Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
Some of you just may have heard a song.
Oh, I guess it was sung some 80 years ago,
before I was born even.
Oh, give me some men who are stout-hearted men
who will fight for the right they adore.
Start me with ten who are stout-hearted men
and I'll soon give you a song.
Ten thousand more.
I had decided last night on meeting the friars
that we would talk about men, Catholic men.
But you know this gospel that Father just read,
I can never hear this gospel without feeling a strong obligation
to explain it at least very briefly.
So we're going to do that first, you know.
I can just imagine this Israelite woman,
probably not from a city,
probably from the hillside somewhere.
Husband probably worked the land long hours.
And she was Jewish.
She could have been an Italian woman.
She certainly could have been a Mexican woman.
I live in Mexico.
And at the sight of Jesus,
at the sight of the way he spoke,
at the sight of the man that he is,
she was overcome with emotion and screamed out,
blessed is the womb that bore you
and the breasts that fed you.
As though she was saying,
what a marvelous mother you must have had.
Oh, if I could only meet your mother.
Now Jesus answered her,
superficial people,
and we don't want to be superficial people.
Superficial people.
Superficial people would say that Jesus' answer
was a put-down, oh dear Lord.
Jesus doesn't put people down
unless they're scribes or Pharisees.
He doesn't put down ladies from the hills.
Why did he say what he said?
There's a very, very deep reason,
very sensible,
really explains it all.
He said, rather,
blessed are those who hear the word of God
and bring it to life.
But first of all,
can you think of anybody who heard the word of God
more intimately
than the ever-blessed Virgin Mary?
She's just filled with the Old Testament.
You can see it in her magnificence.
Oh, the magnificence
is such a faithful echo of the Old Testament,
moving us on into the new,
into the incarnation,
the marvelous magnificence.
How that little 15-year-old Jewish girl
knew her scriptures,
how she had read her Isaiah,
her Jeremiah.
And in hearing the word of God,
oh, she heard it.
You even have to think,
and I can think of some great saints who said so,
that she even heard the word of God
in the womb.
Can you not think that if upon her visit,
John the Baptist in the womb,
six months along,
was filled with grace?
Can you not think that Mary,
already conceived immaculate,
it's so good to be with the phrase of the immaculate,
was hearing something,
and then,
she heard the word of God
from the Archangel Gabriel?
Hail, full of grace,
with Gabriel we repeat
the Queen of Heaven.
From Him we learn to grieve,
and to forgive.
Oh, did she hear the word of God?
So when Jesus said,
rather,
blessed are those who hear the word of God,
and bring it to life.
Oh, and did she bring the word of God
to human life?
So Jesus,
in answering the lady,
was truly,
truly,
deeply,
broadly,
praising His mother,
and pointing out to us,
something very essential.
Spiritual motherhood,
is more important than physical motherhood.
Spiritual fatherhood,
is more important
than physical fatherhood.
We're getting back to Mary now,
and then we'll move on to
what we had planned to say this morning
at this Holy Mass.
Getting back to Mary.
Augustine,
who died in 430,
430.
Augustine died,
just to give you some idea,
1101 years
before Our Lady came to Guadalupe.
Imagine that, 11 centuries.
Before Our Lady came to Guadalupe,
we're going on
five centuries now that that happened,
was when Augustine, you know,
Monica's boy,
when he died.
So,
let me tell you now,
so that you won't think that devotion to Mary
is something brand new in the Church.
Listen to Augustine,
you already have some idea
how far back he goes.
He said,
before the Incarnation took place,
and the Word was made flesh,
before the Incarnation took place,
Mary
had already
spiritually,
not physically,
engendered the Eternal Word
so intimately in her soul
by such love
that the physical incarnating of God
was a necessary consequence
of the spiritual engendering
that had already taken place.
But,
the extent of what the surgery did
in order for her to recover
could be held open in the fight
between this world and the Holy Spirit.
womb
and you
I guess that leaves me less time to say what I wanted to say,
but God wanted this,
and actually the two come right together as you're already intuing.
There really has been a move lately.
See, these last 20 years or so, it has got stronger.
But to do away with men as such,
I suppose it was more than 20 years now this has been going on.
I suppose it was 25 years ago that I saw in a college sociology textbook.
I'm going to quote this now as best I can.
If it's not a textual quote, it's certainly a faithful quote.
Now listen to this.
The ideal personality of the future
is neither a man's personality nor a woman's personality.
The ideal...
personality of the future
is androgynous.
Androgynous.
You have to pardon me for spending maybe 30 seconds
to explain that word.
That's what a whole generation of kids were taught.
