Pause for thought

A lot of behaviors on dramatically different sides of the moral spectrum frequently are passed off by the media as morally equivalent. They are not, and it’s insidious to draw that connection.

Fr. Tad Pacholczyk makes a connection here that’s disturbing, in the least, and shouldn’t be easily dismissed on the face of it, as some people will want to do. For obvious reasons.

But then, being obvious is a big part of this story…

When I traveled to Auschwitz a few years ago, one question played over and over in my mind: Did they know? Did the German people know what was happening in this camp near their own border, in their own occupied territories? With the trains coming and going year after year, with the long lines of prisoners and the billowing smokestacks, did they just turn a blind eye to the atrocities? Had they become desensitized to the point that they could no longer see the carefully choreographed death operations nearby?

Some concentration camps, like the one in Dachau, were set in comfortable suburbs right inside Germany itself, and the townsfolk could stroll past them during their daily routine. The grass in those suburbs continued to grow as green as anywhere else, young people got married, babies were born, men went to work, and life went on.

I spent a lot of time in Munich many years ago, and talked to some folks about this. I was told that the Germans in that neighborhood lived in denial of what was happening down the street, that they surely knew, but could do nothing, and only humanly survive the smothering air of evil by not taking it in. As a result, their collective conscience was plagued with guilt for decades, a friend there told me. The horror of it is still so visible.

Walking through a place like Dachau or Auschwitz, one wonders: could it ever happen again? Could a similar scenario play out today in middle-class America? Most would instinctively say “no” — after all, we live in a more enlightened time and culture. A more perceptive eye, however, can discern troubling parallels. Nowhere are these parallels more evident than in the bioethical issues of our day. Our society, in fact, faces virtually the same temptation that Germany did: the temptation to normalize certain well-scripted death operations in the midst of polite society.

If we look within our own culture and within our own time, we will see that suction machines have replaced smokestacks, and that fertility clinics and women’s health centers have replaced the barbed wire. Unborn humans and embryonic children are now dispatched with the same desensitized ease as camp inhabitants once were, and ne’er a word is mentioned in respectable society.

Don’t stop here, tempted to wave this off as over reaching. It’s not.

There is a certain banality about evil. It doesn’t necessarily present itself in a monstrous or dramatic way. It can take the shape of simple conformity to what everyone else is doing, to what the leadership says is right, to what the neighbors are doing. The gradual encroachment of evil in our lives can be something we might not even notice because we are not paying attention; it can be something barely on the periphery of our consciousness.

We know that’s true.

Martin Luther King, Jr. used to say that what pained him the most was the silence of the good. Albert Einstein, who fled Germany when Hitler came to power, articulated the same sentiment in an interview for Time Magazine on Dec. 23, 1940. He stressed that sometimes it was only the Church and religion that could challenge the status quo as evil made inroads into a society:

“Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany I looked for the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom. But they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I had never any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”

I’ve shared this same quote on my radio show, and listeners were amazed to hear it. It should be spoken and shared more.

Thanks to CWNews for sharing it.