Fr. Richard Cipolla’s Sermon, Sunday Feb. 9

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, St. Mary’s Church, Norwalk, Feb. 9 2014

From the gospel: And the servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” (v. 24-30)

So we are at the point where the United Nations instructs the Catholic Church on what points of her doctrine should be changed in order to meet the standards of the United Nations. The report of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, states that despite, quote, progressive steps (ah that word progressive) taken by Pope Francis, much more needs to be done by the Church vis a vis rights of children. The report begins by using the sexual abuse scandals of the past thirty years as a cudgel to beat the Church into submission and to take away any pretense that somehow the Church is on a higher moral ground. The report insists that the Church did little or nothing to stop the abuses and failed to punish those responsible. While it can be said that the Report is not fair and is in fact prejudiced against the Church, purposefully neglects the steps taken by the Church over the past fifteen years to address the issue and to call to account those who have so terribly harmed children and young people, the fact is that those in authority in the Church failed terribly to put into practice their God-given oversight over their flock. The bishops are shepherds whose model, whose icon, is the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who not only guards his sheep, who not only goes after those who stray, but who dies for his sheep. It will not do to say: what happened was bad and was not good and now let’s get on with our lives and get on with being Church. The blots in the history of the Church where she has betrayed her founder and savior cannot be written off as merely unfortunate incidents in an otherwise blameless historical record. And this is one of those blots.

Now we can be amazed that we have come to this point, where a secular organization, albeit prestigious but with little power or authority, can chastise the Church for insisting on teaching her moral doctrines as true, doctrines that the Committee members deem to be out of step with their agenda, One is tempted to say, with their moral agenda, but what we are dealing with is post morality or amorality. The Report suggests strongly that the Church re-examine her teaching on abortion, contraception and human sexuality and after examining her teaching she should realize that she is mistaken and must conform to the inevitable progress of man’s understanding of these thing as reflected in the amoral and selfish agenda of the newly enlightened world as reflected in the Western member nations in the United Nations. But we should not waste too much time being offended, we should not waste time spouting about liberalism and secularism and individualism. Rather what we must do is to look inward and ask ourselves how the Church has become so weak in the face of the attacks by an amoral secularism founded on the primacy of the naked self, couched in terms of human rights.

When such things happen, and when such things have happened in the past, I always expect a bishop or cardinal or even the Pope to respond in an impressive way. But most often there is silence. Part of the answer to this silence is the diminished moral standing of the Church because of the sexual scandals and the dishonest and shameful way they were handled. But a significant part of the answer to this silence lies also in a cowardly and false interpretation of today’s gospel. We have all heard this gospel so many times, the wheat and the tares, and how the owner of the field counsels patience and prudence: do not tear out the tares, the weeds, lest in doing so you tear out the good wheat as well. Wait until the final reckoning when the tares will be taken out and burned.

Now this wheat and tares image can be understood in two ways: in terms of the world, and in terms of the Church. When we talk in terms of the world, we often in the past have had no problem in seeing clearly the necessity of fighting evil where it arises. Despite the ambiguities of the post-World War II world, when things are not quite as clear, there is still an understanding that the evil, the tares that threaten the growth and harvest of the wheat, must be identified and opposed even with violence when they threaten to choke the wheat. Only a crazy ideologue could refuse to see the evil present in Naziism and Fascism and the Communist dictatorships set up by the Soviet Union. And a long and costly war was fought against those cruel and murderous movements that were identified as tares that threatened the wheat, a war fought both in a hot way and in a cold way. Those of us who remember the Korean War know that this was the beginning of a blurring of the purpose of the fight, and that blurring persisted and increased with every involvement in foreign lands that we as a country have had every since. We are no longer sure of what we are fighting for because we have lost sight of or forgotten who we are as a nation. And it becomes more difficult to identify the tares in a world where once what we spurned as weeds to get rid of in our garden we now eat quite happily in salads and power breakfast drinks that look and taste like green sludge.

