Memorial of Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

“You have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and revealed them to the childlike.” In these words, Christ calls us to simplicity—not ignorance, but simplicity of heart.

I think of a letter St. Francis Xavier wrote while serving as a missionary in India. He had encountered whole communities eager to receive the faith, but there were not enough priests to teach them, administer the sacraments, and satisfy their hunger for God.

Writing back to Europe, Xavier thought of the learned men at the University of Paris, one of the great centers of Christian scholarship. He lamented that they possessed more learning than charity. In effect, he wished that they loved God as much as they loved learning about God.

That is a striking criticism. These men had devoted themselves to profound and subtle questions about God, but they had not allowed their knowledge to touch their hearts and transform their lives. They knew much about God, yet that knowledge had not become the burning love which would send them out to proclaim the Gospel and draw others into his Kingdom.

This is part of the simplicity Christ praises. Our faith can be immensely deep. Its mysteries can occupy the greatest minds for an entire lifetime. Yet at its heart, the faith is simple:

Love God.

Love your neighbor.

Jesus is Lord.

Turn the other cheek.

These truths are simple enough for a child to understand, yet deep enough to transform an entire life. They are not given merely to inform us. They are meant to convert us—to set our hearts on fire with love for God and for one another.

We must never love learning about God more than we love God himself. Knowledge of God must become friendship with God. Theology must become charity. What we have received must send us out to share the simple, saving truth of the Gospel. But our Lord’s words mean still more when we hear them in context.

Immediately before this passage, Jesus rebukes the towns that witnessed his mighty deeds but refused to repent. He warns Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum that judgment will be more tolerable for Tyre, Sidon, and even Sodom than for them. Those who considered themselves wise and secure had failed to recognize what was directly before their eyes. Christ is therefore warning us about our own cleverness.

Human intelligence is a great gift. We are made in the image of the infinitely wise God. But precisely because intelligence is powerful, it can also be misused. We can construct systems of thought so subtle and abstract that they no longer clarify the truth but obscure it. Eventually, they may even invert it, teaching us to call evil good and good evil.

We can take something plainly contrary to the Gospel and the order God has created, surround it with qualifications and clever arguments, and finally repackage it as something good. We can become lost inside our own systems.

This is not always done maliciously. Most people do not consciously decide, “I want to justify what the Gospel calls evil.” More often, we become so attached to our own reasoning, assumptions, or desires that we can no longer see clearly. Scholars, theologians, priests, bishops—all of us—can become blinded by our own cleverness.

Here again, Christ calls us to simplicity. He calls us to measure our ideas against the Gospel and the faith handed down through the Church. He calls us to receive the truth with the humility and innocence of a child—not because the truth is shallow, but because we must allow the truth to judge us rather than imagining that we can sit in judgment over it.

The Gospel therefore asks us to examine ourselves in two ways.

First: Do I have a greater ardor for learning than I have for God? Has what I know about God taught me to love him more? Has it made me more like him—more merciful, more generous, and more willing to give myself for others?

Second: Am I receiving the faith in the simplicity in which it has been handed on, or am I covering it with so much complexity, nuance, and subtlety that I lose—and perhaps even distort—the message itself?

Let us ask the Lord for the childlike heart he praises: not a shallow heart, but a docile one; not an ignorant heart, but a humble one; not a heart afraid of truth, but one willing to obey it.

Then our learning will become wisdom, our knowledge will become charity, and our faith will lead us—and those whom we serve—along the road to eternal life.