I got this in a textbook of a girl
in San Jose, California
who came to see me for spiritual direction.
And she was on her way home from college.
That is to say, she would come and go each day.
And so she had her books with her.
And she was all mixed up.
So I started to look at her sociology book.
And that's what I saw.
The ideal personality of the future
is neither male nor female,
but androgynous.
Do you have any idea how wrong that is?
How utterly wrong that is?
How anti-creation?
How anti-God?
How utterly stupid?
First of all, I've got to tell you about the word androgynous.
In Greek, ander means a man, a concrete man.
Ander.
Like the man down the street,
he would be in ander.
That's the root for man, ander.
The root for woman is G-Y-N.
In Greek, it was pronounced
G-Y-N.
It's the root for gynecology.
G-Y-N in Greek meant a man.
So an androgynous personality
is a personality that's neither male nor female,
neither man nor woman,
and something in the middle, you know,
no.
As though God had said,
let's not make them man and woman.
Listen.
Let's just make one mixed bag.
Let's make it a man and a woman.
Let's make it a general ruleci sh hal a.
Listen.
Listen.
First of all,
you could not try to make them a men or a woman.
Listen.
It's not easy to tell a man and a woman
that's part of their relationship.
Listen.
What?
Other
of the practices
There are.
I've become the woman.
I don't know the Alternative.
Man and woman,
It's not in the nature of things for a man and a woman to hold a pitched battle.
In fact, it's against nature.
But man is man, and woman is woman.
And I'll tell you, you might as well recognize there's a whole, I'm not ready to say what the origin of it is.
It's not the point now anyway.
But there really is a whole plot to mix this all up.
As though there wasn't.
There were only one gender.
And I might as well make brief reference now to something that's very real.
The demasculinizing of the church.
The demasculinizing of the church.
The elimination from the church.
And of all male influence, as far as you can, as much as you can.
I don't know how often I've been told to sit down at communion time
so as not to hurt the feelings of Doña Ana Maria or somebody.
She's a Eucharistic minister, you see.
Padre, sit down.
I remember once in Chicago,
there was a chapel of Our Lady of, Our Lady, no, I'm sorry, of Mother Cabrini.
I counted the people at noon mass that day in the hospital chapel.
There were 18 people.
18, I counted them.
And there was one celebrant, and I was con-celebrant.
I was told to sit down at communion time.
So did the celebrant.
Neither he nor I went anywhere near the tabernacle.
I don't know the lady's name.
She did everything.
The man of the Eucharist,
the one who was ordained
to do the Eucharisting,
the one who was ordained to do the Eucharist,
the one who confects the sacrament,
the only one who can,
only an ordained priest,
does things
in persona Christi,
in persona Christi,
in the person of Christ,
with the power of Christ,
with the words of Christ,
just as efficacious as they were at that last supper,
take and eat.
This is my body.
Take and drink.
This is my blood.
He doesn't say, take and eat, this is Christ's body.
Take and eat, this is my body.
Why?
Because what he does,
he does in persona.
In persona Christi.
So he's told us, sit down, you see,
because the church must be feminized.
Oh, she must not.
Oh, she must not.
Oh, she must not.
You're up to me.
I put a moratorium on the training of new lady Eucharistic ministers
and get guys up there.
And only when they really need it, you know,
because the priest is all alone
and there are no deacons on hand
and there's 500 people or so
are going to go to Holy Communion.
If it's just the priest himself,
you're going to have parking problems
getting the cars in and the other cars out.
And may I please say,
may I please illustrate now
the worst pastoral idea.
I cannot think of
a worse pastoral idea
than the communion traffic cops.
Do anything you can,
talking with your pastor,
to get this horrible, horrible,
I'll tell you a little more about it,
idea
dead.
Dead.
And bury you in our Christian burial
because it doesn't merit it.
The communion traffic cops, you know,
you and I are so stupid,
we have to be told when to go to communion.
You know,
the communion traffic cops over here,
who can resist that pressure?
Who can resist it?
This is sunshine.
Can you resist that pressure?
There's a neighbor who can resist being like that.
The neighbor's going to be saying,
what was I saying to a friend of mine
when he came to the communion?
I was so stupid,
we have to be told,
we don't get up,
and find the word communion.
Is that pressure resisted?
It is not.
And as we saw,
if there are 500 people in church
who made the first communion,
500 people are communion.
And you should pay any.
What about the ones
who just happened to come to me?
Okay.
Because they felt like it.
And I'm going to invest in six months.
And we're bringing home
smart for their tool.
Et cetera.
We're going to even leave
in a new present.
