Evil in souls percolates down into the mind,
into the heart,
into the emotions and attitudes.

Unrepented sin:
The ultimate folly

By Patrick J. McHugh

n How foolish can a man get? An impossible question, of course. For one thing, how do we calibrate foolishness? And there is another question even more piercing: how do we define foolishness? The New Testament seems to turn our scales upside down, making what we call folly wisdom and vice versa.

Where is the wise man to be found? . . . Where is the master of worldly argument? God's folly is wiser than men and His weaknesses more powerful than men. (1 Cor. 1)

The Psalms, too, bewail folly.

O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger;
do not punish me, Lord, in your rage.
Your arrows have sunk deep in me;
your hand has come down upon me.

My wounds are foul and festering,
the result of my own folly.
I am bowed and brought to my knees.
I go mourning all the day long. (Ps. 38)

It has never been a simple duty to preach on sin to sinners, that is, to members of a fallen race, to people who are much like ourselves. Should we proclaim that sin is a violation of the law of God (which it is, of course)? God forbid that we neglect or, worse still, despise that homiletic mode so deeply part of Christian rhetoric since the first days of the Church. The proclamation to all that sin is a violation of-here comes the familiar idiom they must hear-"the holy Will of God" is still deeply part of our Faith, as Pope John Paul II has made so clear in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, not once or twice in passing, but over and over again in lines like these:

Only God can answer the question about the good, because he is the Good. But God has already given an answer to this question: he did so by creating man and ordering him with wisdom and love to his final end, through the law which is inscribed in his heart (# 12).

Magnificent, of course. May it be proclaimed and listened to with reverence and love by all. But there is a pastoral problem here: those who listen to us are all of them, ourselves included, affected by the cultural atheistic smog of our age and time. We all instinctively think of law as a human product to be modified, changed or abolished according to circumstance, by consciousness-raising, by political pressure, by agitation, by revolution led and inspired by forward-looking people with gnosis, special insights that the rest of us, the unwashed rabble, do not have.

This is the pastoral reality we have to deal with. We live within a secular milieu so that we think of the "law of God" as something like traffic laws which we can violate if there is no policeman around. And which, like all laws, can be changed if we put our minds thereto. For all of these reasons and others besides it might be wise to try to get our own people to think of unrepented sin as folly-mad folly, if you will-but folly of which everything we call "folly" is nothing at all, a lot of straw.

There is more: sin is the invasion of the malign into personalities, civilizations, cultures, the whole world as human things. This has to be proclaimed as well as the fact of God as "Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible," the One who holds us in existence from moment to moment and to whom we shall render an account in eternity of the good or evil we chose in time.

Begin with prayer

How are we to do all of this? It is not easy to say. We might use whatever analogies we can think of to proclaim sin as folly because it is the degradation of all that is good and beautiful and true. The temptation here that we all fall into is to imagine we are proclaiming Faith when we are only regurgitating current slogans, incantations, clichés. Faith becomes a glow within the mind only as we come before the Lord alone every day. Only then. If I do not speak to the Lord I do not know what mad nonsense I may come up with and in the pulpit, too. One way or another, while sin must be proclaimed as a violation of the law of God, it is, at the same time, folly and entering into the realm of darkness where demons rule. But how are we to proclaim all of this? We have to use whatever analogies we can, even wild and extreme ones.

Choose wisely

A news story in Ireland made the headlines as follows. After the evening performance, everything was securely fastened and locked up, especially the steel barrier and wire mesh around the tigers' cage. A man came along during the night, broke through all of these protective walls, made his way to the tigers' cage, because apparently he had the illusion that they were such nice, delightful pussycats, it would be nice to pet them. Which he tried to do. He put his hands through the bars of the cage, and the tigers tore off both his arms at the elbow. His screams aroused the employees. They ran to help him, rushed him to the hospital, but there was little the doctors could do beyond saving him from bleeding to death. Everybody felt sorry for the man, of course, but they wondered about the mad folly of dealing with tigers as if they were pussycats.

