How Can Anyone Call Good Evil And Evil Good?

Thirty-First Sunday in Course 2022

Good morning, fellow sinners. If we forget that sobering fact, the Liturgy reminds us every time we come to Mass of our moral insufficiencies. And we get to say “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” and even strike our breasts every time we say the word, “my.” We join a long list of every adult human from Adam and Eve to the present day. With the obvious exception of Jesus and his Mother, Mary, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The story of Zacchaeus the tax collector frames the story of redemption by Christ: he receives Jesus as His guest, but Jesus provides the gift. Zacchaeus repents and promises restitution, and Jesus forgives him with the promise to us all: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost.” We all walk in the footsteps of little Zacchaeus. All of us, through repentance and prayer, especially together here, can be made worthy of God’s call.

Now the question has been raised–what about public figures who claim the name Catholic or Christian, and who publicly commit or support grave sin without repentance? We’ve heard so many conflicting calls about the present, let’s learn a lesson from the past about chronic public sin. How is it that some otherwise intelligent people can say, as Isaiah reports from three thousand years ago, “evil is good and good is evil?” (Is 5:20)

Between 1860 and 1865, the United States was torn apart by the first total war, one that split states and families and even Protestant communions. As the President at the time said, “all knew that [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war.” He continued, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.”

Ironically, at the time of the American founding, all those involved in it recognized the evil of one person or family pretending to own and dispose of other human beings. Most, North and South, in 1787, believed that the evil practice would eventually fade away. Thomas Jefferson called it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” but he owned more than six hundred, and profited from their labor, in his lifetime.

But by 1860, opinions had hardened in both the North and the South. Northern abolitionist Charles Sumner, who was at one point beaten almost to death by South Carolinian Preston Brooks after giving an anti-slavery speech on the Senate floor, decried the practice as making chattel of men created in the image of God. Calvinist pastor Fred Ross, reacting to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published a response entitled Slavery As Ordained by God. Such Southern clergymen decried the Declaration of Independence and its statement that “all men are created equal” to be “contrary to the revealed word of God.” In some states, even possession of anti-slavery literature became a jailable offense, such that slave-state postmasters even opened mail coming from free states. Can you see how a culture can be so corrupted over decades of indoctrination in schools and public media and private family conversations that thousands would take up weapons to defend to the death an institution that was gravely sinful?

So perhaps we can better understand how it might be that a Catholic politician would be so saturated with a dominant secular opinion, supported by millions of dollars of donations, that even the gravest anti-human evil could be good. So saturated that he or she would consistently support the legality of that evil, and even vote to make all citizens pay for the evil act. We then are challenged to pray for the conversion of them even as we work and vote for their defeat, and for the triumph of justice and life.