
“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 to 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, until then, flourished. The “plants considered
undesirable in a particular situation” — specifically
those unsuitable for consecrated life
— 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 exclusion of the wheat.
Homosexuality, in particular, grew rampant within nearly
every seminary and house of formation in the Church. It was
to such an extent that heterosexual men were not
simply discouraged from becoming priests, but actively
discriminated against by homosexual rectors and seminarians
alike. To use a term near and dear to Francis (and
essentially to the same effect), they were considered “too
rigid”, their view of the priesthood was “too traditional”,
they were “too pious”, and that piety and faithfulness to
tradition threatened the delicate and effeminate
environment, the liberty given to homosexual promiscuity and
the sodomistic orgies that flourished.
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 in 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 underscores
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
Printable PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
________________________________
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weed
2 Apocalypse 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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