Pope Francis reflected on the parable of the wheat and the tares and urged to recognize that good and evil grow together during his Angelus on 23 July Sunday.
“How easy it is for us to recognize the tares in the other, how we like to “skin” others!”, said the Holy Father in a passage of his reflection.
Next to the Holy Father was a grandmother, on the occasion of the celebration of the III World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly, and a young participant in the next World Youth Day in Lisbon (Portugal).
“Jesus speaks of our world, which in reality is like a large field, where God sows wheat and the evil one sows tares, and thus good and evil grow together,” said the Pontiff from the window of the study of the Vatican Apostolic Palace, where he leaned out to pray the Angelus.
“Good and evil grow together. We see it on the news, in society, and also in the family and in the Church. And when, along with the good wheat, we see bad weeds, we want to uproot it immediately, to do ‘total cleansing,’” the Bishop of Rome said before the faithful and pilgrims gathered in Saint Peter’s Square.
“But the Lord warns us today that it is a temptation to do this: you cannot create a perfect world and you cannot do good by hastily destroying what is bad, because this has worse effects: you end up – as they say – “throwing the child out with the bathwater”, he added.
Then he emphasized that “there is, however, a second field in which we can clean: the field of our heart, the only one in which we can intervene directly. There is also wheat and tares, for from there both extend to the great field of the world.
“Brothers and sisters,” Pope Francis continued, “our heart is, in fact, the field of freedom: it is not an aseptic laboratory, but an open space, and therefore vulnerable. In order to cultivate it properly, it is necessary, on the one hand, to constantly tend the delicate shoots of goodness and, on the other, to identify and pull out the weeds at the right time.”
He then invited them to make a daily examination of conscience and urged the faithful to look “inside ourselves and examine what is happening, what is growing in me, what is growing in me, good and bad”.
“There is a precious method to do it: what is called the examination of conscience, which consists of seeing what has happened in my life today, what has struck my heart and what decisions I have made. And this serves precisely to check, in the light of God, where the bad tares are and where the good seed is, ”he added.