THE LAST RIVER MILE

“Traditional Catholic moral teaching said there were three sources of evil – the world, the flesh, and the devil. Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), the holy and wise archbishop of Recife, Brazil, taught this in terms of a spiral of violence rising from the bottom up. The world (systemic evil) is the lie about power, prestige, and possessions at the root of most cultures; in the middle is the flesh (personal evil and bad choices made by individuals); at the top is the devil (evil disguised as good power that enforces the first two), which usually takes the form of unquestionable institutions like war, the laws of the market economy, most penal systems and many police forces, unjust legal and tax systems, etc. They are rightly called diabolical because, starting with the snake in Genesis, high-level evil always disguises itself as good, charming, on your side, and even virtuous. Satan must present himself as too big or too necessary to ever be wrong.

“Up to now in human history, most people’s moral thinking has been overwhelmingly oriented around the personal evils of the flesh. There as not too much knowledge of the foundations of evil in cultural assumptions themselves, nor hardly any critique of major social institutions on a broad level until the 1960s! This is really quite amazing. The individual person got all the blame and punishment for evil while the supportive worldviews and violent institutions were never called to account or punishment, as Jesus did when he critiqued the Temple system itself.

“The biblical prophets of Judaism were the unique and inspired group who exposed all three sources of evil. It’s why they have been largely ignored – as was Jesus, the greatest of the Jewish prophets. They didn’t concentrate on the flesh, but largely on the world and what I just described as the devil, which very often passes as good and necessary evil. You see what we are up against and why evil continues to control so much of the human situation.”

-Richard Rohr, YES, AND…DAILY MEDITATIONS (2013), p. 199.