16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 19, 2020 - Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43
 
Over a year ago, before the sheltering made us all so tense, and before the eruption of protesting over the continued racial injustice in our country made everybody on edge, the administration of SUNY New Paltz was put upon by the student body to change the names of some of the buildings and streets on their campus. And one of the ones they wanted gone was Huguenot Street because, they said, the Huguenots owned slaves. That may or may not have been their intended purpose, but I suspect that at least why they wanted the name gone was because the kids couldn’t spell Huguenot anymore. However, you have to know this about the Huguenots to know how short-sighted that was.
 
The Huguenots were a group of French Protestants who grew in numbers during the 16 ^th and 17 ^th centuries. They were so severely persecuted by the French Catholic hierarchy and the clergy who assisted them, that there were many bloody massacres of Huguenot people in France. They scattered to other countries in Europe, but couldn’t find a safe haven and finally came to colonial America while this area of the country was still in the possession of the Dutch. They settled in New Paltz and, ironically - just down the road here on Rt. 209, just outside of Port Jervis - in a little hamlet that is still named Huguenot. They were a group of, what we call generically, separatists. So were the Pilgrims.
 
I always get confused who the Pilgrims were and who the Puritans were because, when you see Thanksgiving cards, they all have the same hats with the gold buckles, so you don’t know who’s who. But the Pilgrims were separatists. They were driven out of England because England was controlled by the Church of England, and no other religion was allowed – not Catholicism, not any other brand of Protestantism. But they believed that the only way for them to seek salvation was to be separate from the rest of society. The Puritans, however, who had the same theological background as the Pilgrims, did not believe that they had to separate themselves from society. But, ironically, the Puritan community in Massachusetts became so rigid and so isolated from everybody else that it is from that group that arose the terrible Salem Witch Hunt. We’ve had the experience of separatist people in the United States from the very beginning.
 
There’s the Amish. They seem so gentle, and so kind, and so caring, but don’t cross the leader of an Amish community. Because, if you do, you and your family and everybody who associates with you will be shunned until you are forced to leave the community, and try to found another Amish community someplace else.
 
And then there’s the Mennonites, who look like the Amish, but aren’t. And the Bruderhof, who look like the Mennonites, but aren’t. And among our Jewish brethren you have the Hasidim. It’s very interesting that they believe that they’re holding on to the purest form of Judaism. But the name of one of the Hasidic communities is Satmar Hasidim is actually named after the Blessed Mother. Not because they loved her, but rather because, in Medieval Europe, these people were confined to ghettos from which they could emerge during the day to do the dirty work of the Christians, and then, at night they were locked in. And to add fuel to the fire, the Christians of one town in Europe named their enclave, their ghetto, after St. Mary, Sath Mare.
 
But there is also separatism within the Catholic Church. Just at the tail end of the Huguenot controversy in France, another group arose, called the Jansenists, who were more Catholic than the Pope, literally. They believed in things like people only being able to receive Holy Communion once a year, extending Lent to about two-thirds of the calendar year, and so on and so forth. They got so focused on being pure and separate from everybody else that eventually they were condemned as heretics and made separate from the rest of the Catholic Church. But their tradition shadows the Catholic Church down right into the 21 ^st century.
 
Have you ever been involved in a conversation with some other Catholics and you’re talking about some very sensitive issue in Catholicism, where people tend to have strong opinions on both sides of the issue, and all of a sudden somebody in the group will say, “Well they’re not real Catholics”? They are actually groups arising in America who claim to be the only true Catholics left in America. But the fact is, that once you’re baptized, once we pour water on your head, no matter what you do, you remain a Catholic for the rest of your life. Maybe not such a good Catholic sometimes, but a Catholic. We never disown you. You are ours. We pray with you when we can, for you when we can’t.  And we expect you to die within our fold and seek the mercy of a loving God.
 
I tell you all of this because we’re in the midst, right now, of an attempt to purify society once again. And it’s a very fine line that you have to walk between ugly racism that still bedevils our society and the attempt to eradicate it by shaming people.
 
That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to the Gospel and try to figure out what it was that the farmer was attempting to do. He was not attempting to harm the weeds; he was attempting to protect the wheat. It seems like a small distinction, but it’s a big one.
 
I don’t know what you know about the other half of the Church’s public liturgy. One half is Mass. The other half is something call the Divine Office. This is the book of the Divine Office. Priests and religious Sisters and Brothers have to say the Divine Office every day. You can say the whole thing, or you can just say Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. Morning Prayer used to be called Lauds after the Latin word for morning, and Evening Prayer is still called Vespers after the Latin word for evening. But I was saying Vespers last night. The way each hour is constructed is this: you have three psalms followed by a little hymn, followed by the Magnificat to the Blessed Mother, and then comes a Prayer of the Faithful. Every day there’s a Prayer of the Faithful in the Office. The petitions are interesting.
 
Now, this version of the Divine Office was written about 1971, so we’re talking about fifty years ago. This is one of the petitions from last night’s Prayer of the Faithful: “Protect and defend those who are discriminated against because of race, color, class, language or religion, that they may be accorded the rights and the dignity which are theirs.” Of course, fifty years on, we would add sexual orientation to that list of discriminated peoples. But isn’t it amazing, isn’t it wonderful, that fifty years ago the entire Church throughout the world, at least one day a week, was praying that racial inequality would be ended? And isn’t it dreadful, that for the last fifty years we’ve been praying for it and it still hasn’t happened?
 
So, it is dangerous to try to protect those who are defenseless or persecuted by shaming those who offend them and persecute them. That’s the point of Jesus’ parable. It‘s a fine line we have to walk. Let us defend and let us not wind up creating other separatist groups that themselves need to be defended.