Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (2026) - Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP

When I was a kid I sometimes saw movies in which one of the characters called out, “Smithkins, you’re fired!”  To me back then, it seemed like a moment of power.  But, a few years ago when I found myself in that situation, the experience was quite different.

I was running a theological college in another country, and one of the ancillary workers, let’s call him Raphael, was going through a marital crisis.  We were arranging marriage counselling for them, but before it could take place I was called early in the morning to go to the college.  There was Raphael’s wife, on her way to work, carrying an axe to defend herself, and Raphael advancing towards her with an iron bar.  I used the only means I had at my disposal, calling out, “Raphael, if you hit her, you’re fired.”  Raphael then swung the iron bar, which his wife blocked with the axe.  I knew that if I did not carry through with dismissal straight away, then the threat of being fired would forever lose all its effectiveness.  So, as iron bar and axe clashed against each other, I called out, “Raphael, you’re fired!” and the blows continued exactly the same.  I had never felt so powerless in all my life.  And then, of course, there were all the consequences, including trying to support Raphael’s wife, whose husband was now unemployed.  (You will be relieved to know that Raphael’s wife walked away from the attack, although she sustained some serious but not permanent injury to her hand.)

How common is this experience?  Do Ukrainian soldiers feel the same when time after time they deprive Russian or Uzbeki or African families of their loved ones and breadwinners, without the Russian leadership showing any signs of withdrawing?  Or is there a desire, as there certainly is among many who wage war, simply to punish harder, to make the attack more bloodthirsty, so as to dispel the appearance of weakness?

To bring us closer to home, this can give us some insight into the most recent crisis to afflict our Church.  The threat of excommunication did not stop the illicit ordination of bishops, and Pope Leo looks, and probably feels, something of a failure.  To have conceded to the Society of St Pius X would have undermined the whole disciplinary system of the Church, and yet when the excommunications came into effect, they did not seem to change anything. Pope Leo stands powerless as schism rends the body of Christ.

We are not like God.  God, whose power embraces all things, does not need to punish, as the first reading reminds us.  In our weakness, we feel the need to punish and to exclude, even though we can see it does not achieve the good we want, not just for ourselves, but for the Church.  We are like the servants in the parable who want to pull out the weeds even if it means taking the wheat with them.  We do not know what we want, and therefore we do not know what to pray for.  We cannot form a concept of it.  We cannot put it into words.  We need, as St Paul reminds us, to let the Spirit pray on our behalf with ineffable groanings, with sighs that cannot be put into words.  The Spirit’s prayer will become our own, if we acknowledge our own weakness.

Jesus himself helps us, by addressing us in parables, by speaking words that we cannot understand, so that we are always aware of our inability to grasp his message, the impossibility of seizing the Gospel and taking it in our power.  The Kingdom that he tells us to pray for each day, has no constitution, and is presented us in a series of images and sacramental symbols.  The dogmatic statements of the Church come later, like Jesus’ explanation to the disciples in the house, but they do not replace the parables and the sacraments or exhaust their meaning.

And here, speaking in very general terms, is the problem with the Society of St Pius X.  When through the intercession of the Holy Spirit the Second Vatican Council came to the aid of the Church in her weakness, it produced results that we had not expected, and showed that the Kingdom of God was deeper than all the inspired formulations we had developed so far, and that the sacraments were greater than the sacred rubrics which guided their celebration.  Were there mistakes made in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council?  Plenty of them.  But the approach of the SSPX was to pull out the wheat with the weeds, to isolate themselves as far as possible from the rest of the Church as it stumbled forward in communion with the Pope and all the other bishops, to restrict themselves with what they could grasp and control.

By the very same logic, your response must not be just to take my words to heart, for they do not grasp the situation either.  We do not yet imagine the healing of this schism, and so in our weakness we must allow the Spirit to intercede.  First of all, we invoke the Spirit over the bread and wine, so that they can become the body of Christ, a body that was broken by whips and thorns and nails and lance, and yet rose to eternal and indestructible life.  And then we invoke the Holy Spirit over us who will receive his body, so that our bodies will be part of his body the Church, and that the Church, though broken, may be united and enlivened in ways beyond our imagining, to the glory of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP is the Regent of Studies and the Chaplain to Monash University, assigned to St Dominic's Priory, Melbourne.