Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed our thou among women, and blessed

is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

The Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, and now to get our God.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

I'd like to make two points in today's sermon. The first comes from yesterday, which was the

vigil of John the Baptist. And as you know, today is the great feast of St. John the Baptist.

Listen to the gospel yesterday. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a certain priest

named Zachary of the course of Abia, and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name

was Elizabeth. That is John

Chapter 1. Now, I know it's early, but you may have missed right there. Very fascinating fact. Did you

hear that John the Baptist father is Zachariah, who is a priest? St. John the Baptist's father

was a priest, meaning in Jewish law, he was a priest. Isn't that interesting?

So what is he doing out in the wilderness? Well, I have no proof from the church fathers of this thesis, but I had heard this thesis in seminary that because the temple was so corrupt, he was exercising the Adamic, that is the adjective for

Adam, the Adamic priesthood out under the stars, the original temple, which was the cosmos.

Now, that's a very interesting theory to have during a conference for canceled priests,

that John the Baptist was in some sense the first original

canceled priest. Perhaps self-cancellation, perhaps didn't want to be part of the very corrupt

temple. Now, of course, Jesus Mary and Joseph still go to the temple for the presentation of Jesus.

So this is proof that we can't be Protestants. We are still part of the Catholic Church, even as we look at the fact that there is a lot of corruption. But there's a lot of corruption

in the first century, and Jesus, Mary and Joseph still went there. But why was John the Baptist a priest

out in the wilderness? He was calling people to repentance, but he was a priest. So we don't really know why

that's the case. So you can let that percolate. I don't have a great answer to it. And we move on to

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