Why Be Catholic

FIAT: Why Be Catholic Conference 2026 – Saturday afternoon: Our Yes

Mary's yes didn't stay in Nazareth. It became a song: "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord." On Saturday afternoon, we make that yes our own.

Saturday 3 October
1:30pm The Interior Life of the Evangelist – Fr Mark Payton
2:10pm The Magnificat: Praise that Proclaims – Fr Christian Irdi
3:10pm Afternoon tea
3:30pm Closing Keynote: Making Your Yes – Tim Staples
4:30pm Consecration & Commissioning

Tim's closing keynote is the final talk of his final Australian tour. Be there for it.

🎟️ Register for the full day ($120) and the whole day is catered: breakfast, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea. Single session tickets are $60 (meals not included). Children 12 and under, priests, religious and seminarians attend free.

📍 Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, 104 Scarborough Beach Road, Scarborough

Scan QR code for registration

This time next week, we begin.

Over 250 people have already said yes to FIAT: Why Be Catholic Conference 2026. Will you join them?

For three days, we'll walk with Mary from her fiat to her Magnificat, and ask what our own yes might look like. Tim Staples of Catholic Answers joins us on his final Australian tour, with Fr Christian Irdi, Fr Mark Payton and others.

Thursday 1 & Friday 2 October, from 5:30pm
Free and open to all. Registration is essential, and please bring a plate to share at our community dinner.

Saturday 3 October, from 8:00am
Full day $120, fully catered, or single session $60. Children 12 and under, priests, religious and seminarians attend free.

📍 Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, 104 Scarborough Beach Road, Scarborough

Register at www.evangelisationaustralia.com

Like Saint Padre Pio, who remained stationary in San Giovanni Rotondo yet exercised worldwide spiritual influence through prayer, confession, and the stigmata, recognize that effective mission doesn't always require elaborate resources or extensive travel. Practice radical dependence on God's provision rather than your own preparation. This week, undertake one act of ministry or service stripped of excessive planning and self-reliance. Trust that the Holy Spirit will provide what you need when you need it. Follow Padre Pio's example: depth of prayer enables breadth of mission.

FIAT: Why Be Catholic Conference 2026, Saturday 3 October

After Mary said yes, she went in haste to carry Christ to others. Saturday morning at FIAT explores what that means for the Church today.

Tim Staples (Catholic Answers) gives the morning keynote, Mary & the Missionary Church, on his final Australian tour. This is followed by a special session, Fruit of the Earth, Work of Human Hands, with a guest speaker yet to be revealed.

📅 Saturday 3 October
Holy Mass 8:00am · Breakfast 8:50am · Keynote 9:30am · Morning tea 10:45am · Guest session 11:15am

📍 Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, 104 Scarborough Beach Road, Scarborough

🎟️ Register for the full day ($120) and the whole day is catered: breakfast, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea. Single session tickets are $60 (meals not included). Children 12 and under, priests, religious and seminarians attend free. Thursday and Friday evenings (1–2 October) are free with registration.

Register at www.evangelisationaustralia.com

Look what’s arrived!

FIAT WBC26 8 days to go!

www.evangelisationaustralia.com

Like Saint Matthew, who left his tax collector's booth immediately and without negotiation when Jesus called, practice radical, unhesitating response to Christ's invitation. Don't finish current business first or make excuses. Matthew's response was total and immediate - he rose, left everything, and followed. This week, identify one area where Jesus has been calling you and you've been delaying your response. Practice Matthew's immediacy: rise and follow now. Then celebrate like Matthew did - by bringing your old friends to meet your new Lord.

The early workers are not wrong. That is the first thing to say, and it is important. They agreed to work for a denarius. They worked all day in the heat. They kept their end of the arrangement. And they received exactly what was promised. Their grievance is not that they were underpaid. Their grievance is that the people who worked one hour were paid the same.

