“AN
ENEMY HAS DONE THIS”
The Weeds and the
Wheat
A Parable for the Crisis in the Church
“The
Kingdom of Heaven is likened to
a man that sowed good seeds in his
field. But while men were asleep,
his enemy came and over-sowed weeds
among the wheat and went his
way. And when the blade was
sprung up, and had brought forth
fruit, then appeared also the weeds.
And the servants of the master of
the house coming said to him: Sir,
did you not sow good seed in thy
field? Whence then has it weeds?
And he said to them: An enemy
has done this. And the servants
said to him: Will you that we go
and gather it up? And he said: No,
lest perhaps gathering up the weeds,
you root up the wheat also together
with it. Allow both to grow until
the harvest, and in the time of
the harvest I will say to the reapers:
Gather up first the weeds, and bind
it into bundles to burn, but the
wheat gather into my barn.”
(Saint Matthew 13.29-30)
Quite
nearly everything that is occurring in the Church today
is outlined in this brief but enormously important parable.
The parable explains how it happened and who
is responsible for it. It is striking in both its brevity
and its scope.
What is happening
in the Church, right now, is horrific! It is historically
unprecedented and morally execrable. Never has the Church
been so afflicted since the great Arian heresies
in the 3rd century almost two millennia ago.
Even the Protestant Revolt instigated by Martin
Luther is not comparable in the intrinsic evil and the
devastation it wrought — to the Body of Christ, the
Church, and to the world around it.
While others
speak in terms of the Faithful’s “frustration”
and “concerns” — let us describe it in terms
of our lived experience:
We are not “frustrated”—
we are outraged!
We are not “concerned”—
we are horrified, shamed, scandalized,
and perhaps above
all we are
angry!
— angry at the seemingly “routine” way that it is being
trivialized by our bishops, our priests, and, for all
his pretensions, Francis himself!
“Put
this on the calendar” to be addressed at the next
meeting” — months from now.
ARE YOU KIDDING?
Catholics are scared!
We are afraid of what is being done not only to our
children, but our Church! We want heads to fly!
We want Birettas placed down in shame. We want guilty
priests defrocked — immediately — and jailed!
We want complicit cardinals to be removed from office
at once, silent bishops to be dismissed
from the episcopacy and all that responsibility of which
they have proven themselves unworthy or unequal
— and if not subsequently laicized then
at the very least educated on basic morality and the
difference between sanctity and sin — based on
the Sacred Depository of Faith, and authentic
and established doctrine: not the whims of “pop”
theologians who make a living off the Church even while
despising her.
WHAT WE DO NOT
WANT:
No!
No longer! No more! The
sociological rhetoric in which they are increasingly
addressed and inevitably culminate will never
suffice to accomplish anything. The time of showmanship
is past. It is now a very dangerous matter of brinkmanship.
Much has been lost and
much more stands to be lost.
We want action to be taken
— and
not “sometime in the future”, but
NOW!
THIS DAY! THIS MOMENT!
The crisis
IS that serious
... and the hierarchy — to the very top — seems
either too obtuse or simply too stupid to recognize
it! Or … more frightening still, and much more darkly
… unwilling to — because to address
it would be to implicate themselves!
This is where the devil
comes in
Let us look more closely
at this extremely important and eschatological (pertaining
to the end of the world) Parable:
“his enemy came and over-sowed
weeds among the wheat and went his way.”
Who is the enemy?
The devil of course! It is satan! It is he who sowed
the weeds among the wheat.
How and why?
First we must ask
ourselves the most basic question about this parable:
what is a weed? Interestingly, and succinctly,
Wikipedia nails it on the head:
A weed is a
plant considered undesirable in a particular situation,
“a plant in the wrong place”.
This
is actually an admirable description and entirely appropriate
to our purposes.
A weed
is not of itself evil. It is simply a plant among other plants.
But in Christ’s Parable we must take note that an
“enemy
came and over-sowed weeds among the wheat” They were
not native to that group of plants. Wheat does not become
weed. It remains wheat. The weed, we find, is surreptitiously
introduced among the desirable plants: in this case, wheat.
The wheat is “sown-over” for a purpose: to fester among it and
to impede and eventually destroy the wheat. There was a purpose
to its planting by the evil one just as there was a purpose
to God’s planting of the wheat — the purpose of the latter,
the wheat, was to nourish other things. Of the former, the weed,
it was to destroy, to crowd out, to entangle and kill the wheat
— and with the wheat, all that it nourishes.
The “particular
situation” referred to as “undesirable” in Wikipedia
is, in the case of the parable, the Field that nourishes,
which is the Church — and the wheat, Her priesthood
together with the Faithful. It is, after all, through the
Church that Christ comes to man in the Most Holy Sacrifice
of the Mass. The Church is the indispensable means of
salvation for all men. Destroy the Field (the Church) through
the depredation of weeds and you destroy the means of salvation.
Is this not the sole objective of satan — that
none should attain to salvation, but perish everlastingly
in the “Lake of the Second Death”, in Hell, together with him
and those who serve him — among which are not only the demons,
but men?
