A few weeks ago, my mother and I watched a film called Vera Drake, set in London around 1950. I had never heard of it before, but my mother had clearly seen it. When I asked her what it was about, she simply said ''a woman called Vera Drake.'' As the film progressed, I realised what it was about and was confessedly horrified by what I saw, which was the grotesque and altogether unnatural and evil tampering with the Laws of God. The film is clearly a piece of abortionist propaganda, and is about a ''kindly'' middle-aged working class woman who procures illegal Abortions, thinking this to be an act of generosity. In other words, she was a callous witch. When she was arrested, her explanation to the police was that she ''helped out'' young women who ''couldn't cope.'' I need not explain that this manifests a tragic crisis of moral standing in someone.
I often wonder whether this terrible yoke of the Devil over the minds of Men, especially in the last century or more, is the reason so many people, no doubt ''sincere'' (is that the right word? Where is Tolkien when you need him) in their erroneous and monstrous beliefs, are so morally corrupt. I think that it is a devastating tool devised by the Devil to weaken resistance to his will. It just strikes me as terribly discrepant that people can commit acts of atrocity, like the Nazis one minute, and can then go about their business as though nothing untoward has happened. Something is clearly wrong somewhere. Does the same principle apply, I wonder, to people who despise the Traditional Liturgy? Yea more! To people who are vegetarians, give up drinking (not Pioneers, one of my mother's cousins is a Pioneer, or those who were previously alcoholic - I am here referring to people like Ian Paisley who stupidly think that Alcohol is inherently bad - perhaps if they bothered to read the Scriptures they'd note that God invented wine!), people who join funny Eastern religions/philosophies etc. Never mind about Asperger Syndrome - they are the real lunatics!
Well as Catholics we are advised to examine our conscience regularly. I think this stops our sense of right and wrong from becoming atrophied. Of course, one can ignore the pangs of conscience, but usually at a cost to one's character(at least that's how I experience it when I sin). I am trying to be better these days, with the help of the Rosary.
ReplyDeleteShadowlands, many thanks for your comment. I know exactly what you mean! In fact, I was thinking about this yesterday evening in the pub, when this post was in the making. I said to a friend of mine: Whenever I have a difficult moral choice to make (the choice, I must say, is not difficult, but actually acting on that choice is the hard part), I remind myself that I will undoubtedly feel better having done the right thing, morally, than opting for the easier option. Doesn't always work, as has been evident very recently, but it is good that I at least still hear the voice - the voice of God, I think, as Newman described conscience.
ReplyDeleteHere is a post I put up a couple of years ago about this very phenomenon of "decent" evildoers.
ReplyDeletehttp://v-forvictory.blogspot.com/2007/09/banality-of-evil.html
And it ends with this 1943 quote from Heinrich Himmler that illustrates his perverse view of "virtue":
Most of you know what it means to see 100 corpses lying together, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written...