Cooperation with evil, a parable

I've been trying to find an example that would illuminate the aborted fetal cell issue and our responsibility towards it, the issue of what Don Pietro Leone calls "a social and universal structure of sin: that of the treatment of man as an object to be used, abused, and disposed of at will." 

For your consideration: The Mafia. 

Suppose your village is run by an organized crime mob. You are a truck driver and you must support your family. Your friends are butchers and bakers and grocers and teachers and construction workers; they must all support their families.

You all try to stay away from the main workings of the crime family, yet to get along you must do things ("cooperate") with their plans. Deliveries have to be made, houses have to be built, and so on. 

Normally you manage to stay away from criminal activity, but sometimes you are asked to drive your truck and it is not an offer you can easily refuse, so to speak. 

Your conscience troubles you occasionally, so you talk to the priest. 

He too is maintaining his position in this village by having a church for people to go to; and he too has to get along with the crime family on a certain level. He sees the good in baptizing their children and giving the Last Rites to the elderly. He tries to give homilies that are not too vague, but these do end up being about the importance of loving God and giving to charity; not very often does he mention the sin of stealing, for instance. One thing is that sometimes he receives quite lavish gifts from The Family, especially after a big wedding. His life is not uncomfortable.

When you go to confession with this priest, he assures you that you are doing your best. "God will forgive you, and it's not as if YOU are committing these sins; you are only driving the truck, and only rarely for them."

He may even explain to you that there are various ways of cooperating with evil, and some are so remote as to not involve the person in complicity with that evil. Besides, there is the good of supporting your family, carrying on your good work of being an important part of the supply chain for the village, and living your life undisturbed. Besides, we are meant to live in the world, and if we try never to have anything to do with any evil, we simply can't function.

This is why the Church has developed a way of thinking about getting along in a world full of ambiguities, he says.

But the truth is that this village is not thriving. The Family has gotten really strong as its younger members have stepped up and claimed their own share in the spoils. There are now multiple centers of control that have to be juggled and fewer places to hide. As time has gone on, more and more of the businesses are run by or receive backing from The Family. The schools too -- the high school just got a beautiful new playing field, financed by the Don.

People live in fear and this fear plays out in different ways, none of them doing anyone much good. Some people simply cower, really afraid that they will become victims. Others, wishing to have peace, go about their business but live with the knowledge that their children may very well be drawn into a bad life. Some want to advance in comfort or position and engage in flattery, sometimes carrying out the more peripheral of the criminal activities going on. These then take out their petty worries and troubles on the others, those weaker than they, or further from the inner circle they wish to inhabit; in short, they become bullies in the service of the mobsters. There is a definite predatory tone, a real but unspoken power structure, to life in this village.

You realize one day while you are driving down the road that while it is true that you are not to blame for the crime family's deeds, without people like you they could not continue -- if enough of you decided not to cooperate. And without doing something, your village will descend into rather a hellish situation. You can already see it happening, now that your children are older. 

But this is the problem! How can a village go from one or two people listening to conscience to a large enough group being willing simply to stop living in a way that harms the common good? How to gain enough numbers to be effective against so much power? How can you, how can one person, do anything when the evil is so much a way of life?

There is no other way than for the one person to decide not to go along, no matter what the consequences. He must abandon the "levels of cooperation" way of looking at things because the situation is not anymore about needing to get along with all sorts of people; it has become a matter of having nowhere to turn without coming up against real wrongdoing. 

Having decided, he can then speak to the others if he has the opportunity, but they will not be convinced unless he actually does something that goes against his short-term well being. He doesn't have to have every step figured out and he may be surprised at how God guides him. It starts with the conviction, though, not to cooperate if he can help it. If he can find friends, they can accomplish right action and the defeat of evil.

Or he may convince no one and change nothing, but at least he has followed God's Law.

Thus do the saints act; thus did Our Lord act in His Passion. We are not here to go along with evil but to bring good into the world and to be with the Good God in heaven.