SIN AND EVIL
 

Lent is a good time to reflect on sin and evil. Some of what I write here is based on an article by Alice Camille one of my favorite writers. The article, entitled “Unoriginal Sin” appeared in the March 2019 issue of U.S. Catholic.

By Melannie Svoboda SND

Evil is rampant in our world. Because we are basically people of good will (or we think we are), we label evil as monstrous. The people who propagate atrocities of all kinds, we think of as monsters. In this group we would include people like Stalin, Hitler, serial killers, terrorists, sexual predators, and individuals who shoot people in our work places, churches, and even schools.

The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt used to think of evil in those terms too. She, who escaped from Germany just before Hitler’s “Final Solution” was put into place, had thought that Hitler and the Nazis were “fiends of the first order.” But after the war, she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the incarceration and destruction of Europe’s Jewish population. She learned that Eichmann was not a fiend or a monster, but a rather ordinary man, “a paper pusher” with ordinary ambitions.

What ambitions? Eichmann wanted to do well the task he was asked to do. He wanted to make a decent living, please his bosses, and further his career. (Sound familiar?) But here’s the terrifying part: Eichmann never considered the horrific consequences that his “good job” had on flesh and blood human beings. He never weighed the morality of his actions. He never wondered if it might be evil to imprison, starve, and exterminate millions of people simply because they belonged to a particular religious group. “Eichmann didn’t think at all,” says Camille. “He just followed orders and did his job.”

But massive evil demands massive complicity...READ MORE