c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of a biography of the late Cardinal Bernardin,”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ America has long employed humor as a defense against the infiltration of lawyers into our national life. It isn’t funny anymore.
In the same sense, Jesus warned that the letter kills and only the spirit gives life. That warning has, like those on cigarette packs, been too easily ignored. Now we are suffering the consequences. Legalism is the ever-present secondhand smoke of moral bankruptcy choking our humanity and our common sense.
The crisis of the Clinton administration comes down to a fundamental moral and spiritual teaching. Does”Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”ring a bell with you? It means lying is not just embarrassing, inconvenient or unethical; it is immoral.
That, however, is the commandment that is almost totally obscured in contemporary American life on both sides of most issues. This is no accident.
The truth sets us free, the Gospels tell us, but those who enforce life by legalism do not want us to be free. They want us to be as bound by paralysis as the man cured by Jesus in the Scriptures. Their objective is not to reveal but to obscure the liberating truth of a moral life.
There can be no morality in a culture dominated by the legal mind.
Once lawyers are asked to interpret and decide everything that takes place we have ceded our common sense to them and agreed to play by their rules. That is why lawyers fill the panels of talk shows every night, speaking a befogging language concerning itself solely with the manipulation of the appearances of truth rather than truth itself.
Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William Ginsburg, wears their follies like a robe. When was the last time you heard a qualified moralist speak on any of these programs? Don’t wait for it to happen.
The tactics of criminal lawyers, disseminated widely by the wind machines of the advertising/public relations complex, are simple: Confuse people about what they have seen with their own eyes, get them to doubt themselves, and especially, make them think there is something wrong with them, not with the issue at hand. You name it _ O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence, President Clinton’s veracity, or whether there is any difference between right and wrong.
What Christianity teaches is not complicated. We are mistaken to think Jesus spoke only to the corruption of his own time. But even religious leaders, much like those in Jesus’ world, hesitate to apply his extremely direct teachings. If they don’t do it, people must free themselves and redeem their culture.
The law holds the world in its power when it forces everybody to think like a lawyer _ to split hairs, sow confusion, and worst of all, create an atmosphere of mistrust, thick as smog, so ordinary people doubt everything and everybody. This environment of mistrust destroys our capacity to find and live by the spiritually enlarging experiences of life. These include trusting and having faith in each other and, surpassing all, to love one another. These are also necessary for a democracy to succeed.
None of this is possible _ this is why people are disgusted and saddened by the ongoing smear-and-destroy tactics whose native language, sanctioned by criminal lawyers _ in a cloud of lies and distortions.
The most remarkable sign of our times is that falsehood, whether garbed in accusation, fabrication or forgetfulness, is now granted equal status with the truth, that every day the demonic pitbull is set against the angel of our deliverance and the crowd roars.
The times Jesus warned us about have arrived. It seems people must, largely on their own, express their spirituality by finding for themselves the truth that truly frees them.
DEA END KENNEDY