Holy Soil
You may reply that the same soil
nourishes and feeds wheat and weed alike. True. But the wheat
in the Field (the Good seed 2)
was planted by God Himself to be nourished and grow and
to further nourish unto Eternal Life. The weeds deplete
the soil of what the wheat needs to grow: it steals nourishment
intended for the wheat.
God Himself
established the Field and planted each seed of wheat
— but this was not so of the weed.
It had
to be planted by someone else other than the Master of
the Field. The parable explicitly and pointedly states that
“it was the enemy
who had done this.” Finding that he could not destroy
the Field, the enemy secretly infiltrated it, planting weeds
among the wheat which, in time, would choke it and kill it.
This
is precisely what happened within the Church following Vatican
II. The priesthood, Religious life, vocations and the fidelity
of the Faithful had flourished. The “plant considered undesirable
in a particular situation” — specifically homosexuals
— rather than being excluded from, were cultivated in
the seminaries and houses of Religious life. People who had
no business in the Field — the “plants in the wrong place” —
were permitted to flourish to the detriment of the wheat.
As the
weeds flourished, the wheat withered.
This
is a concise summary of the present situation concerning priests
and seminarians. The weeds choked out the wheat until a
Field that was largely wheat became a desolate Field
that was largely weed with little wheat remaining. It is a queer
weed, lavender and pink with flowery petals that reek of decay,
rooting deeply and spreading aggressively. But few are willing
to call it a weed preferring to call it a flower ...
“The
dragon — that old
serpent, who is the devil, satan”
3 — we would do well to be clear
about the enemy and name him for what he is: vicious, deadly,
“the
prince of this world”
4 who has no place
in God’s Church. He does not treat or parley: he drags off to
Hell whom he can … and deceives the rest that he is
just a twinkle in
a predator’s eye ... those whom he has over sown
in our seminaries, monasteries, rectories, and chanceries. The
dismissive voices that would call the charade simply “progress”
and a “gay” affair at that — despite its manifestly deadly
consequences, are now without excuse ... or concealment.
Are we
alone is this frightful indictment? We think not — even apart
from Archbishop
Viago’s
explosive revelations of the homosexual predatory network
in the Church, Bishop Mutsaerts — of the Netherlands,
appointed by the Dutch Bishop’s
Conference to attend the Youth Synod in Rome in October, has
refused to attend for clearly articulated reasons in an interview
with
Lifesite News yesterday (21 September 2018) that underscore
the absence of accountability in this grave situation:
LifeSite: “Excellency,
why did you decide not to go to Rome where you were
to have joined the youth Synod in October?”
Bishop Mutsaerts: “To put things briefly, it
comes down to this: given all the recent difficulties
and lack of openness, the whole thing will lack credibility.
We are going to talk about young people, no less, even
though it appears that we are not even capable of offering
them security. We all know of the difficulties in Rome,
we also know of the Pope's letter about Ireland, with
its mea culpa and “forgiveness” and all, but
there is
not a single word about what we are going to do about
it, who are the culprits and what are
we going to do with them. It would totally discredit
us if in this situation, we go and talk about youth.
If it were another subject, it would be different. But
we need openness about this business. What we need is
the truth, only it will serve us. That will only be
possible if there is openness, and well, we can't have
openness without an independent investigation. That
is also what Archbishop Chaput said.” [American Archbishop
Chaput, chairman of the Committee on Laity, Marriage,
Family Life and Youth of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops has urged Francis to cancel the Synod
on Young People altogether, given the lack of confidence
in the credibility of the bishops, while others such
as Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler Texas, New York
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Bishop Edward Burns, of Dallas
Texas, Bishop Philip Egan, bishop of Portsmouth, England,
among others who wish, instead, to address the most
critical issue of the clerical abuse that has shattered
the Church.]
LifeSite: “But you would prefer that the whole
affair be scrapped, in order first to let light shine
on everything that's coming out right now.”
Bishop Mutsaerts: “Yes, we need light to
shine on all that. Our credibility is in jeopardy. And
we shouldn’t do it ourselves. I understand from the
Pope that he identifies clericalism as the main cause.
That's probably true to some extent, but the greater
part of the problem is somewhere completely different.”
LifeSite: “Where is the problem, then?”
“When I read
the reports of the scientific institute of the New York
University, almost 80 percent of the people involved
have something to do with homosexuality.
It’s a tricky subject, but
we have
to name it because if you don’t name
it, you can’t judge it properly and you can’t investigate
it properly, and take measures. I’m not saying that’s
the cause, I don't know how I should interpret those
figures, just don’t sweep it away, just take them into
account.”
What did
Shakespeare say about “A Rose by
any other name ...”?
Another
Synod — as we see above — has been called for instead: a
Synod of the Bishops — concerning their job description
... and their abject failure in fulfilling it.
But don’t
count on Francis summoning it: he is too heavily vested in the
very causes that demand it!
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
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Comments? Write
us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
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1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weed
2 Apocalypse 20.2
3
Saint John 14.30
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