Wheat and tares, Saints and frauds

First Things, 21 July 2020

Good and evil are so intertwined that sometimes it is hard to recognize which is which.

I was ordained a priest in 2002, on the day before the Sixteenth Sunday of the Year. At my first parish Mass that Sunday, the homilist—the masterful preacher Father Paul Holmes of Seton Hall University—told the people that this new priest was sent to preach the gospel to “congregations that are filled with wheat and weeds, with saints and sinners.” Not a world full of good and evil, but “congregations,” that is, the Church.

The parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–43) was read that Sunday, as it is every three years according to the lectionary cycle. So it was in 2002, and again this past Sunday, eighteen years on. “Tares” (or “darnel”) is a more suggestive translation than “weeds,” for the tares are often confused for wheat but are poisonous. They look healthy, but are corrupt within. The wheat and the tares grow side by side in the field, the wheat sown by the Lord, the tares by the devil.

Given the link to my own ordination, and my decades in Catholic journalism, I think about the wheat and the tares more than many of the other parables. This year, though, I have been thinking about the passage especially often.

My ordination took place several days before St. John Paul II arrived in Toronto for World Youth Day. Just a few hours’ drive away, our cathedral in Kingston was full that day with pilgrims from Poland and Chile. We were all on our way to Toronto. It was just months after the scandals in Boston had come to light. What would the Holy Father say? This great magnet for young Catholics would have to address the abuse of the young; the great champion of the heroic priesthood would have to speak about its corruption. The tares that had been growing alongside the wheat were now evident. We didn’t know then how abundant they were.

On May 18 of this year we celebrated the centennial of John Paul’s birth. But 2020 also marked the centennial of another priest, a centennial that was not observed in any way. Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, was born just two months before Karol Wojtyła, on March 10, 1920. The seeds of wheat and darnel were planted together.

I remember when I first learned that Wojtyła and Maciel were born the same year. It was May 2001, and Father Richard John Neuhaus and I were going to a lecture that he was giving at Regina Apostolorum, the Legionary university in Rome. The young Legionary accompanying us remarked upon the coincidence.

“1920 was a very good year,” Father Richard replied, adding that his late friend, Cardinal John O’Connor, was also born in 1920. A good year for good priests.

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