"An Enemy has Done This" - the Weeds and the Wheat: a Parable for the Crisis in the Church

“AN ENEMY HAS DONE THIS”

weeds choking grain

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 3^rd 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:

more “synods”
the “convening of another conference”
establishing yet more useless “committees” to “examine the issue”.
more “study groups”
more “commissions”

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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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weed
²Apocalypse 20.2
³ Saint John 14.30

**Totally Faithful to the Sacred Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome**

“Scio opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I know your works ... that you have but little power, and yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.” (Apocalypse 3.8)

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