The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal

Sin, corporate sin, was abundantly confessed this past week during an opening penitential rite for the synod in Rome. And before the whirligig of the news cycle carries off those confessions along with everything else in the coming week - I feel the need to confess myself to a personal temptation to sin in the form of weariness and annoyance with grand gestures that aim at the concrete and spiritual - and result in the abstract and bureaucratic. And pose no little danger. Please bear with me.

The penitential spectacle before the opening of the Synod needs to be viewed through lenses other than pious wishes and all due respect for the doubtless good intentions of the Holy Father. Let us describe it for what it was: Cardinals and others officially confessing sins that they have in all likelihood never personally committed, on behalf of others in the Church, who may themselves be quite personally innocent. (How many people in the Church have in any normal sense of the term sinned against "peace" or women's contributions or the environment? Repentance on that score is better recommended to the attention of specific criminals, miscreants, terrorists who are not in short supply.)

One might, of course, also start quibbling over why these sins and not others. For instance, how widespread is the "sin" of "using church teaching as weapons to hurl at others." Particularly as opposed to how frequently this sin is: ignoring Church teaching to please myself. You don't need a Pew survey to have a fairly good idea of the relative proportions, which now as always tips heavily towards the latter. The Pharisees are a small cohort - the self-willed, especially in our Age of Identity, legion.

Whenever I see broad group efforts at repentance like these, it reminds me of C.S. Lewis' profound essay, "The Dangers of National Repentance." He wrote it in the early days of World War II when British Christians and others were feeling generalized guilt for whatever part they may have played in the coming massive global death and destruction. He allowed that there was, to be sure, some Christian value in the impulse, especially contrasted with the presumption some might feel toward "self-righteousness" against the Germans and other enemies.

But several dangers also lurk in that impulse, he said. The main one is the confusion between the repentance of someone who has actually committed a sin on the one hand, and on the other hand the moral status of the claim that "we" are repenting: "You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition."

In other words, in this context, when you say "we" have sinned, you really mean some unspecified "they" are wrongdoers, unwarranted detraction of others - a sin worth looking up that has mostly dropped out of view - masquerading as contrition on my part.

The Cardinals and others this week confessed on behalf of "the Church." But the truth is that while everyone in the Church is a sinner, very few - and certainly not the Church - have failed morally in the several ways offered.

It was especially ironic that Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, yes, he of the book Heal Me with Your Mouth and author of Fiducia supplicans expressed, "shame for all the times that in the church, especially us pastors who are entrusted with the task of confirming our brothers and sisters in the faith, have not been able to guard and propose the Gospel as a living source of eternal newness, (instead) 'indoctrinating it' and risking reducing it to a pile of dead stones to be thrown at others."

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who lived with Theodore McCarrick in that Cardinal's Washington residence for years, but never saw anything questionable in his relationships with young males, was tasked to confess, according to reports, "especially on behalf of men in the church, 'for all the times that we have not recogn...

By David Warren

At the present time, and under current conditions, in most public places, I would say that reciting the Athanasian Creed would be an example of "badass Christianity."

There are other examples.

By extension, the statement of any of the multiple elements of the Christian creeds, and their application to "real world" questions (such as baby-killing or abortion), is an example of the "badass" approach, which will draw criticism from many of our contemporaries, including most bourgeois Christians, and the Catholic ones.

Mostly, it is the opposite of silence. To keep one's mouth shut, in polite company, rather than saying something that could cause offense, might be considered the quintessence of the bourgeois creed. And verily, "silence is golden," in almost every situation, except when the truth is in dispute.

The form of silence that is commanded by prudence should be carefully considered, where there is time. Is one being prudent? Or is one only (usually unsuccessfully) protecting one's derriere? It would of course be bad-ass not to shield it.

One might try the Christian exercise of not protecting one's behind, or even flinching for the kick. There is a higher and holier prudence, that is not the consequence of intimidation; nor of the expectation of intimidation.

An act of violence, on a supposedly Christian motive, will also be criticized, though as a crime. "Badass" isn't technically a crime, but merely a sometimes-fashionable style, though in certain progressive jurisdictions it may soon be illegal. There are already calls to censor badass remarks, and I should think Christian badass is especially offensive, to the non-Christian "snowflake."

