Originally published at The Catholic Thing
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
