c. 2000 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 “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) The bill eventually comes for that lunch that is never really free. So, too, it arrives for fads and the temporary madness that seizes almost all of America some of the time.

Nonsense, like a play that everybody thinks they should like even if they don’t, often has a long run in our national life. Wrong notions about human beings, such as the Sexual Revolution’s proclamation that men and women are really the same, can and do cause great psychological and spiritual harm before, like a false dawn, they vanish as if they had never been there at all. Thousands of wounded, however, lie in their wake.

As we discover in a new way every day, the worst of these engineered slogans-to-live-by is that “Character doesn’t count.”

The headlines now press us to re-examine this assertion. It is not so much that the bills have begun to arrive as that we are learning that, tragically and perhaps irredeemably, we have been paying them, without knowing it, for some time.

Only the most recent of these debits against the soul of the nation is the news that hard drives of nuclear secrets have disappeared from the vaults at Los Alamos, that somehow, in the hazy indifference bred by writing character off as inconsequential, the security had been breached. Their disappearance was only discovered because of a drill necessitated by the fires that threatened the installation in recent weeks.

The loss is heavier to bear because it took place not so much behind our backs as in front of our faces. We are shamed because we learn that this information, perhaps vital to world peace, mocked its top security rating by never being secure at all.

We have had a rash of such unpleasant and unsettling discoveries in the last several months. The State Department has been more open to casual exploration by unauthorized and unquestioned strangers than Washington D.C.’s museums, in which security guards evince at least intermittent curiosity about the visiting crowds

At the State Department, however, unchecked visitors wandered at will deep within its supposedly secure areas. How does such a mood, for it is nothing less than that, spread through so many of our institutions?

This loss of security wells out of a lack of concern for security at the highest levels. We are not surprised to hear that the house next door has been robbed. They never locked anything, someone observes, people came and went and nobody knew who they were, the parents were not there or they just didn’t seem to care. When nobody cares, anything goes.

The high price of the delusion that character is irrelevant is related to a president who, from his first days in the White House, has shown little concern for its integrity or safety. For months, aides operated on temporary security clearances to protect them, it was said, from possibly failing inquiries about drug use.

So lax was the atmosphere of that residence that it became a staple of late night comedians. Records disappeared, underlings of questionable character were given access to FBI files on political opponents, long lost billing records appeared as magically as long lost wills in a Dickens novel. Now a large swatch of the vice president’s e-mail cannot be found. An innocent mistake, it is claimed by those who long ago lost their innocence. They may some day find the e-mail but their innocence is gone for good.

Earlier this year, The New York Times published a piece that puzzled over the sexual behavior of early teenagers. They are indulging in oral sex with what seemed, according to the story, the unconcerned, uninvolved, and bored attitudes of the burnt-out characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels of the 1920s.

Why should anybody be surprised in a decline in all behavior that requires self-monitoring and self-control? This incautious national mood is at least a portion of the president’s legacy. Why be surprised that teenagers engage in oral sex in a casual and meaningless way when the president of the United States has done so in the very office that symbolizes the authority of both his office and our country?

Security breaches, the White House as a Lost and Found department, teenagers barely past childhood imitating the sex habits of a president whose lack of character has not only been excused but put aside by our public relations culture as irrelevant: The teenagers merely tell us we have been paying the bill for a long time for the loosening of the nation’s moral restraints that inevitably follows when its highest official has never learned to restrain himself.

This buck stops in the president’s office. Remember, the next time you see him laughing off a serious matter, the high price we pay when nothing is secret and nothing is sacred either.

DEA END KENNEDY