Sts John Fisher & Thomas More

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hallelujah, hallelujah. The word of God is living and effective, able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Lord be with you. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, Stop judging that you may not be judged, for as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out for you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother or sister's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother or sister, Let me remove that splinter from your eye while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your own eye first, then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother's eye. The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, a little bit of history about the readings, and then we'll talk about why I'm wearing red today. This is from the book of Kings, the first reading. And basically, this section is about punishment. You do wrong, you get punished, case closed. But that's the people of Israel, and God speaking to the people of Israel through the prophets. Okay? So the theme is keeping God's law, keeping God's word. We respond with help us with your right hand and answer us. So always in communication with God, asking him to hold on to us and to watch over us. And of course, in the gospel, we have this judgment scene from Matthew, which is very uh significant. That that splinter versus log, I guess you get it. Um the Jesus is given an example of someone who picks on the little things that somebody else is doing and judges them while he or she does the big things wrong, big sins. He compares it to a splinter versus a log. Now, you you can't get a log in your eye, of course, but he's saying you can look at other people and say, oh, look, look what she's doing wrong. Oh, correct this one, correct that one. Oh, you're doing that incorrectly, you know, oh, that's a sin. Jesus is saying, before you get to that point, my grandmother used to say, fatedi fatati, mind your own business. But Jesus is saying something better. He's saying, remove the log. So the log implies your great sin, your hypocrisy. Get rid of that first, then you can go judge little things around you. So that is the background for today's scripture. Now, you realize how the scriptures are put together. We read all year long from the scriptures, and there are two cycles, A and B, and excuse me, two series of the weekday readings, A, one and two, and then for the whole year, there's three cycles, A, B, and C. Not going to go into the details about that. That's why the readings today don't necessarily reflect the theme that wearing read for, the lives and deaths of Thomas Moore and John Fisher. John Fisher and Thomas Moore were condemned, and this is the day that John Fisher lost his head, the 22nd. So they put them both together because they were very important together, the two of them. But the church goes on with this other themes of cycle one and cycle two in the readings, and you heard the continuation of, especially in the Old Testament, the continuation of the people of Israel as they followed the scriptures, as they followed the prophets. So that's where there's two different levels. This reading, I probably totally confused you, but this reading, these readings have nothing to do with John Fisher except that they are God's word. And that's the key here. So it doesn't matter how you keep God's word, whether you're an old or young person, whether you're on the battlefield or you're a politician, keeping God's word is the key. Okay. As you remember, there was a king, Henry VIII, in the 15th century. Um, he was called the defender of the faith. He was a good Catholic. He knew all the rules. So this reading really applies to him as far as uh the log and the splinter. He knew all the rules. He was given the title by the Pope at that time as defender of the faith. Capital. This is his title. So he was looked upon as someone who knew the Catholic faith, who defended the Catholic faith, and he turns out to be the one who screwed the Catholic faith. Because he thought he was special. Hypocrite. Jesus mentioned it. What he wanted to do, he didn't like the wife that he married. Long story about politics and serenities and choosing the sovereign. I'm not going to go into that. But he asked the Pope to give him a special dispensation to marry Catherine of Aragon. Okay, so he marries Catherine of Aragon. That marriage doesn't work out. He wants a boy. He wants a son, again, for the political continuity of the crown. He doesn't get a son. He divorces her. The church is, no, you can't divorce her. We don't approve of divorce. And you are a defender of the faith. You, above everybody, can't get the marriage annulled, get it rid, get rid of it, because it's a sacrament. He didn't like that. And as you know, he went through a few wives in order to get a son who eventually had, but died at a young age. So the defender of the faith turns out to be the mocker of the faith, the critique of the faith, and someone who destroyed the Catholic faith in England. He says, you know, that title I have, Defender of the Faith, I'm the head of the Church of England. Forget the Pope. That's Rome. I'm now the head of the Church of England. And he calls it the Anglican Church. That's how the Anglican Church came into existence, real summary fashion. However, there were many leaders of the Catholic Church who refused to go over and refused to sign the document that he demanded for loyalty. And two of those people we mentioned today, St. Thomas Moore, who was his right-hand man. He was his chancellor. So he knew all the rules. And Thomas said, nope, can't sign it. It's not right. You're not the head of the church. Pope's head of the church. Jesus is the head of the church. I'm not going to sign it. Okay. So he gets, long story short, he gets sent to the tower. And we when you were sent to the tower, that was your last step. Nothing happened after that, because you usually lost your head by hanging or by the by the block. His friend, very, very important friend of his, John Fisher, a bishop from Rochester, England, again sided with Thomas Moore, and said to the king, No, uh to Henry VIII, no, I will not sign and I will not give up my Catholic faith. To you? I mean, you you made yourself head of the church. You're not the head of the church. And he was a great intellect, John Fisher. He studied the scriptures. He was a great preacher. He reformed in his diocese, Rochester, England, he reformed the seminaries, and he encouraged preaching from the seminarians and education. And he went on and on and on and on. Very, very popular, very, very saintly, too. In his diocese, there wasn't a rich diocese. He wanted to live like the people of his diocese live. And there's one story in which he went visiting people in his diocese and they had no blankets for their beds. Goes back to his own house and sent blankets from his own bed to the poor in his diocese. A lot of little stories like that, how he really lived the message of Christ. He wasn't only a legalistic person who respected the law of the church, but he really acted out. That's important. So what happens is Thomas Moore goes to the dungeon, goes to the tower, and his last words are I am loyal to my king, but I'm more loyal to my God. And they chop his head off. Becomes a martyr, a great martyr. Thomas Moore, there's so much we should know about him, but we do know about it, but we can't talk about it now. But today we can focus on John Fisher for two reasons. One, because he's associated with Thomas Moore, and because in Rochester, New York, there is a college named after John Fisher, John Fisher University. It's staffed by the Brazilian Fathers, an order of preaching and teaching monks, brought into the diocese by the bishop of the diocese. And my nephew is going to be a student there this year. That's why I had to bring that up after all. You know, it's part of the family. So little Michael will be attending John St. John Fisher University in Rochester, New York. What a role model for all the students. He was an intellect, he was focused, he was well-rounded, he knew what was right, what was wrong. He wasn't a hypocrite. He was a good man. And as Catholics, we have to know that. We have to know the people who made our church. Yeah, Jesus Christ is the head of the church, of course, by all standards. But we should know that there were people, lay people, men, women, nuns, religious, doesn't matter, who were great role models for us. Our church, there's no secret. Your churches down here in Florida are packed. You're building churches like it's going out to start, which is great, thank God. But that's not the case throughout the world. Up north, not so much. Europe is going through a devastation. The church in Europe is really being challenged. I'm not going to get into the politics of it, but the role models are there, but if we close our eyes to the role models of who the great leaders of our church are, and we don't follow them, always following Jesus, then we're going to give up and it's going to go by the wayside. And regrettably, so many people, I'm not going to put an age category, because we have a new growth in New York diocese. It's wonderful. 30 and under that age group, I don't know what they call them, they're coming back to the church. It's amazing how many young people we have coming back to our church in New York Archdiocese. And I'm sure you never lost them here, but they're coming back to. So all of us depend on role models. We depend on the saints to teach us how to live the Christian life. And that's why today we honor Saint Thomas Moore, who was Chancellor, and Saint John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.