By any logic of proportional justice — the logic of the labour market, the logic of a fair wage for a fair day's work — their grievance is entirely reasonable. You do not need to be a morally deficient person to feel it. You need only to believe that what you receive should bear some relationship to what you have given. Which is, in most of human life, a perfectly sensible belief.

The landowner's response does not dispute their arithmetic. He disputes their premise:

"My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go. What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous?"
— Matthew 20:13–15
The Greek underlying that final question is stronger than most translations capture: hē ho ophthalmos sou ponēros estin hoti egō agathos eimi — is your eye evil because I am good? In the idiom of first-century Palestine, an "evil eye" was the eye of the envious person — the one who could not look at another's good fortune without it twisting in them. The landowner is not simply noting that the workers are upset. He is diagnosing an interior condition: the inability to receive another's unearned gift without experiencing it as a diminishment of one's own earned reward.

And this diagnosis is the heart of the parable.

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The workers who have been in the vineyard since dawn have made a category error. They entered a relationship with the landowner — an agreement, a covenant of labour — and they have been experiencing it as a market transaction. In a market transaction, what you receive is determined by what you contributed. More input equals more output. The terms are proportional and the expectations are calculable.

But the landowner does not operate on market logic. He goes out at dawn, at nine, at noon, at three, and at five — not because he miscalculated his labour needs, but because he keeps going back to find more people to bring in. The pattern is not efficient hiring practice. It is something closer to compulsive inclusion — the landowner who cannot pass the marketplace without inviting whoever is standing there into his work. And at the end of the day, when he pays them all the same wage, he is not making an economic statement. He is making a theological one: everyone who came into the vineyard received the same thing — the gift of a full day's participation in his work, and the full wage that represents not payment but belonging.

The one-hour workers did not receive less than they deserved. They received far more than they could have earned in an hour. They received the wage of someone who belongs — the same belonging that the twelve-hour workers have. And the twelve-hour workers, instead of receiving this as a revelation about the nature of the landowner's generosity, receive it as an insult to their effort.

They are still keeping score in a relationship that has transcended scoring.

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Two weeks in a row, the lectionary has shown us the same interior condition from different angles. The unforgiving servant last week refused to extend mercy to someone who owed him a little, having received the cancellation of everything. The early workers this week resent that mercy was extended to someone who contributed less. One withholds grace from another. One resents grace given to another. But the root is identical: the self that is still keeping account in a relationship that has abolished accounting.
Isaiah names the underlying reality that makes both of these errors possible, and that the parable is correcting:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts."
— Isaiah 55:8–9
This passage is often read as a statement about divine mystery — God is unknowable, his ways inscrutable. And there is truth in that. But in the context of Isaiah 55, which began with the extravagant invitation of the open table — come, without cost, all who are thirsty — the declaration that God's ways are higher than ours is specifically a statement about divine generosity. His way of forgiveness exceeds what our proportional calculus would authorise. His way of inclusion exceeds what our merit-based systems would permit. He pardons abundantly — the Hebrew is yarbeh lislo'ah, he multiplies pardon, he forgives on a scale that our accounting simply does not have categories for.

The early workers' mistake is to assume that the landowner's ways are their ways. That his calculations are their calculations. That he is playing the same game they are playing. He is not. He is operating at an altitude their logic cannot reach — not because he is arbitrary or capricious, but because his goodness is of a genuinely different order.

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Paul, writing from prison in Philippians — a man who has been arrested for his faith, who does not know whether he will live or die, who has every reason to calculate what life owes him — demonstrates in his own person what it looks like to have fully crossed over from marketplace logic to Kingdom logic:

"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. I am caught between the two. I long to depart this life and be with Christ, for that is far better. Yet that I remain in the flesh is more necessary for your benefit."
— Philippians 1:21–24
Paul is not calculating what he deserves. He is not keeping a ledger of his years of service and the reward that proportionally warrants. He has been so wholly given over to Christ — so completely identified with the one who is himself the wage, the denarius, the gift of full belonging — that the question of what is fair has simply ceased to be operative. He lives axiōs tou euaggeliou — worthily of the Gospel, in a manner that matches what the Gospel actually is. And what the Gospel is, as today's parable shows, is the landowner who keeps going back to the marketplace at five o'clock to bring in one more worker and give them everything.

