Saints and Martyrs

EXCERPT:
In a bizarre irony, Pope John–Paul II is beatified the same day that Osama bin Ladin is killed. The most popular (perhaps even the most beloved) man of the last 50 years is thus linked to the most feared and vilified man since Hitler. John-Paul’s body is exhumed for the solemn celebration, while bin Ladin’s body is captured for positive identification and buried at sea.

But beyond the irony, is the any lesson for us? Is there any connection in the coincidence?

Perhaps we could pause and reflect on the values and limits of a very human instinct: the impulse to sanctify some and demonize others.

…These two men were exceptional: one an outstanding figure of principle and peace, the other a notorious icon of terror and destruction.

Such men make life simpler, in that we have definitive, un-mixed opinions about them. Most of the people we actually know evoke our appreciation for their strengths but also something less for their weaknesses, but these men evoked pure admiration and pure vilification, respectively, from millions.

Such reactions, natural as they are, can pose risks. We may so overreact to their image as “good” and “evil” that we dehumanize them--and in so doing, break their connection with us.
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Still, this does not mean that assigning some people to our public Hall of Fame and others to our Hall of Shame is a bad idea.

The long tradition of canonizing saints (who comprise, after all, the Church’s Hall of Fame) offers many benefits. It gives recognition to a life well-lived, rendering that life more visible, and magnifying its power to inspire. It personifies, in the concrete form of one person’s life, values that otherwise might remain abstract. It creates a real-life model for others to admire and emulate. And it provides incentives and encouragement as we struggle with life’s challenges.

This is why we work to keep alive the memory of extraordinary people we may never have met. But sometimes--perhaps too often--that memory ossifies into the kind of “plaster saint” whom we pray to but never really connect with…:

If we lose this connection, we may forget that even the blessed are not perfect. John-Paul II, after all, badly misjudged the scale of the sex-abuse scandal (labeling it an “American problem”) in ways that hampered an effective response. His papacy may have been great, but his actions we not always good. So we must keep in minds that the Hall of Fame is full of fallen humans.

Having a “Hall of Shame” can be good for us too, since remembering history’s villains can personify, in concrete terms, the very vices we reject and want to expunge from our lives and our world. … Thousands of youth across America celebrated bin Ladin’ death precisely because he was the bogeyman of their youth, embodying an evil they feared and rejected.

But that fear came become paranoid, all out of proportion to the real danger. As bad as bin Ladin was, after all, he caused fewer deaths than our invasion of Iraq, the flaws in our healthcare system, or even the alcohol-related fatalities on our highways. His threat was real, but not unrivaled.
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For the rest of us, the danger is different. By celebrating a villain’s demise we may be merely venting our relief after years of anxiety. But we may also be acting out our mistaken belief that we have defeated, not only one evil man, but evil itself. This danger is all too real when our country wages a “war on terror” in the misguided hope that world peace will come if we kill all the evil people.

This is the fundamental risk of overreacting to the saints and sinners among us. We can become blind to the human foibles of our heroes, and the same time we can pretend that our villains hoard all the evil of the world unto themselves.
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But the fact is that, no matter how many evil men we tracked down and kill, we can never kill evil in the world, for evil lies within us all--that is what Christianity calls “Original Sin.”