The Catholic Weekly 2 August 2020

8 2, August, 2020 F rom the archbishop catholicweekly.com.au Weeding our hearts There is more – far more – to Christ’s parable of the wheat and tares than we often realise “ T o act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power … to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking – knowledge which in fact we do not possess – is likely to make us do much harm.” So said the Austrian-British thinker Friederich August Wheat awaits the harvest. If our hearts were wheatfields they would be a mixture of the wheat and the tares. But God gives us the gift of time to apply ourselves in His Grace to getting rid of the weeds. The Austrian-British intellectual Friedrich August von Hayek. von Hayek in his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Hayek was an economist, political philosopher and so- cial theorist. Having survived fighting in the First World War and being infected by the Spanish flu, he dedicated his life to building a better world through economics. He became a prominent critic of socialism, national- ism and fascism in politics, of Keynesianism in econom- ics and scientism in the social sciences, of social conserva- tism in culture and of con- ceit in the academy. A hero of classical liberalism, he influ- encedThatcher and Reagan, and received many honours. Though mostly an agnostic himself, Hayek was baptised and buried a Catholic, and said he felt that if someone wanted religion they should stick to “the true article”, Ca- tholicism. He once engaged in a dialogue with Pope John Paul II on science and re- ligion. He agreed with his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” And so in his Nobel prize speech, Hayek warned against speaking or acting as if we knew things we don’t or can’t. We need intellectual hu- mility, modesty, docility. As long as we remain aware of our limitations, we can work within them, he thought, but as soon as we attribute to our- selves omniscience, we easily slip into tyranny – whether of an intellectual, social or polit- ical kind. In our Gospel this morn- ing (Mt 13:24-43), farm hands find tares growing among the wheat and their instinct is to get in there quick and rip up the weeds straight away. In von Hayek’s words, they think they ‘possess the knowl- edge and the power to shape’ things the way they like. But the Master warns them that their confidence is unjusti- fied: wheat and darnel look very similar; if they try to sort them before time, they’ll in- evitably pull out a lot of good wheat and leave lots of tares behind. But as the great English ju- rist, Sir William Blackstone, put it: “Better that ten guilty persons escape than one in- nocent suffer”. Be patient, Je- sus says this morning; leave the good and bad to grow up together; the Son of Man will sort out which is which at the end. Some might respond: it’s not rocket science to sort out good people from bad. The human heart has a natural knowledge of good and evil and a natural ability to judge actions: we call this ‘con- science’. Disciples also have Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP