We need to be very conscious that evil is not some
nameless, impersonal and deterministic force at work in the world. Evil, the
devil, works in and through human freedom, through the use of our freedom. It
seeks an ally in man. Evil needs man in order to act. Having broken the first
commandment, love of God, it then goes on to distort the second, love of
neighbour. Love of neighbour disappears, yielding to falsehood, envy, hatred
and death. But it is possible for us not to be overcome by evil but to overcome
evil with good (cf. Rom 12:21 ).
It is to this conversion of heart that we are called. Without it, all our
coveted human “liberations” prove disappointing, for they are curtailed by our
human narrowness, harshness, intolerance, favouritism and desire for revenge. A
profound transformation of mind and heart is needed to recover a degree of
clarity of vision and impartiality, and the profound meaning of the concepts of
justice and the common good.
Address
to Government and National Leaders, Lebanon Sept 15, 2012
Reflection – Well, yesterday
I certainly got lots of eyeballs looking at the blog, as I decried the
quickening slide into tyranny of my home province of Ontario. Yesterday was all
about freedom of speech and conscience, the absolute necessity for a peaceful
society to engage in peaceful disputation, in a free and non-violent exchange
of opposing views on any and all subjects.
Today this theme of freedom goes
deeper. We see here the Pope reflecting very profoundly on the fundamental
issue in every society, every civilization, and every human heart.
It is the conflict between good and
evil that each of us engages in only and absolutely as individuals. Social
programs can help people have opportunities, or save them from starving to
death on the streets. Economic recovery plans, tax code reforms, stimuli of
various types can all work, at least potentially, to encourage investment and
entrepreneurial risk-taking. Legal reforms that protect minorities or outlaw
discrimination do what legal reforms can do: punish and thus curtail bad
behaviour.
But every revolution, every social
program, every reform, every external change of law and policy is doomed to
fail, utterly and completely, without this ‘profound transformation of mind and
heart’ to justice and charity in the individual.
As Pope Benedict says so well,
without this, we human beings are susceptible to simply lapse into narrowness,
revenge, harshness, intolerance, falsehood, envy, sloth… all the usual
suspects, eh? Without conversion of heart, there is not a legal system, a
social program, an economic arrangement that can produce human happiness and a
flourishing of human civilization.
Well, we have to know that, and
know the limitations of law and the structuring of civil society. It can
curtail outrageous excesses of cruelty and injustice; it can prevent people
from starving to death; it cannot make society thrive and flourish in a vibrant
human way.
That is the role of cultural,
religious, educational, individual human formation in virtue and goodness. This
is why government needs for the most part to basically stay out of the way of
the very bodies that provide that formation: churches, schools, the whole
network of clubs and service organizations and mediating institutions that
daily call people out of their own self-interest and self-sufficiency into a
communal shared project of care and help. In our modern world we take it for
granted that the government needs to have a finger in every pie, be both
underwriting and supervising and, increasingly, micro-managing the work of all
these groups. I think we need to question this assumption and return to a much
smaller government with a much more focussed role. In our day of spiralling
national debt and fiscally over-extended governments living on credit, we have
to find another way to organize things.
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