FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK
Dear St. Mary’s Parishioners:
If tomorrow morning you saw headlines on the news, “Pastor of St. Mary’s Arrested For Bank Robbery”, many of you would be rightfully shocked. Some of you may even think, “I knew that priest was weird!” or “It doesn’t surprise me. Something was always off about that guy”. Many Catholics and non-Catholics may even say, “See! That’s why the Church and religion is horrible.” While all these sentiments are understandable, it reveals a great mystery about the nature of faith and the question we all intuitively wonder about: How can people do evil things while they profess to be Christian? It’s an age-old question reaching all the way back to the Old Testament and even to our very day, especially here in the United States. As you’re well aware by now, the failures of priests and other leaders in the Church are laid bare for all to see. This blatant hypocrisy can scandalize the faithful and at worst, keep those who would otherwise convert, away from Jesus Christ.
Last Sunday in the English Masses, I recounted the story of my old college roommate. We had become great friends while we were undergraduates at UC Davis. We were the only two Catholics in a three bedroom apartment, shared with seven other male students. We’d go to the 7pm evening Sunday Mass every weekend at St. James. We’d go on Catholic retreats and sing praise and worship songs with the guitar in our living room. While other college students got drunk and partied, we stayed up late and prayed. Senior year, however, things slowly started to change. He began to drift away from the practice of his faith. We stopped going to Mass together. We no longer prayed and the guitar that used to fill the air in our apartment fell silent. What happened? I heard through mutual friends of ours that he began to notice the fake Christian lives of some of the other people in our group. He saw them going to Church, making the Sign of the Cross at Mass, receiving the Holy Eucharist on Sunday’s, but on the other days of the week, their moral lives were the complete opposite of what they professed with their lips. Seeing this contradiction created a deep resentment in his young heart. It’s been over twenty years since we graduated and my old college roommate hates the Catholic Church with passion. How are we to make sense of this?
The Gospel reading this Sunday tells us how. It comes from Matthew 13, where Jesus tells seven parables about the nature of the Church and Heaven itself. They are important for us to ponder because they can teach us how to respond to life’s difficulties. My old roommate grew to despise the Church due to the presence of sinners in her ranks. In the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, Jesus explains that our Heavenly Father allows the good, the “wheat” in this analogy, to grow alongside the bad, the “weeds”. In other words, in the Church you will always have saints and sinners sitting next to each other in the pews. He does this to give us sinners a chance to change our lives and repent. Our Father is patient with his stubborn children. We should not be surprised when people in the Church fail to live up to the high standard of Jesus Christ. As the great Fulton Sheen once said, “Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.” Let’s continue to hold one another up in prayer. Pray especially, that none of us end up as a news headline.
A Servant of Jesus Christ,
Fr. Brian J. Soliven
