
Salus
animarum suprema lex esto The
salvation of souls must be the supreme law
in the Church. (Canon Law 1752)
The
Curious Faces of Sin

What was our
Place in the Crucifying of Christ?
The faces of sin, of course, are
many
Anger, greed, lust, pride
we have seen, stood before, the menacing faces of sin and we instinctively
recognize them despite all efforts to conceal or disguise the malice
they portend. They contort and disfigure the face that leers at us,
the face behind which the turbulence of sin implacably roils. We recoil
from them in either fear or disgust and we abhor them. The signature
of sin is the same even as the faces change, but it is always inscribed
on distinguishable faces, on identifiable persons. The sin, the malice,
is personal that is to say, it infects a personality, an individual
to whom we have some manifest connection. In a sense the malice, the
evil, is personified; it assumes the personality of another. Avoid the
person and avoid the malice, a very reasonable and effective remedy
for us as individuals.
There is, however, another and much less clearly defined (but no less
pernicious) aspect of sin that we are far less disposed to recognize
despite ample and apparently futile lessons from history.
Our Silence: the Sin of Omission
While most
of us grasp the existence of our own individual sins and even more
clearly the sins of others there is little awareness of our own complicity
in sins that lacerate us as a people, a society, a nation even a civilization.
This absence of the realization of an evil to which we contribute beyond
our individual culpability, this failure to recognize the reality of
collective as well as personal sin essentially a recognition of our
complicity in appalling moral enormities not through our acts but
through our silence is just as grave in nature (but more far-reaching
and devastating in consequences) than most of our personal sins. The
sin, as we see it, is not our own. It is not of our making. We do not
will it, therefore we are not responsible for it. We recognize the evil.
We lament it. But in the end, because we do not enact the evil ourselves,
we have no responsibility for it.
Now, multiply that by a society, a nation, a civilization, and we begin
to understand the nature of collective sin, the sin for which all are
responsible but in which no one personally participates ... It might
be summed up in three words: Let it pass. Whatever the evil, whatever
the injustice, whatever the oppression in whatever form it takes let
it pass.
We do not see it is inconvenient
to see that when we fail to raise our voice against evil, to stamp
it out as inimical to the good, as irreconcilably contrary to a Law
greater than any men legislate (and subsequently amend, discard, or
abolish) in courts or seats of legislature, however august, esteemed,
and established its venue. Whenever we fail to raise our voice, and
simply let it pass we have entered into complicity with that outrage
through our silence. We fear to condemn it, to reveal our abhorrence
of it ... to act against it ... and in remaining silent we promote it.
It is the sin of omission.
Unlike individual sin which both confronts us and indicts us in clear
and personal terms, collective sin is a much more subtle evil that attempts
to elude the responsibility of the individual by diffusing and propagating
itself in a social context. It is collaborative sin, sin that is only
possible through the collaboration of the many. The Holocaust, slavery,
and pornography come immediately to mind. And because it is so subtle
it is extremely pervasive. In fact, we come to believe that the more
pervasive it is, the less evil it must be. It is essentially morality
as distributive, or more simply, morals as mathematics. In effect, it
is legitimized; it has become a matter of open policy, and since a majority
are either practicing or condoning it, I myself cannot conceivably be
held responsible for it, even if I loathe it. In fact, I have no right
to personally object to what is publicly acceptable, and moreover, no
legal recourse, should I choose to. So ... I let it pass.
We may recognize the evil, but believe that we can abstract ourselves
from it and place the fault, the responsibility upon others. We distribute
the blame, the guilt, until it becomes so suffuse that it is no longer
morally tangible. That failing, any residual guilt can simply be ascribed
to some impersonal corporate body, to the vast number of which we,
in fact, are part. This amorphous corporate body populated by real but
somehow anonymous persons, becomes our
scapegoat when the core meltdown
of moral imperatives reaches critical mass and can no longer be ignored
without catastrophic consequences to the individual and society at large.
We would do extremely well to reflect deeply upon the consequences of
articulating morality through numbers.
Let
it pass ...
In Mel Gibsons,
The Passion of the Christ, a very brief, but memorable moment
occurs when, amid the violence of the mob, an old woman stands, looking
quizzically upon the scene of personal carnage. She looks with detachment,
indifference, neither incited nor perturbed. This is such a frightening
vignette that encapsulates our moral indifference in the face of evil.
Her indifference, coupled with her curiosity, makes her the metaphor
of evil through omission, of complicity through indifference. In this
sense, she is a more frightening figure than the soldiers.
Let it pass ... what has it to do with me?
Unknown to her ... everything, both in time and in eternity.
Collective sin is malice through mathematics,; and because it is rooted
in exponential numbers, it is inherently cumulative. So much so, in
fact, that the individual sense of responsibility is diminished by the
same exponent through which the collective sin is multiplied. There
is a clearly inverse proportion between the magnitude of the distributed
number and diminished responsibility.
What, then, was your place, my place, in the crucifying of Christ? What
is our place and what our responsibility in the starving of a child,
in the therapeutic killing of a baby in the womb, of the little girl
sold into the slavery of prostitution and pornography?
|Meditating on the Passion, how easily we abhor the weakness, the conspiracy
of the crowd failing to see that we persecute Christ in our brother,
our sister before us ... with the same malice that motivated the Immolation
of the Lamb ... when we ourselves are the wolves ...
Do you still think that you can take refuge in numbers, loose yourself
in the crowd? And how long will you continue to let is pass until
it comes to your own doorstep?
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
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Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum
I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.
(Apocalypse
3.8)
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