With last week’s release of a Pennsylvania grand jury’s report on the two-year investigation of Roman Catholic church dioceses in Pennsylvania, we learned of unspeakable horror of children and young men and women suffered at the hands of those who were supposed to be guiding and leading them spiritually. We learned of financial pay outs and cover-ups by the church hierarchy and, as we had already seen in the Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown diocese investigations, repeated instances of the accused priests being transferred to unsuspecting parishes instead of being reported to law enforcement or the proper authorities.
With this report, Pennsylvania stands alone across the nation in its statewide investigation of the church. The allegations of both abuse and the cover-ups extended to almost every church and almost every city and town in Pennsylvania. Since the release of the report, additional survivors are stepping forward to share their stories, despite the expired statute of limitations for both criminal and civil cases against the accused.
The abuse and cover-up of the abuse of thousands of children and young adults, often in the name of religion and faith, can only be described as evil.
In discussions with friends and families about this violation of trust and faith in the church, I found myself considering the concept of evil. What do we mean when we say that something is evil? Is it worse than just bad? Does the crime or deed have to be so horrific that evil is when it becomes difficult or uncomfortable to talk about?
It turns out that the question of “what is evil?” has been researched, philosophized and theorized for centuries. It crosses religious and secular lines, social science and neuroscience, and even in some discussions, is suggested that “evil” is a construct that humans have made up through our evolving moral code.
To me, the husband and father in Colorado who pleaded on television for the return of his pregnant wife and beautiful little girls and who, according to some reports, then confessed to killing them – with the bodies of his young daughters found submerged in oil tanks on the property where he worked — is, if guilty, something more than just a bad person. It is evil.
While some clerics and philosophers have looked at evil as the absence of good, others have sought to seek understanding through religious teachings. Evil is that is what tests our faith and provides us with lessons about the love of the higher being to which we pray. Those who deny the higher being – atheists, agnostics – question how an omnipotent and omniscient god of any faith would allow the horrors of evil, including natural disasters, disease and famine, to happen. Some describe evil as being defined by social mores. For example, how some groups of people view the treatment of animals. Others have tried to look at “intent” in evil and have raised the examples in which people have done evil things because they fear for their own lives or for the lives of their family members. Inevitably, in almost all conversations and debates on evil, the topic of free will comes into play.
In recent decades, researchers in the hard sciences as well as those in the social sciences have tried to examine possible causation for what we call evil. Are there differences in the wiring of the brain of someone who could shoot up a school or a movie theatre? Are there other organic causes (such as a virus or head trauma) that make someone more likely to disregard the social mores that we have established for how we treat each other? Social scientists have looked at everything from family dynamics, early childhood trauma and our social learning to try to figure out what makes someone become a serial killer. It has been theorized that it is our ability or inability to empathize with others that determines what we do or don’t do with our free will. Inevitably, for each person whose brain scan lights up in a certain way, or whose childhood trauma was as horrific as their deeds, we find people who have the exact same profile but who didn’t commit evil.
Late last week, the tragic news of the murders of a young American couple who gave up their jobs to go on a bicycling tour around the world hit the internet. Terrorists with links to ISIS claimed responsibility for their deaths in Tajikistan. Men in a car apparently drove past the couple and two other cyclists and then turned around, ran them over with the car and then stabbed them to death. By our standards, the killers are evil. By their standards, they are justified by their faith. While the politically-driven news posts exclaiming that the couple was on the bike tour to “prove there is no evil” were likely exaggerated to fit a political agenda, it is obvious that the victims did not take into account the true evil that is out there or didn’t consider that others don’t define “evil” the same way.
In her book “Evil in Modern Thought,” researcher Susan Neiman suggests that we look at the effect that which we call “evil” has on us. Evil, in other words, is the impact the deeds or actions – or the cover-ups — have on an individual or on the collective we.