But something else happens when we consider this parable in terms of the Church. We are loathe to apply the parable of the wheat and tares to the Church. But this is in fact what our Lord is talking about in this parable: that the kingdom of God whose locus in this world albeit in a not absolute or clear sense and yet in a real sense– is the Church. And the mystery is that even in the growth of the kingdom, even within the Church there are tares among the wheat, and this is true because the enemy of God, the enemies of God, are still at work within the Church that is in the world that has not reached its final consummation. Jesus’ parable counsels realism and patience. But this parable does not counsel an unrealistic understanding of the Church on earth, as if her holiness that is guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit excludes the presence of tares within the Church. This is difficult for pious Catholics to accept, for it seems contradictory to call the Church holy and yet to see in a real sense the sins of her people, and this is especially true when this relates to those who are supposed to be icons of this holiness, namely the clergy, especially bishops and priests and popes. The laudable desire of the laity to look to the clergy for examples of holiness in this world and to love them and support them—this is a good thing. But it becomes sentimentality when there is a refusal to acknowledge the sinful failings of the clergy. It is sentimentality when Catholics refuse to see the tares among the wheat within the Church. It is sentimentality that has had and is having such a devastating effect on the Church, when the laity excuse the failures of their shepherds on the basis of the weakness of all human nature. And it is an act of turning one’s back on injustice when the shepherds go unchastized and unpunished by those who are the representative of the shepherd and bishop of our souls.

But the fact is that Jesus railed against the hypocrisy of the law abiding and pious Jews of his time. He called the Pharisees whited sepulchers, a phrase that does not cause much of a spark within us, but what he was saying is that despite their carrying out of the rules and practices of their faith, they were dead men in the eyes of God. Harsh. Our Lord went into the temple precincts with a whip of cords to drive out the money changers who were turning a place of worship into an investment bank operation. He did this because the tares have to be identified and opposed. He called a tare a tare, but he did not tear them out, but rather he did the most opposite thing possible: he died for them. But he did not pretend that they were not tares.

But this is precisely what seems to be happening in the Church today. There is a false and sentimental interpretation of this parable that refuses to call a tare a tare, and instead takes a cowardly refuge in appealing to mercy and refusal to judge, cowardly because it denies reality, cowardly because it uses Christ’s commandment to love as an excuse to not call a tare a tare. And in so doing, those who are in authority in the Church lose the respect of those ordinary people who understand Jesus’ parable about the reality of the wheat and the tares, people who understand that because we cannot tear the tares out of the field lest the wheat be harmed does not mean that we pretend that the weeds are not noxious and are not a threat to the wheat. If the shepherd refuses to distinguish between the wolf and his sheep, if he refuses to protect his sheep by confronting the wolf hiding under the cloak of an unchristian understanding of personal freedom, then he is but a whited sepulcher himself.

I had the occasion just a few days ago to have a conversation with Bishop Caggiano. It was brief, but pointed. We talked about the UN Committee report and what it meant. He said this: this is good, because the choice is now very clear. And the choice for everyone lies in the necessity to answer this question that Jesus asks throughout the gospels and in a poignant way to Peter and the disciples: who do you say that I am? When confronted with this question, so many Catholics today will immediately start talking about how the Jesus they believe in would never judge anyone, would never oppose where the world is going, would never say anything negative to anyone about his lifestyle, etc, etc. There is a knee jerk denial that the question for the Catholic has an objective and faithful answer that is intensely subjective because it demands an acceptance of Jesus as who he is and not who they would prefer him to be. This is what I pointed out to the bishop: their talking around the question is a cover for their own sin and tries to use a sanctimonious attitude of being non-judgmental to avoid answering the question at all costs. The bishop said this: but they are not answering the question, and you have to call them on that and say to them: for unless you believe that Jesus is your Lord and Savior with all that means and that He is the way, the truth and the life, then perhaps you have committed yourself to something other than the Catholic faith. And that is how a shepherd talks and acts. He knows his sheep and he knows who are those in sheep’s clothing, and he acts upon this realistic discrimination, with love, that love that is the Cross.

As we enter into the celebration of this Mass, as we approach the Consecration, as we gaze on the Sacred Host at the elevation, the bell rings, the bell that calls us to answer the question. For to gaze on the Host forces us to answer the question that He who is truly and really present in that Host asks us: who do you say that I am? And our answer must be: my Lord and my God.