14th Sunday 2026
Zechariah 9: 9-10; Romans 8: 9, 11-13; Matthew 11: 25-30
Yes! And Yes! But a couple of notes of caution. I have long believed that Our Lord’s words at the beginning of today’s Gospel should be inscribed in letters of gold over the door of every Christian educational establishment, and particularly of every seminary, in every country of the world.
Jesus thanks the Father for hiding the mysteries of the Kingdom from the learned and the clever; and Holy Mother Church is constantly tempted to turn those words on their heads. Who have always been the backbone of the Church in this country and, I suspect, everywhere? Surely, it is the ordinary folk in the pews: Joe and Joanna Soap. It has been your Dad and my Dad, who joined the KSC or the SVP, who broke up or transported and sold salvage, to help pay for the building of the new church: your Mum and my Mum who knitted and baked for the parish fair. Yet, over the years, these people have been neglected and despised, as we have become increasingly the chattering Church of the chattering classes; and now their descendants have increasingly been lost to the Church.
My own particular bugbear has always been the seminaries. My own time in the seminary was one of the happiest periods of my life, but even then it troubled me that the less academically gifted students were often left to sink or swim; and some who would have made excellent priests sank. They were not thrown out, but left of their own accord, overwhelmed by the difficulties of an over-academically biased timetable.
One situation stays vividly in my mind. After I had been ordained, and spent a year on the Junior Seminary staff, Steve arrived for Sixth Form. His education to that point had been rudimentary, but by careful guidance, and the benefit of three years in the Sixth Form, we helped him to gain two A-Levels, and I was more than happy to see him proceed to the Senior Seminary.
A few months into the new academic year, I took a football team from the Sixth Form to play the Senior Seminary. I checked up on our former Sixth Formers, bumping into Steve in the ambulacrum (corridor).
“Hello, Steve! How’s it going?”
“Not very well, Father, I’m afraid. I am really struggling with the studies.”
I hotfooted it to the President’s (Rector’s) room. “Oy! What’s happening to Steve?”
“Oh, he’s hopeless!”
“He’s got two A-levels!”
“I don’t know where he got them from!”
Not long afterwards, Steve left: a potentially fine priest lost because of the seminary’s obsession with academia. (Of course, the Church is not alone in this obsession: nursing is now a profession which, in its attitude to training, appears equally one-eyed.)
Now for the first note of caution. I am not for one moment suggesting that academic studies don’t matter. We need our scholars and our theologians, but when academic prowess is prized above pastoral sensitivity and above prayerful openness to God, we ae pursuing a non-Christlike path.
My other “Yes” goes to the final stages of today’s Gospel. “Come to me, all who labour and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest.” That is what we look for from Christ. Furthermore, it is what we look for from priests and religious. Suffering people do not need from their priests a learned discourse on the distinction between Pelagianism and Gnosticism: they need a listening ear and a loving heart, a heart which shares in the compassion of Christ, and of the Heart of Christ, the Sacred Heart.
“I am gentle and lowly in Heart” Jesus goes on to say, “and you will find rest for your souls”. That is what we long to receive from Him. How will we receive it? We should receive it through our prayer and through the Church, which is why Popes John XXIII and Francis have been the best loved of the recent successors of Peter. If people do not find that consolation in the Church, then the Church, for all its theological acumen, is failing in its task. Pope Francis described the Church as a field hospital, because it should be “binding up hearts that are broken” and thus drawing people to the wounded Heart of Christ.
Finally, my second note of caution. Jesus ends by saying “My yoke is easy and my burden light”. In the long term, we may say “yes” to that, but we cannot deny that, in the short term, many people find that yoke far from easy, that burden painfully heavy, and they need a loving Church, including sensitively loving priests, to help them through.