But if Christianity is entirely uninvolved, the expression is generally flattering. We use it of sports personalities, and Mark Zuckerberg even included the almost-assassinated Donald Trump (who isn't usually counted as a Christian).

The badass is "pushing it," not actually committing a crime, when for instance he humorously declares, "Missed me!" after a balloon was exploded in Ronald Reagan's presence. Christianity is, characteristically, not involved in any violent crime that I can imagine, or even in the popping of balloons, though perhaps a reader will correct me. It is more likely to courageously inspire a violent act of defense against a crime, which, however, may be prosecuted.

I am from Canada, but Canada and the "Uniparty" in the United States, plus several uniparty states in Europe, frown upon a violent defense. But they do not punish it, as they still usually do the original act of murder or whatever, unless the perpetrator is, say, defending "mere property" in response to some physical act of aggression, by, for instance, fashionably woke rioters, or one's home and family against violent intruders.

This is inevitable - that Christians will be prosecuted - once an originally Christian doctrine is interpreted, or re-interpreted, in an unambiguously materialist way. It is how the notion of "human freedom" can become "a woman's right to control her own body," so that it becomes the right to murder a body that isn't hers.

But it could be interpreted more exactly. Imagine, if you will, that instead of referring to Jesus Christ as our moral authority, we were to consult only biologists on the question, "When does human life begin?" This would be a materialist interpretation, and non-violent, but indisputably "badass."

I am focusing on abortion because it is almost the last issue in the category of the divine creation, expressed by the words, "Male and female created He them, and blessed them." Like all the many other divine revelations, it is clear beyond the shadow of mistaking, even by material science. For instance, only some people are female. And only they can ever get pregnant. At least, this was formerly understood.

Live things are alive, according to our waning Christian philosophy; dead things are dead. We used to understand this, and for religious minor...

By Stephen P. White

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, October 3rd at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the second Synod on Synodality now underway and other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

One of the delightful consolations of the Catholic faith is that we seem to have a patron saint for everything, no matter how serious or seemingly trivial: St. Claire of Assisi is the patron saint of television; St. Peregrine the patron of those suffering from cancer; St. Anthony the patron saint of lost items; St. Hyacinth the patron of those in danger of drowning; St. Bibiana patroness of hangovers; St. Drogo is patron of ugly people; and so on.

Unlike the process of canonization, which has become formalized over the centuries, there is usually no official process by which a saint becomes patron of one thing or another. Occasionally, we get a formal declaration, as when, for example, Paul VI declared St. Benedict to be patron of Europe. But usually patronage is assigned by acclamation or tradition, and matches some event or condition from the saint's life to the object of patronage. St. Denis was beheaded, so he gets to be the patron saint of headaches.

Sometimes the connection between a patron and a cause is less obvious. For example, Thérèse of Lisieux, is one of several patron saints of aviators, though she died several years before Wilbur Wright watched his brother Orville take flight at Kitty Hawk. Her cult was growing rapidly in the first decades of the twentieth century, and she quickly became a favorite of French aviators during the First World War. The patronage stuck.

Aviators and flight crews are not the only ones entrusted to the patronage of the Little Flower. Pope Pius XI declared her patroness of the missions in 1927, and Pius XII named her among the patrons of her native France in 1944.

There is a beautiful irony, of course, in St. Thérèse being the patroness of missions and missionaries. She lived most of her 24 years in the near-total obscurity of her parents' home and, for the last nine, within the walls of the Carmel at Lisieux. A world traveler like Francis Xavier or Junipero Serra she was not.

I was thinking of St. Thérèse earlier this week when her feast day, October 1, happened to coincide with the opening of the latest session of the Synod on Synodality. The synod is devoted to the theme "How to be a missionary synodal Church," so perhaps it is fitting that such an event would open on the feast of the patroness of missions and missionaries.

I am not going to go so far as to suggest that St.Thérèse be made the patron saint of Synodality. (The multi-year synod process has not always been exactly emblematic of her "Little Way.") But if the object of the entire synodal exercise is to renew the Church for the sake of mission, then perhaps it makes sense to consider what the patroness of missions and missionaries can teach us about how to do that.

