Pope reflects on parable of weeds and wheat

July 24, 2017

Pope Francis reflect on the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matthew 13:24-43) during his July 23 Sunday Angelus address (Italian text, video).

“With this image Jesus tells is that in this world the good and the evil are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate and extirpate all the evil,” the Pope told the crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square. “God alone can do this, and He will do so in the Last Judgment.”

“The present situation, with its ambiguities and its composite character, is the field of the freedom, the field of the freedom of Christians, in which the difficult exercise of discernment between good and evil takes place,” Pope Francis continued, as he called for “decision and patience”:

The decision is to want to be the good seed—we all want this, with all our strength, and, hence, distancing ourselves from the Evil One and his seductions. Patience means to prefer a Church that is leaven in the dough, who does not fear soiling her hands washing the clothes of her children, rather than a Church of “pure ones” that pretends to judge before the time who is and who is not in the Kingdom of God.

Christ “tells us that the boundary line between the good and the evil passes in the heart of every person, passes in the heart of every one of us, that is, we are all sinners,” the Pope added. “With Baptism, He has also given us Confession, because we are always in need of being forgiven for our sins.”

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• Posted by: Bveritas2322 - Jul. 25, 2017 4:58 AM ET USA

  I knew he would misunderstand this Gospel. He constantly works backwards in assuming that because we can not know the ultimate state of moral culpability in an individual soul that this implies that clarity about objective moral truth is ultimately unknowable. This is precisely the very sort of shallowness that this particular gospel reading condemns.