Surprized

“…since the will of man is a slender reed, not to be relied on to do the right thing, evil will exist. No police force can be expected to do what religion, good example, and the fear of being caught have failed to accomplish.”

This quotation is from a novel by Ralph McInerny titled Grave Undertakings: A Father Dowling Mystery. I was struck by it’s simple truth. In fact, stunned by it is a more appropriate way to put it.

It is very popular today to decry the decline of morality. It’s as if it’s a new thing; that there was some better time, say the post War 50s that where a high water mark of civility and high morals, or perhaps the Victorian Age. Well I certainly remember the 50s as pretty good, but I had a very limited world view. And since the media didn’t always tell us everything they knew, for example, JFK and MM, we can’t be faulted for believing it was actually better. Plus, there were so few choice of media. Now with the 24 hour new cycle and the necessity to fill it up, plenty of “bad” news gets reported perhaps given us a jaundiced view.

It’s not that I don’t think modern morality is the pits—I do. But declined? I’m not so sure. As regular readers know, I’ve been teaching a survey course on the history of the Church. Again and again I get reminded of the low level of morality both of the religious leaders and of the people throughout history. Otherwise apparently good men got elected to bishoprics or to the papacy and the power just seemed too much. There was a rampant sense that holding the office somehow permitted excesses. And the temporal rules seemed to basically care about their own needs at the expensive of their subjects.

So it seems pretty clear that McInerny is right. If religion can’t reform the lives of people, we’re doomed. And it seems clearer and clearer to me that it can’t—or at least it doesn’t. That’s not to say there aren’t good moral men and women in the world, clearly there are. It is to say that all the evidence seems to indicate they are outnumbered very many to one. That being the case, we can just expect things to continue to be bad. I just don’t see another Great Awakening coming and I don’t see a corrective in culture swing us back from our excesses.

I know this seems pretty pessimistic. But I’m feeling pretty pessimistic these days as injustice touches close to home again.

Jerry+