Thank God for Witnesses
A Reflection on Pope Benedict XVI's Words for the Upcoming March for Life
“Today’s Church is more than ever a ‘Church of the Martyrs’ and thus a witness to the living God. If we look around and listen with an attentive heart, we can find witnesses everywhere today, especially among ordinary people, but also in the high ranks of the Church, who stand up for God with their life and suffering. It is an inertia of the heart that leads us to not wish to recognize them. One of the great and essential tasks of our evangelization is, as far as we can, to establish habitats of Faith and, above all, to find and recognize them.” ~ Benedict XVI
As the annual March for Life in Washington D.C. approaches, the words of the late Pope Benedict XVI provide a reminder about the hope and gratitude we must find in the Spirit’s continual strengthening of witnesses throughout the Church. Benedict’s words can help to reshape our vision of both the good and evil that surrounds us: a vision that is too easily threatened by cynicism, apathy, or despair. In particular, I see in Benedict’s words a refocusing of our attention on the primacy of good over the nothingness that is evil.
The first precept of the natural law is “do good and avoid evil.” The precept in English reads in such a way that not only the doing of evil, but any contact with evil is to be avoided. In the Catholic Tradition, this aspect of the precept is elucidated in the resolution to “avoid the near occasions of sin.” Such a precept exists not only to prevent the gradual backsliding of a slippery slope but also to curb the cavalier attitude that urges us to ride out to confront and conquer evil. The resolution guards us from spiritual vigilantism and keeps us within the ordinary channels of grace.
Does evil then get off scot-free? Do the faithful walk around with blinders or withdraw like soft Epicureans? The first part of the precept renders such questions moot for two reasons. First, to actively do good and to practice virtue necessitates that one have one’s head up and eyes open. Second, when we understand evil as a privation, we realize that evil is always best remedied by a super-added good.
I rehearse this well-known point of catechesis only because I am sometimes struck by the magnitude of a simmering anger within the Christian fold that seeks its justification in the confusion and chaotic perversion of both the world and the church. I am led to wonder whether the prey of such feelings have let themselves wade too long in the sources of confusion and failed to observe the proverb: “The evil of one day is sufficient unto itself.”
This, of course, is not to deny the place of righteous anger. Who can deny the claims to anger as so many prepare to march for life against the terrors of a hidden holocaust? Yet, the March for Life itself has always been marked by the reverence, piety, and even paradoxically the joy of the participants, making it a prime example of a properly Christian response to evil; a response that does not give way to merely natural feelings, but proclaims the hope that sustains life. We at the Broken Binnacle, therefore, thank God for such witnesses and strive to recognize them in all their habitats.
Well said, Matthew! You address the common English translation of the first precept of the Natural Law, and as a side note, the Latin word used in "avoid evil" is "vitandum," which is used not only to describe a retreat from or maneuvering around some danger, but also, and perhaps more interestingly, the way a guilty man averts his eyes from his accuser. The use of it here is a reminder that, as you say, we lose if we even make eye contact, so to speak, with evil, since we ourselves are guilty on all counts.