Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth. Even so, on the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.”    

The setting of the Holocaust provides ample opportunity for serious thinking. For example, someone had to do the practical work of eradicating a whole race of people. Someone had to turn on the furnaces, someone had to supply the gas, someone had to run the concentration camp. In the movie "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," SS officer Ralf was promoted to be the commandant of one of the concentration camps. He and his family including young Bruno, his eight year old son, pick up their things and move from Berlin to the site of the camp or the "farm" as Bruno was told. What was on these adults' minds? How could they live with themselves considering what they were doing? Ralf explains it this way to his wife: "This is a vital part of war." 

Some people live ordinary lives when the way they make a living is evil. How is it possible? Whenever loyalty to some cause or belief becomes more important than morality, evil will be present. And so the question must be for any person who makes a living by following a cause or belief: is my job one that ultimately is good for humankind? Or does it smack of evil?

In Jesus' mind, the occupation of being a religious leader in his day was not evil because it was, after all, what God had directed in the Scriptures. But it had become evil as it had evolved over the years because the people who did the job were evil. As Jesus pointed out, the "insides" of those leaders did not match the job. They were only acting like they were righteous. Their job was necessary for the functioning of a religious society, but in the end they made it evil. So, Jesus confronted those religious leaders, telling them exactly what they were doing.

It did no good. The religious leaders would not listen to someone tell them what they were really doing because they refused to ask themselves the right questions. Likewise, the leaders of the Holocaust never listened to critics because they were not considering the good of all people.

There has not been, and hopefully never will be an evil that equals what happened in the Western world in the latter part of the 1930's and early 1940's. But there have been equal smaller-scale evils: mass murder, wars generated by lies and propaganda, human-made economic disasters. They happen because people lose track of their moral obligation to be good to all people, every human being, no matter what race or color or belief.

As movie critic Roger Ebert comments, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that was evil from the very beginning. The only way to survive in our world that is often governed by evil is to confront the evil and do everything in our power to stop it.                   

THOUGHT
 
PRAYER

Good and gracious God, some of the people you created turn to evil in their lives. Give us the grace to confront any personal evil that may be part of what we do, and help those who are perpetrating the evil in our world recognize their obligation to cease. Be with us, we pray. 

Questions, comments? Let me know. Email Fr. Mike

©2007 Capuchin Province of Mid-America
Fr. Mike Scully is a member of the Capuchin Province of Mid-America