God says,

I built and designed you to come to Goodness and Beauty and Truth and Life. Do not, therefore, destroy yourself by choosing lust and greed and pride. This is folly. Everything else you call "folly" is only a flicker and a shadow to the madness of destroying yourself by the evil you choose.

It is only in the light of Revelation that the folly of sin begins to appear. Even so, there is no harm-there may be much good-in preparing the way for Truth by using the insights of good unbelievers wherever we can find them. This is the pastoral harrowing and seeding the soil of their minds to accept what the Holy Spirit inspired in lines and passages like these:

Dear children, let no one lead you astray. He who does what is just is just, even as he is just. He who commits sins is of the devil, because the devil sins from the beginning. To this end, the Son of God appeared, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Whoever is born of God does not commit sin, because his seed abides in him and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of god and the children of the devil are made known. (1 John 3:7-10)

Or this:

We know that the law is good, provided one uses it in the way law is supposed to be used-that is, with the understanding that it is aimed, not at good men but at the lawless and unruly, the irreligious and the sinful, the wicked and the godless, men who kill their fathers or mothers, murderers, fornicators, sexual perverts, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and those who in other ways flout the sound teaching that pertains to the glorious gospel of God-blessed be he-with which I have been entrusted. (1 Tim. 1:8-11)

Sin is folly in more or less the same way that putting kerosene in an automobile designed to operate on gasoline is folly, or jumping from the top of a building on the mad assumption that the law of gravitation is offensive "dogma" is folly. These analogies are, of course, crude, but if the Lord used clay and spittle as his homiletic tools, so should we. Or even startle the faithful every now and then as follows: "Do not beat the ass that comes into your life-the Lord may be riding on it." And so on. Anything to get their attention and smash the walls of the ideological dungeons many of them are locked into.

Face reality

Are there unbelievers of good will all around us? Most certainly. If there is confusion in their minds, many of them are open to reason and courtesy and love. But let us face it, there is also malice that glares, that is driven by a compulsion to destroy all that is beautiful and good and true. It is a great illusion, never mind if it is politically correct, to assume that those who hate the Church and defile the world are all of them men and women of good will, but just a trifle confused. The Great Myth that affects us all is that there are no tigers out there, only nice pussycats who can be stroked gently. "I'm O.K. You're O.K. We are all O.K." We are all men and women of good will, peace and love. Well, nearly all, except for those Fundamentalists and rabid Catholics who are trying to impose their life-style on all. The reality of grace and salvation must be proclaimed to all-to all, mark well, the rabid atheist, too. So, for example, they have to be told in suitable ways that while therapy has its place it is not enough to cleanse souls of evil. In the kind of world in which we live, where our destiny is supernatural, mere natural techniques will not-they cannot-bring about the healing of the soul. Pelagianism is the Black Plague of our age and time. And Utopianism as well. The reality of our world-reality, mark well-is that there is evil in the world of souls that can be cast out, as the Lord reminded us, "only by prayer and fasting." One writer, describing the mood of our age, wrote:

"Sin" is an archaic idea. Right and wrong as moral concepts have been abolished. There are no black hats or white hats; they are all gray. Moral discernment has been deemed judgmental and discriminatory. In government schools, our children are shielded from spiritual influences. God is scorned but tolerated if He stays in His place.

Unless we change, our future will be that which inevitably flows from the assumption that "we are endowed by a Big Bang and random chance with unalienable rights."

A new onslaught is taking hold: degradation of all who in any way defend the humane. Accusations that are totally and completely false but which, even so, do ferocious damage are hurled with wild abandon. It is so easy to do it can be done with impunity . . . so far. Our justice system is disintegrating at a fearsome rate. Image prevails; reality, evidence and truth do not matter-only feeling and mood: image, in short. It well may be that we shall be driven back to Great Ultimates heavily eclipsed these past thirty or forty years: the reality of evil, the power of devils and the endless Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ that fills the world-that, too. These themes and emphasis of Faith have almost completely disappeared. Now, it seems, the Lord is about to drive us back to them . . . his way.

