Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today's Gospel comes from Luke 17, where St. Luke presents us with the episode of our Lord and the cleansing of the 10 lepers. This was in the Gospel a few Sundays ago. Much of what we'll share here comes from Brent Petrie's reflection on this passage, but we'll also share a few of our thoughts as well.
 The first thing that St. Luke, known as the Beloved Physician, points out to us in this episode is that it's happening as Jesus is traveling to Jerusalem from Galilee. So it means that He's on His way to the cross. Galilee's in the northern part of the country, Jerusalem's in the southern parts where Judea is. In between those two parts lies the land of the Samaritans.
 The Samaritans were a mixed people. They were part Jewish, part Gentile. The Assyrian invaders who had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century B.C. had intermingled with the Hebrews, and so you had a mixed race there. And mixed religious practices, too. For example, the Samaritans believed in one God, like the Hebrews did. They accepted the first five books of the Bible, but they had set up their own temple on Mount Gerizim in opposition to the temple in Jerusalem.
 One thing that's clear from the Gospels is that the Jews and the Samaritans had a mutual dislike for each other. You were not friends with them. They were not friends with you, and that was that. Each one stayed on their own side of the tracks, essentially.
 So our Lord is passing through this unfriendly area, and at one point, ten lepers begin calling out to Him. According to Old Testament law, if someone had leprosy, they had to live outside the town or the village, and if they encountered you on the road, they had to call out to you from a distance. They had to shout, "Unclean, unclean." They had to shout because contact with a leper could be contagious. You need to actually keep away from them. We read about that precept in Leviticus 13.
 So these lepers then, when they see our Lord, cry out to Him, but they don't cry, "Unclean, unclean." Instead, they cry, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us," Luke 17:13. And our Lord shouts back at them. He says, "Go and show yourselves to the priests," verse 14. He said that because it was a priest's job to determine whether a person had leprosy and whether or not they could be admitted back into the society, and they had to go through a whole number of rituals and a waiting time before they could be officially reinstated into the community if they had been cleansed.
 But as the lepers were going on their way, they noticed that their disease was gone. Their leprosy had actually been cured. St. Luke tells us that one of them, when he noticed this, turned back and praised God with a loud voice. Then he fell at the feet of Jesus, giving thanks, Luke 17:15.
 So the man prostrates himself before Jesus. Like sometimes you'll see very devout people, when they come into the church, they'll prostrate themselves before the tabernacle or before the Eucharist if our Lord is exposed. Often, Catholics from African countries do this very often. You know, prostrating yourself like that is a gesture in most cultures, including our own, that you'd only give to God.
 So the man prostrates himself before Jesus and gives thanks, says St. Luke. The word that's used there in the original text in the Greek is the word eucharistio. It's where we get the word Eucharist from. And Jesus does not correct the man like St. Paul did in the book of Acts when the pagans tried to worship Him. Or even the angel in the book of Revelation tells St. John; St. John prostrates himself before the angel. The angel says, "Don't do that, I'm only an angel."  Jesus accepts the worship of this cleansed leper. And the kicker is that St. Luke tells us that this man was a Samaritan, Luke 17:16. He was one of those men that any respectable first-century Jew would have not had anything to do with at all.
 Who's the gospel writer who gives us the parable of the good Samaritan? It's St. Luke. And here he shares with us the story of the grateful Samaritan. St. Luke is the only non-Jewish writer in the New Testament. And so one of his themes is how God's love extends beyond the bounds of the Jewish people and extends out towards those whom the Jews did not associate with. That's actually a good thing for all of us, by the way, all of us who are non-Jews, right?
 "Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner," Jesus says in Luke 17:18. The word foreigner there in the original text is the word allogenes; it means someone of another race.
 So with our Lord's ministry, reconciling people to God, there's a breaking down of barriers between races, classes, peoples. One commentator notes that there's an ancient inscription found in the Jerusalem temple that was unearthed in an archaeological find. It was a stone inscription that warned foreigners who were coming into the temple to worship, warned them that if they crossed over a certain point in the temple courts, they did so in peril of death. The penalty for crossing over into the holy place reserved for the Jews was death. The Greek word in that stone inscription is the same; it's allogenes. "Let no foreigner, let no allogenes pass beyond this point," it says.
 The ministry of our Lord again breaks down those barriers and other barriers too. As St. Paul will say in Galatians 3:28, "There's neither Jew nor Greek, there's neither slave nor free, there's neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  And in Romans 10:12-13, he says, "For there's no distinction between Jew and Greek, the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows His riches upon all who call upon Him. For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved."  In contemporary terms, we'd say that to be a racist and to be a Catholic or a Christian, those two things are not compatible. If you believe that a person is inferior or superior because of their race, that's the definition of racism. Those who are disciples of Christ cannot have that mindset; it's a mindset that belongs to the fallen world.
 It's well known that the KKK were racists; what's not so well remembered is that they were also very anti-Catholic. In reality, it's difficult to even call them Christians because of the hatred and hostility that they had.
 Nowadays we even have what's called reverse racism, right? It's people in our country who have animosity or hatred towards those who are Caucasians. So it's actually kind of pretty fascinating; sometimes you'll see some white people in the mass media, in academia and in politics promote that ideology, which is tied to a Marxist view of life. The struggle between the classes, or in this case, between the races. And to be a white male Christian is considered by some to be the lowest of the low among these present day racists in our country. It's still racism; it's just directed in a different way.
 Karl Marx himself was an atheist; he was a materialist; he was all about class struggle. When Our Lady of Fatima in 1917 spoke of the errors of Russia spreading throughout the world, it's the Marxist ideology which, in our country, many people have adopted too. The Marxist view of life. The devil is always pitting people against each other; racism is just one of his tactics. And people who are unaware of their own spiritual leprosy, their own sinfulness, and that have never encountered the healing power of Christ, they easily fall prey to these and other traps.
 Our Lord closes the gospel by telling the Samaritan, he says, "Rise and go your way, your faith has made you well," or it has healed you or saved you, depending on the translation, Luke 17:19. He says that a number of times to people in the gospels, "Your faith has made you well," it's healed you, it's saved you. Faith in Christ not only cured the Samaritan of his physical illness, but it also cured him of his spiritual illness, of his alienation from God. True faith in Christ does that for all sinners. It heals their alienation from the Lord. It heals our spiritual leprosy.
 Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to do what the Samaritan leper did in today's gospel, to recognize our own need for Jesus to heal and cleanse us, especially to heal us of whatever spiritual illnesses we still carry around with us.
 Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.