"Those who exercise authority among the Gentiles lord it over them but is shall not be that way with you."

Sunday, 10/18’15

Jesus said, “Those who are recognized as rulers among the Gentiles lord it over them, but it shall not be so among you.”

In 1950, when the Reds invaded South Korea, Monsignor Tom Quinlan stayed behind in hopes he could still serve the people. The Reds, however, put him on a death march which he later survived, being freed three years later, to become my bishop. Other survivors of that death march agreed in calling him, “The bravest man they ever knew.”

However, as or bishop, Tom Quinlan demanded that we address him as “My Lord.”

How did our bishops get so uppity? Let me tell you how it started in the year 320 a.d.

Father Arias, a priest in Egypt, back in 320 a.d., began telling people that Jesus was not the Son of God, but only a very fine man. By the year 350 a.d., his followers had come to be called Arians, and they were as numerous as the Christians.

To make this harder on the Christians, one Father Ufilas, a priest from Bulgaria, and an Arian, using the Gothic language wrote a copy of the Gospels and Epistles, changing all the passages in which Jesus spoke or acted like the Son of God. What’s more, his translation into the Gothic tongue, made it readable by Lombards, Huns and Burgundians, and all of the new races from the east that had moved into Europe.

Those peoples then turned against the pope and all Christians; and it looked like they could wipe us out.

Then, a new race, the Franks, moved into the valleys of the Danube and Rhine; and their king, Clovis, married a Catholic girl. She convinced Clovis that if he became a Christian he could become more important than the great King Constantine.

So, at Christmas of 496, Bishop Remigius of Rheims along with his priests, baptized the nobles and the whole nation of the Franks. 

But the Franks, and all those new nations had simple social structures built on inheritances. 

A noble’s inheritance gave him a title, serfs and lands; while anyone lacking an inheritance slept with the pigs. 

The priests and bishops were left with no standing. Then, in the year 500, Clovis and Bishop Remigius cooked up a ceremony that saved the bishop and the priests.

Each of them, in his Sunday best, came before the nobles, making the same announcement. He declared, “I have an in heritance, my inheritance is the Lord.”

Now, the word they used for “inheritance” was klerk, and from then on they were called “clerics,”

Whereas feudal society had previously consisted of the two estates of the nobles  and commoners ; from then on it had the three estates of the nobles, the clerics, and the commoners.

The nobles then insisted that since the clerics were on a level with them, so the clerics would need to demand the same high respect the nobles claimed for themselves. A priest could no longer be a plain Tom, Dick, of Harry. He needed to demand that the commoners address them as “the Reverend, the Right Reverend, the Most Reverend, or “My Lord.”