We have to be grimly realistic about what unrepented sin does. God offers grace to all-to all, mark well, but as far as we can see guilt does strange things and truly terrifying things. The prime devastation is the destruction of grace but it does not stop there. Man is not a dualism of soul and body in separate compartments but a mysterious unity centered around that inmost core of his being from which each says "I." Evil in souls percolates down into the mind, into the heart, into the emotions and attitude. All kinds of strange disorders are set loose by lust and greed and ruthlessness and pride. One fearsome consequence is that the natural boundary in the mind between reality and non-reality begins to break down; fact and fantasy begin to fuse. Unrepentant sinners (take note again of that qualification) feel they exist in a mini-hell of self-loathing, anger and hate from which they try to break out, not by repentance and the mercy of God, but by projecting their guilt on to others. Now they are ready to be programmed to believe that they are "victims." This gives them a feeling of righteousness, of victimhood and it is this they are encouraged to believe. Therapy that is real-that leads to cleansing of the heart and soul-should begin by saying with the man on Calvary: "We indeed justly. We are only paying the price for what we have done. . . . Lord remember me." And go on from there to listen to what the Lord told him: "This day you will be with me in Paradise."

Debunk the myths

The ideology of our age, since Rousseau, is to shut out the reality of evil, the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of evil that the Church insists upon. The great myth that Rousseau set in motion was that all are perfect, there is no Original Sin, demons are myths; we are to be open to everything and everyone; evil does not exist, only ignorance and sickness and nothing else because there is no evil in souls. The reality of the world we live in is that there is malice and hatred of Faith all around us. Father Neuhaus put it well in his magazine, First Things, June-July 1994. Here is the item:

In our local paper it got three and a half inches at the bottom of page 20. Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was completely cleared of all charges of sexual misconduct. From media to Bernardin:

"Here's your reputation back, Your Eminence, we had a lot of fun with it and wish you luck in putting things back together again."

The sordid role of reporters in this affair, most shamelessly of CNN, should find a prominent place in journalism's hall of infamy but it probably won't, the competition for space being so stiff. As for the accuser of Cardinal Bernardin and his memory retrieval induced by hypnosis, the less said the better, or should we reverse that? The more said the better.

In Austria three good bishops were accused in much that same way that Cardinal Bernardin was, one of them being Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, who had already achieved international prominence by being the chairman of the committee that produced the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. A leading homosexual, Kurt Krickler, accused them of "homosexual tendencies," a classic case of projection if ever there were one. Bishop Laun of Salzburg, Bishop Kapellari of Klagenfurt, and Bishop Kung of Feldkirch protested their innocence as loudly as they could but this did not stop the accuser, for he knew that the accusation itself is a weapon. And that is all he was driven to do: to degrade, to defile, to destroy. Pope John Paul II told those bishops,

Recently, you have had to face up to the very harsh trial of violent attacks on the reputation of some of you. In this time of trial, the Successor of Peter . . . feels it his duty to be close to you, in order to express to you his sentiments of solidarity and to assure you of his constant prayer.

He went on to recall Our Lord's words: "I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered." He reminded them of how Jesus himself had foretold the blows that the early Church would have to suffer.

It is hard to judge the extent to which the plan to strike the shepherds was successful. If Christ proclaimed these words when confronted with the final trial awaiting him in Jerusalem, then this is how he desired to help us as we face similar situations and trials today.

It is a comfort to know that the Pope, at least, has no illusions. One good thing is, apparently, coming out of this: these bishops are suing. Forgiveness has its place. Compassion, too. But justice can be, in the Providence of God, the shattering experiences obdurate sinners may need. They should not be deprived of it.

God forbid we judge souls, but is it wild to think that there are people around us so thoroughly corrupt that they live in the vestibule of hell? They need to be prayed for. The Lord reminded us that "this kind is not cast out except by prayer and fasting." He was talking about devils in humans. Take it from there.

It may be that God works in his own strange ways to bring good out of evil and that he is about to cleanse us of all ideological "Christianity" that has poisoned the Church so deeply that the Body of Christ has gone into convulsions and almost appeared to die. And yet, a great renewal of holiness and faith may be about to appear and come. If we pray. If we pray. n