The National Catholic Register portal, in a commentary by James Day published April 10, 2026, offers a meditation on the Gospel episode of Zacchaeus climbing a sycamore tree to see Christ, drawing from it lessons about childhood wonder, the experience of climbing trees, and the Cross as the ultimate “tree” of salvation. The piece weaves together the Lucan narrative, reflections by Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger, the liturgical hymn Crux fidelis, and G. K. Chesterton on wonder, concluding with an invitation to seek clarity of vision before the Cross. While the article is ostensibly devotional, its theological omissions, its reliance on modernist authorities, and its reduction of supernatural conversion to naturalistic sentimentality betray the very wonder it claims to champion.
A Meditation Built on Sentiment, Not on the Supernatural Order
The article opens with the Lucan account of Zacchaeus — a wealthy chief tax collector, a man whose very occupation made him a public sinner and an outcast from the common life of Israel — climbing a sycamore tree to see Christ. The Gospel narrative is clear in its supernatural intent: Zacchaeus sought to see who Jesus was (Luke 19:3), and Christ, by His own divine initiative, called him down from the tree and declared that salvation had come to his house that day (Luke 19:9). The conversion was entirely God’s work — unmerited, sovereign, and efficacious. Zacchaeus did not climb a tree out of “childhood wonder” or a desire for a “clearer view.” He climbed because he was short in stature and the crowd blocked his sight. The miracle was not the climb; the miracle was that the Son of God chose him.
James Day’s commentary, however, systematically strips the episode of its supernatural character and recasts it in the language of naturalistic humanism. The tree becomes a metaphor for “exploration” and “physical engagement with the world.” Zacchaeus is likened to “a curious boy.” The conversion is reframed as beginning “not in grand gestures but in the humble willingness to rise above the crowd in order to see Christ” — as though the act of climbing were itself the meritorious cause of grace, rather than the free and sovereign election of Almighty God. This is not Catholic theology; it is Pelagianism dressed in the language of wonder.
The Ghost of Joseph Ratzinger and the Hermeneutics of Experience
The article cites Joseph Ratzinger — the man who, as Benedict XVI, presided over the further consolidation of the conciliar revolution — from his memoir Milestones, recalling how “encounters with the natural world awaken a sense of wonder that precedes analysis.” The world, we are told, “first appears not as something we construct but as a gift that invites contemplation.” This is a carefully chosen quote, and its selection reveals the theological orientation of the entire piece.
Ratzinger’s theology of wonder is not the Catholic theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom wonder (admiratio) is a passion of the appetite arising from the desire to know the cause of an effect, ultimately ordered toward the knowledge of God as First Cause. It is, rather, the modernist theology of religious experience — the notion that encounter with the created world produces an interior disposition that is itself a kind of revelation, independent of dogmatic content and supernatural faith. This is the very error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (proposition 20): “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God.” And again in Pascendi Dominici gregis, where the Holy Father exposed the modernist doctrine that “religious sentiment” is the origin of all religion, including the Catholic faith.
To invoke Ratzinger as an authority on the spiritual life is to invoke a man whose entire theological project was an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable — the unchanging Catholic faith with the corrosive acids of modern philosophy. His “wonder” is not the wonder of the Magi kneeling before the Christ Child; it is the wonder of the modernist who finds God in his own interior experience rather than in the objective deposit of faith handed down by the Apostles. The article’s reliance on this figure is not incidental; it is symptomatic of a Catholicism that has lost its supernatural bearings and gropes for substitutes in nature, memory, and sentiment.
Romano Guardini: A Thinker of Dubious Orthodoxy
The article also invokes Romano Guardini and his work The Spirit of the Liturgy, citing the idea that human beings “often encounter reality through play before understanding it intellectually.” Guardini, while not a modernist in the strict canonical sense, was a figure deeply influenced by the philosophical currents of his time — existentialism, phenomenology, and the Lebensphilosophie that sought to ground religious truth in lived experience rather than in the objective propositions of dogmatic theology. His influence on the liturgical reform that followed Vatican II is well documented; the “spirit of the liturgy” he championed was, in practice, the spirit that led to the dismantling of the Roman Rite and its replacement with the Novus Ordo Missae — a rite that Pope Benedict XVI himself described as a “fabrication” and a “banal, on-the-spot product” in its practical implementation, even as he continued to celebrate it.
To cite Guardini on the spiritual meaning of play and encounter with reality, while remaining silent about the catastrophic liturgical consequences of his thought, is to practice the very selectivity that defines the hermeneutics of discontinuity — or rather, the hermeneutics of convenience, which picks and chooses from modern thinkers whatever serves a devotional purpose while ignoring the doctrinal rot at their foundations.
The Cross Reduced to a Symbol Among Symbols
The article’s treatment of the Cross as “tree” — drawing on the patristic tradition of the lignum vitae and the hymn Crux fidelis — is perhaps the most revealing of its theological poverty. The author notes that “Scripture is bookended by tree imagery: from the Tree of Life in Genesis to the tree whose leaves bring healing to the nations in Revelation,” and that “the Cross itself” is called a tree by the Fathers. St. Bonaventure’s The Tree of Life is cited as a devotional reflection on the life of Christ as branches extending from the Cross.
What is entirely absent from this meditation is any mention of the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary — the central reality of the Christian faith. The Cross is not merely a symbol of “wonder” or “clarity of vision.” It is the altar upon which the God-Man offered Himself to the Father for the remission of the sins of the world. It is the instrument of redemption, the price of our salvation, the means by which the wrath of God was satisfied and the gates of heaven were reopened to fallen man. St. Paul preached “Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23) — not Christ as a beautiful image among images, but Christ as the Lamb slain for our sins.
