Christmas and the Mysterium Iniquitatis
There will be some empty chairs around the Christmas table this year, after a Saudi psychiatrist, Tabel Al-Abdulmohesn, plowed his BMW into a Christmas market in Germany, killing a nine-year old boy and four women, and seriously injuring scores of others. Then there was the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thomson, shot in the back while returning to his hotel in New York. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, is not only hailed as a hero by many, with people throwing wads of money at him for his legal defense- two hundred grand, and counting, but he’s even been proclaimed as a quasi ‘saviour’, with blasphemous depictions of him as the ‘sacred heart’.
And there are no words to describe the sleeping women burned alive on a train in New York the other day, after a ‘migrant’ set her clothes alight with a lighter, apparently with nothing better to do.
Those empty chairs – like tiny Tim’s – are before we get to the host of other atrocities in our world: the children missing from abortion and contraception; the thousands of disposable old and sick, euthanized by the euphemistic ‘MAiD’. The wars raging across the globe, with who knows how many casualties, soldiers and civilians.
What makes people do evil? Especially in this time of peace and good will towards men? We may surmise motives. Was Luigi just bored with a hedonistic life, and wanted some notoriety? Or simply to ‘make his mark’ on the world, like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s novel, in a Nietzschean transvaluation all values? Or were there other motives? Revenge for a stingy health program, by putting a father of two in the grave?
And Dr. Abdulmohsen? He claims to be an ‘atheist’, and was protesting the poor treatment of migrants in Germany, where they have been welcomed with open arms, now for years on end, and seemingly without end? Or was he just another Muslim, mowing down the infidel?
We won’t even try to understand the Guatemalan arsonist.
For ultimately evil is a mystery, the mysterium iniquitatis of which Saint Paul writes. Only God knows the depths of the human heart. Not only will we each be judged at our death based on that ‘heart’, but the full effects of all of our actions – for good or ill – flowing from our hearts throughout history will be manifested at that Final Judgement, for which we’ve been preparing during these Advent days. Abdel will see what that nine-year old and those ladies might have been, had they been allowed to live. And Mr. Mangione and that migrant will witness the rippling effects of the absence of their victims, from their families, loved ones and the world.
At this point, perhaps they don’t care, their consciences dulled, if not seared. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, but likely true somewhere, that someone spray painted on a rock by the highway ‘Jesus Saves!’. Upon which someone else came along, and added ‘From what?’
The answer, of course, is ‘from sin’, but as Pius XII warned back in 1946 – just after the worst war in world history – the greatest sin in our world is the ‘loss of the sense of sin’. To return to Dostoyevsky, without God, everything is permissible. And, we may add, not only permissible, but laudatory, even required. Destroy the whole moral order. Given the macabre reaction of the under-30 crowd to Mangione, we may fear that if there a next revolution, it may make the French one pale in comparison. He’s been made a martyr for a cause that is not Christian, but anti-Christian.
Christmas only makes sense in light of sin, and Christ’s cry to ‘repent, and believe in the Gospel!’. For if it’s just another happy-clappy, tinsel-tinged secular holiday then it’s worse than useless. Christ came to take away our sins, to carry and atone for them in His own Person by His Passion and Death, to which the poverty and privation of the crib already points.
But, for now, we rejoice, and hope, that God brings good out of all things, even great tragedy and sorrow – and how many are in such this Christmas! – in ways that are mysterious, and we don’t see right away, perhaps not even in this life.
And the perpetrators of evil? Like Raskalnikov, conversion is open to all, and grace is operative in each soul. Would that more respond to that grace, and glimpse, however faintly, what great joy there is in heaven over one repentant sinner, even one repented sin. And the greater the sin, paradoxically, the more joy in heaven – and the more rage in hell. For those who do so repent, their sins are cast into oblivion, as far as the east is from the west. All that will be seen then is what good God brought from their evil. If only more had eyes to see, and ears to hear what everything means in the perspective of eternity, and of Christ.
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. (Gaudium et Spes, 22)
The form of this world is passing away, as we journey towards the Parousia, and the consummation of all things. As a wise woman said to me today, one of these Advents is going to be the last one – which is, the ‘real’ one, when Christ appears on clouds descending. In the meantime – however long that be – there is a spiritual battle waging all around us, getting more intense as the time draws near; we must keep our eyes on the prize, on that little Child in the manger, Who is the Saviour of the World, and Who promised that those who persevere to the end shall be saved.
Keep up the good fight of the Faith, dear reader, and a very merry and joyous Christmas to one and all…+
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