Last October, Pope Francis published a short apostolic exhortation (titled, "C'est la Confiance") on the life of St. Thérèse, holding her out as "a model of evangelization." As Pope Francis noted, it was unflagging confidence in the love and mercy of God which enabled Thérèse to live as she did. She lived, not for herself, but for others. "Thérèse never set herself above others," Pope Francis wrote, "but took the lowest place together with the Son of God, who for our sake became a slave and humbled himself, becoming obedient, even to death on a cross."

"Jesus does not demand great actions from us," St. Thérèse wrote, "but simply surrender and gratitude." This is how she grew in holiness: not through self-assertion but through su...

By Robert Royal has delegates

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow - Thursday, October 3rd at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal (from Rome) will join contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray and host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the second Synod on Synodality now underway, as well as other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

As the second (and final?) session of the Synod on Synodality opens today, many people are still asking: What is synodality? There seems to be no good answer to that question. Indeed, the synod organizers think the very question is wrong. The best that anyone with some authority to say has been able to come up with is that synodality is not a "what" but a "process." It "is" what it "does."

What kind of process, other than continued talking with one another, is hard to say. But it's an open-ended process that is to continue beyond the closing date of the synodal session later in the month - the end of the beginning, so to speak, not the beginning of the end. Not only for the chosen delegates and those appointed by Pope Francis to ongoing "study groups" slated to report at the earliest in June of 2025, but for the future of the worldwide Catholic Church.

In addition to the also somewhat woolly synodal aims of "communion, participation, and mission" - all of which have been going on for 2000 years without benefit of the synod on synodality - there's been a renewed emphasis during this process on a "new way of being Church."

For those too young to have been there, "being Church" - not being "the" Church (more on this below) - was an ungrammatical but stylish neologism in the decade or so after Vatican II. Its meaning was not very clear then either, but the phrase signaled the very latest in Catholic self-definition. The Synod's leaning heavily on this 1970s coinage, which had gone into remission from roughly 1978 to 2013, doesn't seem very likely to produce much that's living and new and cutting-edge now, any more than it did then.

Yet expectations have been allowed to run high. The Instrumentum laboris ("Working Document") states clearly that "Without tangible changes, the vision of a synodal Church will not be credible." Asking whether that vision is desirable might be a good use of the synod's time too. And hardly a "sin against synodality," but a crucial part of listening to all points of view, which is synodality's professed reason for being.

So it's only right to ask: What kinds of "tangible changes"?

Clearly, as was predictable from the outset, for Catholic progressives it's the usual list: women's ordination; some sort of "welcoming" of LGBT (a term now being used in Vatican documents without getting dangerously close to specifying what welcoming means); devolution of powers to lay people; greater autonomy for local bishops and churches except if they veer off into Latin Masses and other "old" ways of being the Church. (The German bishops have thrown a monkey wrench into this last notion by planning to set up an unauthorized German synod that would make heterodox doctrinal decisions independent of Rome and the universal tradition of the Church.)

All these changes fit rather comfortably with the views of nominal Catholics in the developed world. A recent Pew poll found that Catholics in America favor women's ordination, contraception, LGBT relationships, and Pope Francis. Whether those same "Catholics" actually go to Mass, Confession, pray, fast, give alms, read Scripture, actually pay attention to the pope was not part of the survey. Elsewhere such views produce strong negative reactions: See, for instance, the African bishops, the Polish hierarchy, the Eastern churches, and thousands of bishops and priests everywhere at the allowing of "blessings" of homose...

The Sins of the Synod with Jayd Henricks

By Randall Smith

But first a note: In today's podcast, Robert Royal and Jayd Henricks, former executive director of government relations at the USCCB and now president of Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal (and its substack What We Need Now) discuss Henricks' article "The Sins of the Synod" (we link to it today in our COMMENTARY section). It's an informative introduction to the concluding session of the Synod on Synodality which begins tomorrow. Click here for the podcast.

Now for today's column...

There are many kinds of prayer. The Catechism lists vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplative prayer. But we can add intercessory prayer, petitionary prayer, penitential prayer, prayers of thanksgiving, and prayers where we simply try to listen in silence to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

People sometimes say that "somewhere" St. Augustine said: "He who sings prays twice." The problem is no one has ever found that "somewhere," so he likely didn't say it. But singing - chanting a psalm, for example - can also be a kind of prayer. We ask for things we need in prayer; we give thanks for gifts received in prayer; and we seek forgiveness for wrongs we have done or for things left undone.

Prayer, says the Catechism, "is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part." In this sense, the sacraments are a form of prayer. We go to Confession; we confess our sins; we receive the graces of the sacrament; and we go forth to cooperate with those graces, resolving to do better. We make prayers during Confession, "O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You…." But the whole act of confession is itself a prayer, in which we put ourselves before God and ask for forgiveness and grace.

So too, the liturgy is a form of prayer. We sometimes forget this and say things like: "Did you get a chance to pray after Mass?" or "I went early to Mass so I would have a chance to pray." It is good to pray before and after Mass, but we shouldn't forget that the Mass itself is a prayer.

As the Catechism says: "The liturgy is a participation in Christ's own prayer addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy, all Christian prayer finds its source and goal. Through the liturgy the inner man is rooted and grounded in 'the great love with which [the Father] loved us' in his beloved Son. It is the same 'marvelous work of God' that is lived and internalized by all prayer, 'at all times in the Spirit.'"

But then the question arises: If the Mass is a prayer - a participation in Christ's own prayer - what kind of prayer is it? Is it an active, vocal prayer, or is it a more silent, contemplative prayer? Or is it both?

Sometimes people try to fudge their answer, saying something like, "Being active at Mass is contemplative. People can pray contemplatively while they're belting out a hymn. You know St. Augustine said: 'When you sing, you pray twice.'" (Except he didn't.) Such people seem to think there shouldn't be even a moment of reflective silence in the whole Mass.

Keep going. Say more words. Sing another hymn, maybe two. Then go greet people. But be sure to make space in your day for quiet time to pray. When would there be time for that? Not during the Mass, it would seem. At some other time. Mass is a time to keep busy. Silence just makes people uncomfortable. So let's fill the silence with another hymn.

Or people fudge the other way and say: "If we sit here contemplatively, that is active participation. You don't have to do anything or hear the words to engage in 'active participation.'" We sit here quietly, in awe, "putting ourselves in the presence of God," letting the prayers of the Mass that we can't hear just wash over us as we pray silently and contemplate the beauty of what's being done by the priest. That's what the Church means by active participation."

Well, if the Church did mean that by "active participation," she wouldn't have made a point of requiring it (as though it wasn't happening) in a dogmatic constitution...

In a new Vatican Thing podcast, TCT’s Robert Royal speaks with Catholic author and commentator George Weigel about the final session of the Synod on Synodality, which begins later this week in Rome. This is just the first of many podcasts and columns The Catholic Thing will bring readers throughout October as the Synod reaches its conclusion. Don’t miss it.

By Auguste Meyrat

But first a note: TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal is in Rome. And in the next TCT podcast, filmed before he left, he discusses with George Weigel the month-long Synod on Synodality that begins at the Vatican this week. Click here to view (or listen to) their conversation.

Now for today's column...

Although many Americans focus on migration coming from south of the border, an even bigger issue has been the mass migration of Americans from blue states to red states in the past decade. Because of the high taxes, lack of social services, and worsening conditions for middle and working-class families, many residents from progressive bastions like California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota have resettled in relatively conservative states like Florida, Tennessee, or my home state of Texas.

Beyond the changing demography, this migration has affected the culture and politics of the states involved, though not in the way most observers expected. Rather than turning red states purple, the influx of migrants from the blue states made the red states even redder. It's, therefore, more apt to view these newcomers more as embittered refugees escaping a failed state than colonists ready to spread their superior way of life to less civilized parts of the country.

In his new book, American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States, former screenwriter and conservative columnist Roger Simon recounts the story of his own move from Los Angeles to Nashville: "Born a New Yorker, I had come to California as a young man of twenty-one for more than just endless summers and ocean waves. I wanted to be part of the film industry, to write and direct movies. And now here I was, in my seventies, running away to start a new life - of what kind and for what purpose? - in Tennessee."

After contending with an ideologically hostile environment for so many decades, the septuagenarian finally moves during California's draconian COVID lockdown. Although, like most newcomers, he expects to find a conservative utopia where common sense reigns, schools are not indoctrination centers, and people enjoy basic freedoms. Instead, he observes that his new home is at great risk of becoming like his old one: "Nashville and Tennessee would be a test case in this depressing process [of becoming Democrat] whose conclusion is nowhere near resolved."

