A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. At that time, the disciples came children the Israel, the never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Yesterday, we celebrated, memorialized, the feast of Saint Jerome, Truly a line of a man, ferocious in many ways, and I mean that. A man who couldn't stay put any place. He roamed all around them, the Mediterranean Basin, a man who probably was one of the most informed man of his day. He probably had a mastery of of all the knowledge of his day. Now this is no exaggeration.
Jerome was a was a strong man of extremely extraordinary gifts and ability and dedicated to hard work. Let's not forget it. And let's not forget what I said yesterday. He had the support of a very loyal, devoted, self sacrificing group of people led by Saint Paul. Now the contrast between him yesterday and this saint that we honor today, Saint Teresa of Lisieux, the Carmelite nun from this little town of France, the contrast is simply overwhelming, if you can be overwhelmed.
Because here you have a little girl. She was in the convent when she was 15 by a special indult, and I'm not sure of this, but I think she was dead by the age of 29 or so. She had a very short life. And she moved simply from her parish church and her life in the little village there into the local monastery, the local karma like monastery, and that was her whole life. That was it.
Nothing extraordinary about it at all. I should add that when we think of her going from her town into the convent, she wasn't going from the marketplace with all the hubbub and the noise and the excitement of a village town into a nice little cove of tranquility and peace, quite the reverse. As I understand it, when she entered that convent it was in considerable distress by internal dissension. But that's one thing she didn't bother, she did not get involved in. When she moved in there, and in a few years she was made head of novices.
She couldn't have been born about 18 years old. As I say, she's dead when she's about 29 or so, if I remember. Now, but when she moved in there she saw very quickly what the situation was. So that merely leaving the marketplace, the town of Lisia to go into its Carmelite monastery, that didn't remove her from the whips and the scorns and so forth of human beings. But the thing is, she did not get involved in this apparently.
And and and you can search if you will. Her life was most unusually normal. The only thing extraordinary about it was it being so completely normal. It wasn't really until after she died that she began to attract some attention. And that, as far as I can see, was chiefly through very peculiar happenings that took place in her name.
When you read, as I did yesterday, some of her biography, again you say, This is oh, this is sacramental. You say, Gee, what's this? And you see, you can easily go off on this because I don't take that back at all. It's pretty soft, sweet stuff. That's not my cup of tea at all.
But the thing is this, she was not writing in English for Garrett Park in 1980. See, keep that in mind. This young girl was living in the latter part. She has a contemporary of Will the thirteenth whom she met. And as a matter of fact, she certainly had a mind of her own.
See, everyone said, You can't go into the convent at 15, you've got to wait till you're 21. So her father took her mother and died, so they so they went on a a pilgrimage, and they went in to see Leo the thirteenth, and she was warned not to say anything to him, just to accept his blessing. So so when she when Leo the thirteenth came along, you know, the question she popped to him, she said, I wanna go into the convent. Help me to get in. And you he what he said was, if it's god's will, you will.
And she did. Things moved ahead. She was admitted. But the thing that came that comes out in her life as I say, thinking over this man Jerome and his life and his knowledge and his controversies and the turmoil, the turbulence of his life, his extraordinary industry, his ability, his his overwhelming grasp of the word of God. Then you come to this little child.
She's only 17 or 18. She's in there when she's about 16. And you say, can these people be in the same ballpark? They are. They are.
And you see, the church don't miss what the church is telling us. From time to time, we we are we are presented with these illustrious people, men and women, and they are so diverse. There is scarcely any homogeneity among them. They're even not only diverse, but they're opposed to one another in many ways. How can you contrast a man like Jerome and a man like Augustine over there in Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries and then come down to the nineteenth with this little girl down in his convent in Louisiana?
You say, well, there's nobody you can't put them together. Well, they are together. They are together. The church is Catholic, and that's what the church is doing. It's it's fine to read about definitions of holiness.
It's fine to read, if you want to, to read treatises on the virtues and and all of this and asceticism, you know, all the rest of it, and I I'm a great admirer of it. I even am exposed to it once in a while. But what is much more effective is to have somebody put before you and say, Look, that's the way to do it. Look what they have done. That's much more effective.
These models are extremely important, and the church gives us a a cornucopia of them. It's overflowing with this great diversity, this heterogeneity, of men and women, young and old, of all nationalities, of all attributes or of no attributes. Take a man like the Curie of ours that we whose feast be celery, compare him to a man like Saint Augustine of Hippo, or to a man like Leo the thirteenth, or Pius the tenth. You see, this is the company we keep. And when we find ourselves in the company of the saints, remember, there's going to be somebody there we will recognize as imaging me.
And if I don't, I'm still in good company. They, we pray to God, will recognize me. In the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Amen.