By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Can good fruit come from a bad tree? The recent declaration on Medjugorje from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) had to take up that question, at least indirectly. The Church has delayed directly facing questions about Medjugorje in recent decades.

The Catholic intuition is no: bad trees do not produce good fruit. That intuition is sound, as sound as the Sermon on the Mount:

Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. (Mt 7:17-20)

Painful scandals have prompted another examination of what those words mean. Some hard thinking will be in order.

Perhaps the greatest fraudster in the history of the Church was Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. Anyone who has visited a L'Arche house marvels at the good fruit. How distressing then the revelations about Jean Vanier!

The Nobel laureate Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo of East Timor led his people to freedom, but lives now in exile due to sexual abuse of minors. Bishop Belo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996; Martin Luther King won it in 1964, but his promiscuous adulteries compromise his Christian witness.

It's not a clerical problem alone, of course. At his peak, Bill Cosby was perhaps the most famous man on the planet and most beloved for his wholesome portrayal of family and friendship. All that fruit hung off a predatory tree.

Some forty years after the alleged apparitions in Medjugorje began, the Vatican's nihil obstat was welcomed by the site's devotees. After much investigation and back and forth, pilgrimages there can proceed, and may even be encouraged. The good fruit of visits there is affirmed. But it has not been affirmed that the apparitions themselves are a good tree.

The Vatican still speaks of "alleged apparitions"; the DDF's Note withholds judgment on their authenticity:

Evaluating the abundant and widespread fruits, which are so beautiful and positive, does not imply that the alleged supernatural events are declared authentic. Instead, it only highlights that the Holy Spirit is acting fruitfully for the good of the faithful "in the midst" of this spiritual phenomenon of Medjugorje. . . .Moreover, the positive assessment that most of the messages of Medjugorje are edifying does not imply a declaration that they have a direct supernatural origin. Consequently, when referring to "messages" from Our Lady, one should always bear in mind that they are "alleged messages." (¶38)

While pilgrims to Medjugorje might be pleased, the visionaries themselves may not be. If there are problematic messages - which the Note examines in detail - then the problem cannot be with Our Lady. Either those messages are not real, the visionaries are not reliable, or - despite the good fruits - the whole phenomenon is not authentic.

When the Note advises that pilgrims "be strongly advised that pilgrimages are not made to meet with alleged visionaries" (¶41), it must be painful for them, especially those who operate nearby guesthouses.

So, the Vatican praises good fruits but does not affirm they grew on a good tree. To be sure, it does not say that the visions or visionaries are bad trees. Just ambiguous trees. Ambiguous trees do not appear in the Sermon on the Mount. But they do grow in the soil of history.

It is piously pleasing to say that holiness bears good fruit the world. See the fruits and search confidently for the saint. In his 1996 memoir, Gift and Mystery, on the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly vocation, St. John Paul the Great, affirmed just that:

My now long experience, amid so many different situations, has confirmed my conviction that priestly holiness alone is the soil which can nourish an effective pastoral activity, a true "cura animarum." The truest secret of authentic pastoral success does not lie i...