Paul is the person who has received the five o'clock wage and responded not with calculation but with complete self-gift. He has been converted not just in his beliefs but in the logic by which he operates.

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For the work of evangelisation — which is the Fiat conference's horizon and the horizon of many who read these reflections — this Sunday's parable is one of the most important in the whole Gospel. Because the person who has been away from the Church for twenty years, or who has come to faith late in life, or who has spent most of their adult years in what they consider wasted time — that person is standing in the marketplace at five o'clock. And the landowner is going out to find them.

The parable answers the question they are most likely to ask before they come: is it too late? Have I forfeited my place by coming so late? Does the length of my absence disqualify me from belonging?

The answer, spoken by the landowner and confirmed by the God of Isaiah who pardons abundantly, is: no. The wage is the same. The belonging is the same. The full gift of a life with Christ is not reduced by the hour at which you entered the vineyard. What matters is not how long you have been in but that you came when the landowner called — and that you answered yes.

Psalm 145 holds the whole of it in its great declaration: "The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness. The LORD is good to all and compassionate toward all his works." Not to some. Not to those who arrived early. To all. The landowner's goodness is not a limited resource that runs out as it is distributed. It is the inexhaustible generosity of a God whose ways are as high above our ways as the heavens are above the earth.

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The parable ends with the famous reversal: "The last will be first and the first will be last." This is not a punitive statement — the early workers are not being demoted for their resentment. It is an eschatological one: the order of the Kingdom is not the order of the marketplace. The categories that organise human merit — first, last, more, less, earned, unearned — do not ultimately govern the household of the landowner who keeps going back at five o'clock.

The invitation for each of us today is simply this: which logic am I operating in? Am I still keeping the account — of what I have given, of what others have received that I feel I deserved, of the length of my service and the proportional reward it should generate? Or have I begun to be converted, as Paul was converted, into the logic of the Kingdom — in which the gift is simply given, the belonging is simply real, and the only question left is whether to receive it with joy or to stand outside the vineyard in the dark, nursing a grievance against the goodness of the one who gave?

The landowner is still going out. The call is still being made. The wage — the full, extravagant, disproportionate, unearned wage of belonging to Christ — is still on offer. Even now. Even at this hour.

A most blessed 25th Sunday to all — to those who have been in the vineyard since dawn, and to those who are just now hearing the call. The wage is the same. 🙏

As the week ends, examine what kind of soil your heart has become after this rich week of feasts and Gospels. The cross (Monday), Mary's sorrows (Tuesday), the martyrs' witness (Wednesday), extravagant love (Thursday), generous stewardship (Friday) - have these seeds fallen on rich soil or been snatched away, withered, or choked? This week, make one concrete commitment to perseverance in bearing fruit. Remove one thorn - worry, wealth, or pleasure - that has been choking spiritual growth.

Like the women who supported Jesus' ministry from their own resources, practice generous, practical stewardship of what God has given you. Don't underestimate how your faithful, behind-the-scenes contribution enables Gospel work. This week, identify one way you can financially or practically support your parish, a missionary, or ministry to the poor. Practice discipleship through generous stewardship, recognizing that those who provide practical support are as essential to the mission as those who preach.

Like the sinful woman who anointed Jesus' feet with expensive perfume and her tears, respond to God's mercy with extravagant, uninhibited love. Don't be like Simon the Pharisee who calculated hospitality while missing the miracle of forgiveness happening at his table. This week, respond to one experience of God's mercy with an act of generous, even lavish love. Practice gratitude that overflows into service. Let your love be proportionate to your awareness of how much you've been forgiven.