It is even done at funerals.
At funerals.
Where more will care
for the people in the church.
On that time of day.
Communion is tragic, Cox.
Fight it.
Don't be afraid to get yourself in trouble.
Because it's a bad idea.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
A young man, a young woman, single, need a mother and a father.
Dad, even on some TV sitcoms, say a couple of decades ago, became kind of a comedy figure,
you know.
He'd say the funny things and everybody would laugh at Dad and kind of go like this, Dad.
He kind of became the stupid sex that you had him around.
That's not the way it is.
That's not the way it goes.
God made things.
God made a man to be the head of the family, not that he lords it over his wife.
When St. Paul speaks of the man as the head of the family, he's speaking in Christ, and
Christ is that spouse.
Christ is the spouse who kneels down before his church and washes her feet and dries her
feet with the towel that he's wrapped around himself.
Christ is the spouse who lays down his life for his bride, the church.
That's the way to understand.
What St. Paul says about the husband being a head of the family, but he is indeed the
head of the family and must act as such.
Give me some men who are stout-hearted men who will fight for the right they adore.
A boy growing up.
Has to see every day, my dad is the man.
It's not meanness.
It's maybe things like having a catch in the backyard if the weather is still warm enough.
While mom's getting supper ready.
See, father and son, I was brought up near the water, just across Long Island Sound, South Shore.
There's all kinds of bays along the South Shore.
My dad used to take me fishing.
I grew up.
With my dad.
Even though he was at work every day.
In Grumman aircraft.
Making airplanes.
So that men could win a war.
I grew up.
With my dad.
They tell me.
When I was about 20 months old, I used to know when he was coming home, maybe by seeing the shadows fall towards evening, and he would walk down an avenue, an avenue that formed a T with our street, and our house was right where the avenue would have run right into it, didn't it stop at the corner?
It stopped at the corner.
And he would come home walking down that street, under the elm trees, pardon me, under the maple trees, and they tell me he used to press my nose against the glass, and just sit there waiting for him, once it was getting time for dad to come home.
They tell me that when.
He'd come through the front door.
I used to push him.
I suppose just above the knees, I was tiny.
I used to push him.
Push him into a soft chair.
Push him into it so he'd, you know, almost fall down into the soft chair.
And climb up.
Climb up on his lap.
And say to him.
Daddy.
Daddy, sing to me.
You know, whatever happens to me, and plenty of things have, one thing nobody can ever take away, when I was 21 years old, not just then, but for the longest time, my dad sang to me.
With deep.
Off tone.
Masculine cadences.
Nobody can take that away.
Father.
What you do for your son.
Nobody.
Can ever.
Take that away.
If your son.
So much nonsense, I think that John, Paul, and Benedict are helping patiently, efficaciously, to pull us out of it.
So much nonsense, you know.
God is our heavenly parent.
Can you imagine?
God is our heavenly parent.
Can you imagine?
To avoid the word father?
Which is how God reveals himself.
He.
He.
Chooses.
To reveal himself, because he is such.
As a father.
Can you imagine an effort.
Not to call Jesus the son of God.
But the child of God.
Because the word child.
Is noncommittal, you see.
You know, most languages.
Do not have a word for child.
There is in Spanish.
Which is the language.
Of forty percent of the mystical body of Christ on earth.
There is in Spanish.
No word.
For child.
The word does not exist.
If you are talking about a little one.
You immediately commit yourself.
Is it a niño?
Or is it a niña?
There is no word for child.
So there is even a cultural imperialism.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
There is.
In this whole thing.
Of insisting.
It is dying out now.
Thanks be to God.
That Jesus is child of God.
Not the Son.
He is revealed.
And indeed he is.
The Son of God.
Engendered by the Father.
God from God.
Light from light.
True God from True God.
Begotten.
Not made.
One in being.
With the Father.
so God revealed himself
hey guys
take your place in the church
let your voices be heard
something big is going to happen in this country
in about three and a half weeks
there's still time to let your voice be heard
at this crossroads
this crossroads
of the decision
which way
shall this country go
which way shall it go
life or death
civilization of love
or anti-culture
of death
let your
voice be heard
we all have a vocation
not to watch
the civilization of love
which is going to be born
we just don't know when
it's going to come
if it doesn't come soon
there will be a horrible
interval
of an anti-cultural
of death
with the darkness
such as the world
has never dreamed
let your voice be heard
do something
engender
the civilization
of love
man that you are
and the
Light
wherever God places you
God bless you
God bless you
God bless you
God bless you
God bless you
God bless you
God bless you
Et resum benedictum fructum ventris tuum.