Freedom and its discontents: Cooperating with evil in ordinary life

In May I gave a lecture at the University of Lublin, Poland, on Catholic faith and American culture. I gave a similar lecture to the Catholic Theological society of America when it met in Milwaukee June 8. It is a subject I have written about, off and on, for the last 15 years.

Knowing I was going to Poland, a rabbi who is a good friend gave me some notes about Jews in Polish society. Many of Chicago’s Jewish community have family roots in Poland, which welcomed Jews centuries ago when they were being excluded from other countries. Today, there are very few Jews in Poland. I visited the Jewish cemetery in Lublin, searching for the grave of my friend’s ancestor, a rabbi who was the founder of Hasidism. With me in the cemetery was the Archbishop of Lublin, Jozef Zycinski. He has in his Archdiocese many towns which were once populated by Polish Jews, all of whom were killed by the Nazis. He visits these towns now and, with a rabbi, organizes Catholics to pray for the former Jewish inhabitants. Mourning for them is all the greater because there are not enough Jews left to pray the official Jewish prayers of mourning. Their living descendants are now in Israel, Russia or this country.

Writing about Jews in Polish society, my friend the rabbi drew a comparison with our own society. Jews fared best in Polish society, he said, when it was a multi-national commonwealth, home to Ukrainians and Lithuanians, Italians, Scots, Armenians, Tartars, Greeks and Hungarians as well as Poles and Jews. The United States is such a multi-national society today, and here Jews have found freedom. The lesson might be that national, racial, religious and cultural pluralism is the best protection for all people to live in freedom. And yet the United States wrote its basic documents about freedom and began its experiment in ordered liberty when it was a far less pluralistic society than it has become today. It seems that something more than pluralism is needed to guarantee freedom; some personal and social convictions about freedom have to shape a society.

Many of the great modern philosophical reflections on human freedom were written by Germans, especially in the 19th century. Throughout much of that century, Germans led the world in scientific discoveries, in music and literature, in philosophy and social enlightenment. In many ways, Germany for a few decades was the most advanced society in the world. How was it possible that from the midst of a great and cultivated people, the Nazi movement could be born, grow and develop into a force so evil that the world still shudders to contemplate its crimes? Surely, as the mentally and physically handicapped were brought into clinics to be killed, ordinary German people continued to have birthday parties and weddings, to earn their wages and go to concerts. Didn’t they notice? Surely they noticed when their Jewish neighbors were prevented from participating in German commercial and educational and social life and then began to disappear from the streets and the towns. Yet ordinary life continued. Perhaps they did not hear of plans to totally eliminate the Jews or to reduce the Poles to a servile people, fit only to work in factories under Nazi control but not to run universities or pastor churches or write symphonies or govern towns and cities. Did they never hear the Nazi rhetoric about eliminating or enslaving all those not of the “Aryan race”? How is it that ordinary people continued to live ordinary lives in the midst of extraordinary evil? How is it that ordinary people, not criminals, can find themselves co-opted by or even cooperating with great evil? Perhaps, in a totalitarian state, there was little that ordinary people could do.

One cannot spend much time in Eastern Europe without asking these questions, for the great Nazi death camps were almost all on Polish soil. They were not conceived or directed by Poles, who themselves died in them by the millions; but their very presence, their nondescript, slowly crumbling, ordinary buildings designed for death, haunt the Polish countryside. Polish cities are also troubled by the ghosts of Nazi crimes. While in Warsaw, I visited St. Augustine’s Church, in the heart of what was once the Jewish ghetto, and All Saints Church, on the edge of the ghetto. The doomed but persistent resistance of Jews in Warsaw to the Nazi plans for their extermination is one of the 20th century’s greatest stories of freedom and bravery. Mindful of the example of the Archbishop of Lublin, I prayed in mourning in both those churches for the Jews who once lived where I was visiting.

History serves us well if it forces us to ask hard questions about ourselves. Shortly after my return from Poland, all the U.S. bishops were in Atlanta for our annual spring meeting. On the agenda was a statement about the present Israeli-Palestinian crisis. It is clear that there will be no peace for Israel without justice for the Palestinians; but there will be no justice for the Palestinians without peace for Israel. The bishops’ statement tried to address the grievances of both Israelis and Palestinians and did so, I believe, with relative success. Toward the end of the statement, however, the condition of the Christian minority in the Jewish state was raised; and I asked myself the question about pluralism as a protection for freedom. Does it apply in Israel as it applied in Poland and seems to apply in the United States? Should it apply in Saudi Arabia and Iran? If not, why not?

During the spring meeting, the bishops also took up ethical and religious directives for Catholic health care facilities. We had to revise the directives to clarify some questions about cooperating in evil, the cases in point being the evils of abortion and direct sterilization. Over a million babies continue to be killed in their mothers’ wombs each year in the United States. Surely this is a great evil, even if not of the same magnitude as the elimination of an entire people. Yet ordinary Americans continue to earn their livelihood, go to the movies, vote for politicians running for office, earn higher degrees, paint their living rooms, as if we were not surrounded by the death of the weak and defenseless. The laws permitting this evil are now as firmly entrenched in our legal and constitutional system as were the Nazi laws in the German legal system. Some moralists, as well as many ordinary people, welcome these laws because they protect “freedom.” They also make us all complicit in evil. How can this be possible?

Some say it is possible because the Church does not teach clearly enough, as some say the Church failed to teach in Nazi Germany. Those who disagree with Church teaching on abortion are quite aware of that teaching and would like to drive the Church out of health care because of it; but perhaps ordinary people need to be reminded again and again. One of the great ironies of our current revision of 20th century history is the conviction of the Church’s complicity in some of the great crimes of the past century. If, in fact, Church teaching were followed personally and socially, there would be no genocide and no wars of aggression, no drug addiction or drunkenness, no adultery or abandonment of children, no fornication or promiscuity, no prejudice or racial hatred, no affront to the dignity of homosexuals and no unjust wages for workers, no abortion and no abuse of women, no pornography and no violence, no lying or larceny. That would be a very different society from our own, not to speak of Nazi Germany. Would it be a “free” society? Should the Germans have been free to create a Nazi state? As we remember the celebrations of the Fourth of July and as we continue on our ordinary ways, these are questions that keep us from merely moving along without asking where we are going, personally and socially. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago