In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen. That prayer I read is so unrealistic. I I don't understand who gets those things up. Can you imagine a father or a mother with three children walking in the footsteps of Saint Francis of Assisi who didn't become a priest because he wouldn't even own a breviary?
It's ridiculous. We're not asked to call Saint Francis be the first one to say, don't be absurd. You're nuts. You can't follow me and be a good father, a good mother, or a good single person in this world in which you're living. Saint Francis never never this is a great big question.
He never proposed his ideal of poverty for everybody. All he said, if that's what I wanna do. And just remember this, this ideal of poverty of Saint Francis, it it didn't even work during his own lifetime. Not even during his own lifetime because, you see, he he was living in the world. Some of you have been there.
It's a beautiful glorious place. You can't do it because as soon as a few peoples, a few other men gathered around him to join him, he never invited them. What did they had to have a house? They had to had a roof. They had to have a roof over their heads.
So they had to rent a house or they had to own a house. Therefore, they had to have some money to buy or rent a house or they had to go to a court and get a legal deed. You can't escape if you're you we are in this world. And Saint Francis of Assisi never never never raised what he did to a universal rule or obligation for everybody to do it. Now that has been proposed by other followers of Francis, but Saint Francis of Assisi had more sense than that.
But what we can do, we certainly can get something from that man. And don't forget the the woman who'll be who following Saint Francis established her order for Claire's. And that I happened to be there in 1934 and I met Jorgensen who stay was staying at the same Ponson as I was. He wrote probably the most Well, I I guess it's still. I can't be sure.
But it it certainly is among the best biographies of Saint Francis. Now, Jefferson came from upper among the northern countries. He never became a Catholic, but he was a firm follower of Saint Francis of Assisi, marvelous man. Now, Saint Francis of Assisi started out as being a fine young Italian noble. Plenty of money for the time, had everything, and he wanted everything.
And above all, he wanted glory because he hadn't he didn't have to worry about money and those kinds of things. He had it. Somebody gave it to him. Now, the curious thing is this, his whole life changed one day completely. Why?
Why? Here's a young guy who was pursuing everything that a man of his position in Assisi wouldn't be doing. Being very cloppish in his dress, pursuing all kinds of sensuality, being very luxurious, having great ambitions, one of them being glory. What happened? He got a message saying, repair my house.
That changed his life. Something like, you know, Saint Augustine up there in Milan. When all he heard was pick up and read. Now, this is Augustine never tried to explain this, and more sense. I don't try to explain it.
I'm really saying it's a fact that that happened. It changed his life. It changed Augustine's life. Savonarola, the great Dominican who they burned at a stake in Florence. He was walking walking by the cathedral one day.
On one Sunday, they were singing vestures and a song, I forget what what it was, but it was something that he had heard day in and day out. He heard that and that changed his life. Now these things happen. These things happen and there's no getting away from it. But they're not ordinary.
They are not the normal. They are not the kind of things we have any right to expect in my life. And yet that is the temper of the times today. The expiry the experience of religion. Not the truth of religion, the experience of it.
Making religion relevant to my life, to my society, to contemporary morals, to contemporary sociological, anthropological, and that they call them scientific standards. Like controlling families because you're going to be the world's going to be inundated with human beings, Malthusianism. The Catholic faith is a matter of truth which does not at all exclude God's power to speak to me individually, but I have no right on God's earth to expect that, to have an experience of holiness. What I have a right to expect is that God will be with me. He will give me the light whatever that may be and how it's done.
But I've got to do my part. I've got to go through the normal ordinary means of learning of information. You say, gee, that's humdrum. I know. I've been it's been thrown back at me.
I've had a well, no pants don't have time. But we cannot expect to live our lives on a level of experience holiness. It may be quite the reverse. Assisi never thought of himself as a holy man. That would be averages.
What we what we can do in following the footsteps of Francis of Assisi is to do the big things that he did, to acknowledge the existence of God, to acknowledge God's son, our savior Jesus Christ, and his mother Mary. The son of God incarnate, who be who bequeathed a church, who created a church that was to endure to the last of times. Our non catholic brethren have taken a CC to their heart, but what they're taking to their heart isn't a protestant. It's not a person whose religion is what I think. It's a Catholic who accepted the church and was a faithful and loyal son of the Catholic church, Roman Catholic church.
Just as Newman centuries later became. We can follow him there. We can follow him in humility. But all is it there's no particular merit in being poor. That's a negative.
The whole idea of being poor is to be rich in God. And we can try to do that by expecting not the extraordinary, but doing the ordinary things of life extraordinarily well for the love of God. Name of the father, the son, and the spirit. Amen.