EVIL is Real

There are days when I feel as if I am accepting the evil actions taking place in the world around me and that there is nothing I can do about it. The prayer "God grant me to accept the things I cannot change" leads me to a place where I accept the evil I see or hear about. Something I read jared me sufficiently to resolve to find out more.

Our tragedy is that evil has become banal. (The phrase "banality of evil" was coined by the Jewish writer Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It is the idea that the great evils in history generally, and during the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Another tidbit I read on the internet:In one of his books, Walker Percy, the American Catholic novelist who died about 20 years ago, uses an epigram he attributes to Dante. Certain human beings, he says, no longer have a sense of the gravity of sin, and this is a terrible condition, he says. "So low they had fallen that they no longer believed themselves creatures worthy even of being damned."

I subscribe to "Inside the Vatican" published and edited by Robert Monyhan and in one of his internet letters he writes about evil and from there I took the quotes.