When I asked a Jesuit in an MBA program why he was doing the degree in organizational management, he responded that he had never worked in a system that had as little accountability as the Church. “We never even wonder ‘What have we done with all our resources, spiritual and material?’” That’s a fair question on the institutional level, and today’s gospel suggests that it’s not such a bad question for us individually, either.
Friends and family hold me accountable all the time. Why shouldn’t God, whom I love and who loves me, hold me accountable? How am I like the tenants in the parable and the priests and elders listening to it? I wonder how my own self-absorption blinds me to whom God sends my way to collect my life’s fruit, which is God’s after all.
—Fr. Martin Connell, S.J. is a professor of education and Rector of the Jesuit community at John Carroll University, University Heights OH.