It has been an interesting
week to be a Catholic.
Of course everybody who has
access to any form of media
knows that Pope Benedict’s
resignation from the papacy
took effect on Thursday
and that the Church has entered
a period of sedes vacans,
or the empty chair of Peter,
as we await the election of a
new Pope by the college of Cardinals.
In my mind, this event is framed
by two other events from this week:
on Monday the Scottish
Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned
amidst accusations of sexual
misconduct with several priests,
and on Friday the Archdiocese
of Baltimore issued a statement
that one of my brother deacons
had been suspended from ministry
after his arrest for
possession of child pornography.
Sad to say, for all too many
people
such news has ceased to be shocking,
because it has come to seem
like business as usual
from the Catholic Church.
And I find myself praying that
God will seize this opportunity
to send us a leader who can
make the Church into the kind of place
where at least such things
regain their capacity to shock.
So what does the Word of God
offer us today?
We hear in the Gospel the
parable of the fig tree,
which for three years produces
no fruit,
after which the owner of the
orchard,
justly and understandably frustrated,
tells the gardener to cut it
down
so that it will no longer deplete the soil.
But the gardener pleads with
the owner
to give the tree one more year,
during which he will tend it
and fertilize it.
Early Christian interpreters
such as St. Augustine
saw the parable as a warning
to Christians that,
while we have been granted
another season of grace
in which to bear the fruit of
good works,
a day of judgment and
reckoning is coming
for those whose lives remain
barren.
But perhaps this parable
is
not just about us as individuals,
but also about us as a Church.
Events not just this week but
over the past ten years
have led me often to wonder
whether our Church
has become like the fig tree,
exhausting the soil around it
while producing no fruit but
scandal upon scandal,
sucking life from the world
and offering nothing in return
but one more excuse
for the cynicism that so
pervades modern life.
Is time running out for our
Church to bear good fruit?
Could the day arrive when God
decides
that the time has come to cut it down?
Christ said that the gates of
hell
would not prevail against his Church,
but we must also remember the
words of St. Paul:
“whoever thinks he is standing
secure
should take care not to fall.”
These are dark thoughts to
have on the eve of a papal election.
And they bring with them the
temptation to think
that what is needed to fix the
Church
is a Pope who fits with my particular
agenda:
whether that is a Pope who
will ordain women to the priesthood
or impose the Latin Mass on
all parishes,
or change the Church’s
teaching on contraception
or excommunicate all the bad
Catholics.
These might be good ideas or
bad ideas,
but a solution more radical
than any of these is called for,
a solution that fits neither a “conservative” agenda nor a “liberal” one,
a solution that fits neither a “conservative” agenda nor a “liberal” one,
a solution that is hinted at
in the parable of the fig tree.
The gardener in the parable
says
that he will cultivate the
ground around the tree and fertilize it.
What our translation rather
primly translates as “fertilizer”
is the Greek word kopria, which really means “excrement.”
A Pope from many centuries
ago, Gregory the Great,
said, in reference to this
parable, that the fertilizer that can make
the unfruitful tree of our
souls fruitful once again
is the remembrance of the dung
of our past sins;
the frank acknowledgement of
the stench of our own misdeeds
can pierce our hearts
and move us to begin bearing
the fruit of good and godly deeds (Homily
31).
And what is true of us as
individuals
is just as true of us as a Church.
The Church must clear away all
of the weeds that are choking it:
the desire to protect careers
and images at all costs,
the denial that the world’s
evils are found in the Church as well,
the denigration of any who
would dare to call us to account.
The Church must be fertilized
by facing up to the foulness of her failings,
and let her heart be pierced
by the stench of her own sins,
so that we can in due season bear
fruit
that will feed a world that is
spiritually starving.
Perhaps our next Pope can help
us to do this.
But the Church stands
on the
promise of Christ to remain with us,
not on the dream of a Pope
who
will fix everything that is wrong with us.
Still, we should pray in this
time of sede vacans
for God to send
us a leader
who, like the gardener in the
parable,
will cultivate and fertilize
the Church with honest repentance.
And we should not only pray,
but pray with confidence,
because we know that while our
past is ours, and we must own it,
our future belongs to the God
whose grace can make a barren fig tree fruitful
and make a desert bush burn with
the fire of God’s presence,
the God whose Spirit,
despite
our best efforts to quench it,
still burns as a refiner’s
fire within the Church,
the living body of Christ.
