Overcoming Evil with Good
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - September 8, 2006
The most fitting way to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is to act on the lessons that infamous day has taught us.
The first lesson is that evil — real evil, with all its ugliness and destruction, despite relativist disavowals — exists. There's no other adequate way to describe the long-plotted murder of thousands of innocent people in order to instill fear in millions of others. And this evil still exists. As we learned last month in London, there are real villains in the world who continue to scheme how most effectively to massacre innocent multitudes to advance their agenda — and who account it an honor to give their lives in order to take the lives of others.
The second lesson is that there is a false and perverted set of religious ideas that are fostering these wicked actions. The terrorists' particular take on Islam needs to be condemned and confronted by all those who believe in God — and in a particular way by Muslim leaders and faithful who declare that it is not "true Islam." Every religion with any seed of God's influence over the course of history has acknowledged certain principles that God has written into the heart of all his human creatures. One of these is that the killing of innocents is always wrong. Another is that we cannot do evil so that good may come of it. The terrorists, on religious principle, violate each of these universally-recognized moral tenets, and have formed madrassas across Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere to inculcate these aberrant religious ideas among new generations of even morally-blinder warriors.
The third lesson is that these terrorists are intent upon killing those who do not convert to this religious perversion. We were reminded of this twice in recent days. The first came in the forced conversion of Fox News' Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig in Gaza City, who, after being kidnapped and held captive for 13 days, were given the choice by their terrorist captors publicly to convert to Islam or to perish. They chose — or feigned — the former, recorded a conversion video, and were set free. The second reminder came in the message last week by Adam Gadahn, the 28 year-old American who has become what seems to be the English spokesman for Al-Qaeda. After he denounced Christianity as a "hollow shell of a religion, whose followers cling to an empty faith," he then called on Christian Americans to convert to Islam, reminding them ominously that "time is running out, so make the choice before it's too late."
The response to this terrible evil is the fourth and perhaps most important lesson of 9-11. Evil can only be met and overcome by good (Rom 12:21). And if the bad guys are willing to risk it all, the good guys need to be willing to sacrifice everything as well. We saw so much of this good and this sacrifice five years ago. We beheld it in the heroism that led men on a plane to risk their lives to save others on the ground. We witnessed it in the valor that induced hundreds of firemen and policemen to run into the Twin Towers when tens of thousands were running out. We have seen it in the gallantry of young soldiers and intelligence officers who have traveled far from home to enter foreign caves, tunnels, booby-trapped streets and other perils to try to catch the terrorists.
But we need to see more of it still. This heroic virtue also needs to be shown by ordinary citizens in the perseverance and patience it will take to outlast the terrorist's obdurate maleficence. It needs to be manifested in the courage of men and women, boys and girls to go about their ordinary business despite terrorist threats. And it needs to be visible in a real commitment to overcome evil by good.
In this latter undertaking, Christian Americans can learn a great deal from the early martyrs. For 250 years, Christians lived under the constant threat of death for their faith. The Roman magistrates who had far more power than the terrorists do today would arrest them and give them the chance to convert to paganism by burning incense to sculpted pagan deities. The choice was stark: they needed to forsake Christianity, embrace paganism, or die. As they forgave and prayed for their persecutors, they stared down both their torturers and death itself, refused to feign a conversion, and by their example of joyful fidelity to the end gradually brought about the conversion of the Roman empire. Their willingness to die, rather than their capitulation, was what brought an end to the threat.
They were capable of standing strong before their torturers because they were used to remaining absolutely firm before a far greater terrorist — whom we might call "the father of terrorists" — the one whom Jesus said could harm not only the body but the soul (Mt 10:28). Their fidelity in fighting the evil coming from the evil one strengthened them in the face of other evil. The more they were united to Christ, the less they were afraid. The holier they became, the more heroic they became.
The present crisis, too, is a crisis of saints. While the terrorists have their training camps, we, too, have ours, in the day-to-day choices we make to acknowledge that evil exists and in the fight we wage against capitulating to it. The deeper this training, in each of us and in all of us, the stronger we will be in responding to the evil of terrorism and the quicker and more successful we will be in overcoming it.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
