A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Well, when the Pharisee this is a continuation, of course, of what we've been reading from Saint Matthew. It seems that we've been reading it for eternity. When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silent the Sadducees, of course, they hated each other, they assembled in a body, that is the Pharisees. And one of them who was skilled in the law, in an attempt to trip up Jesus, asked him, teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest?
Our lord replied, you shall love the lord your god with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these two commandments, the entire law is based and the prophets as well.
The gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Two very important points I wanna make this morning on these few lines which are simply tremendous. This is not a parable we're dealing with.
This is our lord answering a straightforward question. The first thing I want to call to your attention are three words. When the English says, with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with your whole intellect or whatever, remember you're reading English. And even in English, ask yourself, what do those words mean? We talk about the heart, we talk about the soul, We talk about the mind.
What do you mean when you use the word? And of course the answer is go to your dictionary, the unabridged or even a good collegiate and you will get your eyes opened. That that is the the the enormous difference in meanings these words have. Now I am not going to try to go into the psychology of when this was written by Saint Matthew in Greek, but he certainly wasn't talking about heart and soul and understanding as we use those words, that's for sure. If you're talking about an atomist, would certainly not have used those three words.
But the point one little Greek word I want you to know is holy. Holy. And whatever Matthew understood by these words or whatever the Hebrews or the Greeks or whatever understood these Greek words to mean in the first century AD, that word holy is very clear. It means entirely, holy. You you you have the English word holistic, which is very familiar now to medical profession or to other profession, that we must consider things in their totality.
Holey, three little words, letters, holy. And that word is repeated each time with soul, body, and mind. In the Greek, it's repeated each time. My point is this, how many Catholics even attempt to love god with their whole understanding, with their intellect. That's that's the the Greek which means intellect, understanding, intelligence, mind.
Many Catholics end their Catholic understanding of Catholicism in the elementary school and most of them in a Catholic high school and that's the end. They go to college. Now here's my point. You're dealing with adolescents in the first year high, what? They're 14 years old.
When they leave there, they're ready to be fathers and mothers to set up households. Households. And not many years ago in The United States, that's exactly what they did. At 18 or 19 or 20, boys and girls got married, the guy got a job, they set up housekeeping or lived with the parents of one of the spouses spouses for a while. And the point is this, that these years is the difference between being a kid and being an adult.
And yet most Catholics, look at our book stand, how how many New Testaments have we sold in the last year? Four or five. How many Catholics now you're when you talk about Catholicism, you're talking about a body of knowledge. You don't get it by your mother's milk. You don't get it by any kind of osmosis.
It's work. You learn it like you do becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or or a mechanic repairing cars. You've gotta learn it. You've gotta read. You've gotta argue.
You've got to go to teachers. That all stops for most Catholics at the latest fourth year high and for many at their eighth grade. Now I'm talking present tense. And what makes the situation much worse is that for the last twenty or twenty five years, we haven't been teaching doctrine in our elementary schools, in our catechesis. I know we have confer confraternity of Christian doctrine.
They don't wanna call it that you see. They don't wanna use the word doctrine. But that that those sending high school boys and girls to these Sunday school classes, in most instances, nothing but a fight in the household. And yet these very same people go to their different colleges, they become adults, they learn their law, their chemistry, their physics, their math, their phys ed or whatever they're going to major in, but they don't advance one iota as an adult in their understanding of the basic ideas of religion. Much less Catholicism, much less a concept of God.
You say that's a dreary picture you're point painting. Well, it's it's the picture that's out there and that was very clear on the occasion of our holy father's visit. Very clear. Immensely clear. That's my first point.
The second is more important. The first though is very attractive go on and on. The second point is this, so often you hear people, I'm talking contemporary, so often you hear people talking about the two great commandments. So right away, I say, what do you mean by the two great two great commandments? Love of god and love of neighbor.
I say, they're not two great commandments. You see what you do when you take things out of context. Our lord didn't say that. Our lord said the first commandment is that you've got to give your notice there's not a word in there about body or the physical or the material. What our lord is saying, you've got to give yourself entirely, wholly, holistic, wholly to me with your mind, with your soul, with your heart.