The article’s silence on the sacrificial character of the Cross is not accidental. It is the silence of a Catholicism that has been reduced to aesthetic contemplation — a Catholicism that can admire the “tree” without adoring the Victim nailed upon it. This is the Catholicism of the conciliar sect, where the Mass has been reduced to a “memorial meal” and the Cross has been reduced to a symbol of “love” stripped of its juridical and propitiatory content. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, reminded the faithful that Christ reigns as King precisely because He redeemed us “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Pet 1:18-19). The article’s meditation on the Cross as “tree” omits this entirely, offering instead a vague invitation to “seek the same clarity of vision Zacchaeus sought” — as though the Christian life were a matter of perspective rather than of grace, repentance, and the sacraments.
The Omission of the Sacraments: The Gravest Silence
Perhaps the most damning omission in the entire article is its complete silence on the sacramental means of grace. Zacchaeus was not saved by climbing a tree. He was saved by the sovereign call of Christ, which produced in him the fruits of conversion: he gave half his goods to the poor and restored fourfold what he had taken by fraud (Luke 19:8). This conversion was sealed, in the economy of the New Covenant, by the sacraments of the Church — Baptism, Penance, and the Holy Eucharist — through which sanctifying grace is conferred and the soul is incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ.
The article says nothing of Baptism, without which “no one can enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). It says nothing of the sacrament of Penance, by which sins committed after Baptism are remitted through the absolution of a validly ordained priest. It says nothing of the Most Holy Eucharist, the “source and summit of the Christian life” in the language of the Council — but, more accurately, the unbloody renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary, in which the true Body and Blood of Christ are received under the appearances of bread and wine for the nourishment of the soul and the remission of venial sins.
Instead, the article offers “wonder” — the wonder of a child in a tree, the wonder of sunlight through leaves, the wonder of a world that “appears larger than before.” This is not the wonder of the Catholic faith, which is the wonder of the soul confronted with the mysteries of God: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, the Last Judgment. It is the wonder of naturalism — the wonder that requires no dogma, no sacraments, no Church, and no Cross stained with blood.
G. K. Chesterton: A Borrowed Authority
The article quotes G. K. Chesterton: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” Chesterton, a convert to the Catholic faith and a vigorous defender of orthodoxy in his time, is a legitimate authority on the subject of wonder. But the article uses his words in a context that Chesterton himself would have rejected — a context in which wonder is detached from the supernatural order and reduced to a natural experience of the created world.
For Chesterton, wonder was always ordered toward the recognition of the Creator. His famous observation that “the madman is not the man who has lost his reason; the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason” applies with full force to a Catholicism that can contemplate the beauty of trees while remaining blind to the beauty of the Mass, the sacraments, and the hierarchical constitution of the Church. The article’s use of Chesterton is a classic example of the conciliar method: borrow the language of tradition while emptying it of its doctrinal content.
The Lost Art of Climbing Trees and the Lost Art of the Spiritual Life
The article laments that “the nearly forgotten art of climbing a tree — once a common experience of childhood — offers a quiet lesson about wonder, humility and the clearer vision we are called to seek.” It observes that “concern for safety, combined with the pull of digital entertainment, has replaced much of the unstructured outdoor exploration that once defined childhood afternoons.” There is a kernel of truth here — the modern world has indeed impoverished the natural life of children, replacing the direct experience of creation with the mediated experience of screens.
But the article draws the wrong conclusion. The loss of “wonder” in modern childhood is not primarily a loss of outdoor experience; it is a loss of the supernatural life. Children who are not baptized, who are not catechized, who do not attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, who do not learn to confess their sins and receive the Body and Blood of Christ — these children have lost something far more precious than the ability to climb trees. They have lost the life of grace, which alone makes the soul capable of seeing God.
The true “tree” that leads to the Cross is not the sycamore of Jericho or the oak of the backyard. It is the Cross itself — the lignum vitae — to which we are united through Baptism, nourished by the Eucharist, and restored through Penance. The “climb” is not a physical ascent but a spiritual one — the ascent of the soul through the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, guided by the teaching authority of the Church and sustained by the sacramental life. Without these, no amount of tree-climbing will bring a soul to Christ.
Conclusion: The Invitation That Falls Short
The article concludes with the observation that “sometimes the path to conversion begins simply with the desire to see.” This is true — but radically incomplete. The desire to see Christ is not a natural desire; it is a supernatural gift of actual grace, which God gives to whom He wills, when He wills, and how He wills. The path to conversion does not “begin” with our desire; it begins with God’s initiative — “For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8).
What the article offers is a meditation that is pleasant, literate, and entirely insufficient. It offers wonder without adoration, beauty without truth, and a tree without the Cross. It is a reflection that could have been written by any educated naturalist with a passing acquaintance with Scripture — and that is precisely the problem. The Catholic faith is not a meditation on nature; it is the supernatural life of grace, received through the sacraments of the one true Church, professed in the unchanging deposit of faith, and ordered toward the beatific vision of God in eternity.
Let us climb the true Tree — the Cross of Christ — not with the hands of natural curiosity, but with the feet of supernatural faith, the arms of hope, and the heart of charity. And let us find on that Tree not merely “clarity of vision,” but the very Author of salvation, who hung there for our redemption and who calls each soul to the same conversion He wrought in Zacchaeus: sovereign, unmerited, and eternal.
Source:
To See Christ Above the Crowd (ncregister.com)
Date: 10.04.2026