by the medical profession, they can be sued for libel I mean for for injury and sued plenty. So that's another factor they have to face and that's a practical thing. You asked me what my opinion is. I belong to the traditionalist.
I believe in the natural law. I think I have to use ordinary means, which means food and drink, taking care of my body, not exposing you know, all the rest of it. And when the situation is such now this is careful stuff. When the situation is such that the patient has no hope of recovery, that what you're doing for him is very painful and and a good outcome is not foreseen reasonably, and if it there's a matter of expense comes in here, who's gonna pay these costs? People don't think about this because in many instances, that baby that's being taken care his own public welfare, so is the mother.
So is the public that's paying the bills. So in a case where where a patient is hopelessly ill, there's no hope of recovery, the treatments are very costly, and furthermore, they may be a very great pain or inconvenience or embarrassment, Some people are still modest. They don't like people monkeying around with their bodies. When those conditions are fulfilled, then you say, I am not bound to use extraordinary means. And by extraordinary, I mean extraordinary.
And putting hoses down my in my veins, in my arteries, in my lungs, in my stomach, or wherever they put these gadgets to keep me alive in some comatose states that they did poor missus Kuntz for years. That I consider absolutely extraordinary, and we're not bound to it. And therefore, there's no reason even to put in the plug much less to pull it out. So on that show last night, the only woman, the only person there that made sense had any principles to guide her her judgment was that good lady who'd lost her whose husband had had irretrievable, incurable, inoperable brain damage. She would just be lying there comatose.
She simply said, I'll have I she simply said, I turn it over to god. God let god take him when god wants, and that's our principle. Now this is a very serious it's alright for us this morning to sit here in church, but when you're in the in the hospital waiting room and the doctor's giving you this news about a dear one, this is not an easy thing. But the point is if you have no principles, how can you then make any kind of a conclusion? And a Christian should have principles.
God put me on this earth not for eternity, not to make it a paradise, and not for me to be here all the time, but simply that I will die. But I'm to live in between birth and death for him, to know him, to love him, and to serve him, to be happy with him in the next. It's up to him to take me when he wants me to go. I'm bound to use reasonable means. I'm not bound to the extraordinary, and that's so where's you have here the the essence of solving this very heartrending problem.
It's a time when we need god's help. That did not even come in but once either. In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit. Amen.