They were the three great divisions of the human psychology at least around Plato's time or a little later. Now that is perfectly clear that we've gotta give our whole thought to god. Not just our feelings but our intelligence. That's a. And there's no mistaking the Greek.
It means your intellect, your understanding, or your mind. And our lord said, you've got to give it entirely to me. What have have most of us to give to him yet we don't know anything about him? But anyway, the lord our our lord has said, first commandment is to love god with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with your whole mind. But then he says, the second is like it.
But what does he say the second is? That you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. In other words, there are two commandments there, not one. You love god, one. You love yourself, secondly.
Because our lord puts the love of yourself as the criterion for loving your neighbor. And I often say, God help us if that's I don't wanna be loved by some of those people. Look what how they treat themselves. I wouldn't wanna be treated that way. Look how we abuse our body or disabuse our bodies.
So this is very important that you love god, but then secondly, you have to love yourself. You don't have any obligations of justice to yourself, but you have all kinds of obligations to yourself because you are bound to love yourself. And then thirdly, you love your neighbor, those who are around you because and with the same kind of love that you love yourself. And you love yourself because God has commanded you to do it. You're his creature.
When I say you, I mean all of us. I'm in there too. I'm not preaching to you, I'm preaching to myself. Now this is a very simple idea. It is tremendously difficult to put it into practice, tremendously.
It's a lifetime work, it's like a good marriage, you work on it every day. You never have it. All you have is doing it and working it to try to make it better. But how many of how many people? I mean good faithful Catholics, mass, the sacraments, good homes, how many of them have the has their intellect kept up with their their growth in other fields?
And the answer is it hasn't kept up at all in many instances. They're living on the doctrine that they learned sometime in the distant past. And goodness knows what they learned or what they didn't learn. It's what what makes me just awesomely, horribly frightened at the future because a lot of the people who are today loyal and intelligent Catholics are not of the younger generation. They have not been given the doctrine of the Catholic church of the Catholic church.
Remember our the cardinal sent a letter some months ago to parents and principals of schools that nothing should be taught in a Catholic parochial school unless it has been approved by the magisterium of the church. Well, just look at some of the catechisms as that have been used and you'll see that there that hasn't been true at all. Right. The the new catechism, the Catholic church has not yet appeared in English. Think of this.
It's it's it's coming out in Russia. It'll be in Russian before it'll be in English. The translation that was made in English was was rejected by Rome because of some sensible people in The United States went over there and said, this translation is rotten. The the corrections that a committee made on that new English translation was had more pages to it than the catechism itself, and that was the product of our great in American scholars. And when we are being told already by men like father Reese that this new catechism will not displace the catechisms that have been used that are being used.
They're still trying to hold on to a church without doctrine. You cannot have a Catholic church without doctrine, and you can't have Catholic doctrine without teachers, and you can't have Catholic doctrine communicated unless we have teachers who know it and communicate doctrine. Not what people like, not what makes them feel good, not what fulfills them, but what the Catholic church teaches as official doctrine. Official, the magisterium of the church. This is not always easily come come by.
Most of the papal documents are dull boring reading. I've heard more than one people person say it. I know they are. I've read them. I read them.
It's not like watching TV, you know, on the last latest episode or whatever. But how many law students? How many engineering students? How many medical students? How many anybody who's trying to become a a practitioner in some particular career, how many of them find the books they have to read absorbing?
They can't tear themselves away from it. They're interesting. They're thrilling. How nonsensical can you be? But they do it because learning is hard.
It's not easy. Anyone who's tried it knows that it's not easy. And so this gospel today reading is terrific. It is really take it to heart. Love god with all you are.
I don't care what your psychology is. Put it down on paper and write the word holy, h. Well, that's what h o l e. That's what it is in English, holy or entire. Write that word before it and what our lord is saying with all of that, you have to love god.
But you can't love what you don't know. You can't will what you don't know. Therefore, there must be knowledge, there must be understanding. How do you get it? By hard work and the grace of god.
But our lord is saying that you've got to give that to god. With all that you are, with all of that, god must come first. Not before being a doctor, lawyer, or an Indian chief, but first. And then you come second, that you must love yourself, and then you love your neighbor. As my old friend Lewis, CS Lewis said, if the spokes of the bicycle wheel are lined up with a hub with god, they'll be lined up with one another.
In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit, amen.