Nevertheless, Simon quickly finds like-minded "refugees" like himself who form an unlikely coalition of populist conservatives who aim to challenge the complacency of the establishment Republican elite in Tennessee. While newcomers have more dynamism and savvy, their lack of history and unfamiliarity with the state puts them at a disadvantage, with some of the natives seeing them as modern-day carpetbaggers.

Simon eventually makes himself at home, not only connecting with a number of people in his new city but even rediscovering his Judaism due to the ubiquity of houses of worship in Nashville along with the hearty encouragement of his (mostly Christian) friends. His fight for a more conservative Tennessee isn't over by the end of the book, but he is optimistic about where the culture is headed.

In itself, American Refugees is a nice story about an older man making his final odyssey, but its real value is in what it represents. Innumerable parallels are reflected in other migrations happening in the West, specifically in the realm of religion. For, just as people are leaving the blue states for red states, Catholics have been leaving progressive parishes for more conservative ones.

Some of this has to do with the movement that Simon describes. Catholics from the churches in the blue states are now filling up the pews of churches in the red states. And just as Simon re-verted to his Jewish faith, many non-practicing Catholics are encouraged by the surrounding culture to re-vert and come to Mass again.

I've seen this firsthand here in North Texas. Otherwise generic parishes have...

By Anthony Esolen

I have consistently found that the most intolerant people I meet are those who have the word "tolerance" on their lips all the time. We should not take this as hypocrisy. It is not what the Pharisees do, who blow a trumpet before them when they are giving alms. That is to turn charity into a stage-play, so that they can earn the praise of men, and if that is what they want, that is what they will get. "Fit retribution," says Milton, "empty as their deeds."

It is rather, I think, a condition most peculiar to our age, and it has to do with an urgent desire not to feel the prickling of the sins we approve. Those who regularly and honestly engage in examining their consciences will not like what they find there. That is because we are all sinners, and we all fall short of the glory of God.

The saint is more assured of God's mercy than the ordinary sinner is, but he is also more careful not to offend, and more abashed when he does offend. He does not need a slogan from politicized arms of the Church to instruct him in tolerance. His own sins instruct him well enough.

I am speaking here of persons to be tolerated, not sins. We want physicians who love their patients and hate their cancers.

We must get it into our heads that sin is real just as diseases of the body are real. I walked about for nearly a month with a blood clot in my leg, not wanting to believe it was really there. But the clot was under no obligation to respect my wishes.

We Catholics believe that God has given the human soul a moral constitution: we thrive by what is objectively good, and we wither by what is objectively bad. Our moral diseases are under no obligation to respect our opinions about them.

Of course, when a man sins with full and clear awareness that what he is doing is wrong, he adds defiance or recklessness to the underlying sin. And in this sense, we may say that some measure of ignorance mitigates one's guilt when the whole of the act and all its circumstances are judged. But the sin itself remains, and it works its harm.

Imagine, then, someone who bears within him a grave moral disease, a sin that has become so habitual that he cannot imagine living without it, yet a sin that deforms his dealings with other people, especially those who he knows disapprove of the sin, even if they do not know he suffers from it.

He begins to preach "tolerance" to numb the sore. He is not necessarily conscious of his motive. It is a subcutaneous panic. If he were a businessman nearing the brink of insolvency, the same kind of motive might keep him from driving past his bank, or looking at his checkbook, and he might snap at anyone discussing the ethics of frugality and prudence in money matters.

But that does not suffice. The sore never really grows numb. The disease continues its work. Something in the soul cries out that things are wrong.

It stings the man into action; so he imputes evil motives to those who remind him of the sin, and he goes on a spirited attack against sins he does not commit, and even against moral dispositions that are good or neutral, so long as they can be confused with those sins. "Tolerance" is on his lips, with the snarl of a wounded animal.

And since man is a social creature, social to the core, the condition can become general. The society loudest in preaching "tolerance" is one whose characteristic sins have become intolerable. They are angry sores, red and raw.

Everybody can see them. But everybody must be persuaded that they are not what they are, or that they are natural and inevitable. The melanoma must be called a beauty mark.

In the early progress of this inner conflict, the tolerance of a society's characteristic sin and the rage against its opposite is a function of vanity and social fashions, as Uncle Screwtape suggests: "We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make e...

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...