First, A Detour

Lady Gaga rocked! 

“Accompanied by the President’s own United States Marine Band,” she hit that perfect, sweet spot note – “and the flag was flag was still there” - while television networks broadcast images of a sea of flags commemorating the more than four-hundred-thousand lives lost to the coronavirus plague or the Stars and Stripes accompanied by the flag of the National League of POW/MIA Families flying over the Capitol.

[Was it divine intervention or just wondrous happenstance that soon-to-be-former-vice-president Mike Pence, historically no friend of LGBT rights and dignity, was the one who passed that gilded microphone to one of the LGBT world’s best known advocates?]

Sorry about that little detour. But ya gotta admit: At a Presidential Inauguration protected by more than 20,000 armed members of the National Guard, “Lady Gaga rocked!”

Evil is real. 

And clever. 

And it hides - sometimes in the least obvious of places.

Sometimes seeming “evil” is just that – seeming. It wasn’t an expression or act of evil when a prisoner slashed and destroyed a prized set of Mass vestments. He was floridly schizophrenic and that attack was an expression of his illness. 

At times, evil is up-close and personal.

I still remember the sensation – thirty years ago - as I celebrated a prison Mass. In the beginning, it was subtle. Just a quiet unease as I stood in the middle of the classroom-sized chapel and began to preach - “Something’s not right.” 

By the Offertory, my whole body felt it: “There’s someone genuinely, truly evil here.”

Distributing Communion, I thought “Don’t come up! Whoever you are, please don’t come up!”

Communion distributed, I turned to my inmate clerk and whispered, “Clean everything up. Put things away. I’ve gotta get outta here!” I delivered the “Ite missa est” – “The Mass is ended. Go in peace.” – walking down the aisle, removing my vestments and almost ran through four sets of double-locked prison doors. 

There are times when evil is institutionalized, systemic and systematic, all-pervading and beyond description.

During the second-Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), in what came to be known as Unit 731, the Japanese Imperial Army conducted the most horrific human experiments ever recorded – outrageous surgeries without anastatic performed on Chinese prisoners of war and ordinary citizens, biological warfare carried out against towns and villages, causing prisoners to freeze to death in order to study the process, poisoning of entire water systems to understand the effects and “research “ on bubonic plague, cholera anthrax, typhoid and tuberculosis on living human subjects. Japanese military authorities hoped to develop plague bombs delivered by balloons and kamikaze pilots for use against the United States. Plans were actually afoot to release plague-infested fleas over San Diego on September 22, 1945

Researchers estimate that 3,000 - perhaps many times more – were killed in these “medical experiments.” None survived. 

The evil of Unit 731 is palpable. Seventy-five years later, the stench of evil still rises from the ground and burns the eyes; ears ring with the suffering of the long dead and the anguish of their souls is audible in the silence of the place.

Evil is real. In the beginning it can be subtle, even hiding in church pews and occasionally quoting Sacred Scripture. It claims to love family and deceives with disingenuous acts of public service. 

Pablo Escobar, the son of a poor Colombian famer, was purportedly once worth $30 billion. He sponsored local soccer teams and constructed seventy community soccer pitches and stadiums, built housing for the homeless and assisted local charities – while continuing to conduct his international business and hide from law enforcement. He was a “loving family man,” who once torched $2 million in crisp banknotes to keep his daughter warm as she suffered from hypothermia in a hideout in the Medellin mountainside. In order to save his family from rival cartels, he even attempted to negotiated his own imprisonment 

By the end of the 1980s he supplied 80 percent of the world’s cocaine and when he was killed in a shootout with Colombian police in December 1993 - one day after his forty-fourth birthday, it was believed that he was personally responsible for the deaths of 550 Colombian police and law enforcement officers and left, as his legacy, a river that ran with the blood of more than 5,000 of his victims. 

Escobar’s evil was visible and fatal.

In 2021, America’s evil hides under pseudonyms. It tortures souls and poisons hearts and minds, destroys families with lies, claims without justification to be “proud” and “keepers” of oaths to defend the Constitution. American evil attacks police officers attempting to defend members of Congress who were under attack as a result of evil’s lies - killing one by bludgeoning him with a fire extinguisher and injuring others with pipes, baseball bats, and flag poles.  

Sure. Political candidates who artificially enhance their military histories or claim degrees from prestigious universities they never earned deserve all the opprobrium thrown at them. And they deserve to lose. They were never truly interested in public service anyway. In the spirit of evil they think only of themselves and the next election.

Yet in the Providence of God, there is a special place in a Purgatory that will end only in the final seconds of Eternity for the perpetrators of one form of evil – those who use the Internet and “deep net” and radio programs to deny the heart-wrenching suffering of the parents of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, those who claim the deaths of twenty-three men, women and children in El Paso were staged, or deny election results despite recount after recount after recount and losing sixty of sixty-one - 60 of 61 - (we wrote it both ways for emphasis) court challenges – many of them before appointees of the losing administration. There should be a special place in Purgatory for those who originated and perpetuated accounts of secret cabals of high-ranking politicians participating in human trafficking and child sex rings. 

It is one thing to hire actors - $50 a pop through Extra Mile Casting and Gotham Government Relations and Communications – to prop up the cheering crowd at one’s ride down an escalator. It is another to repeatedly downplay the horrors of a pandemic that would – by Inauguration Day 2021 - claim more American lives than all those buried in the 639 acres of Arlington National Cemetery. 

Almost twenty-one-hundred years ago, Christians were warned

“Be sober-minded; be watchful.
Your adversary the devil prowls around 
like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
1 Peter 5:8

Today’s evil may not conduct human vivisections or plan to release plague-infested fleas over major cities. Instead, it hides out in corporate headquarters or the luxury homesteads of Mexican cartel leaders – both releasing death-dealing waves of addiction around the world. Today, evil hides in Hawaiian shirts and camos, toting semi-automatic weapons and threatening “citizens’ arrests” and trials of governors. Today, evil continues to deny the pain of the families of Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, El Paso and Mother Emmanuel. 

Today, genuine evil sits at computer keyboards and behind rightwing radio microphones or thumbing Twitter messages to the world attempting to overthrow the votes of eighty-one million – 81,000,000 – Americans.

Today, evil simply lies and endangers our nation and our world. 

Today, the response to evil is found in the words of Jesus: 

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. 
John 8:32

Yes. Father Leo O”Donovan did a great job: Ecumenical, hopeful, historic; quoting John Carrol at the Inauguration of George Washington was a reflection of why he is considered one of the most outstanding academics and theologians of our age:

“We trust in the counsel of the Letter of James: ‘If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.’ Pope Francis has reminded us ‘how important it is to dream together... By ourselves,’ he wrote ‘we risk seeing mirages, things that are not there. Dreams, on the other hand, are built together.’ Be with us, Holy Mystery of Love, as we dream together, to reconcile the people of our land, restore our dream, and invest it with peace and justice and the joy that is the overflow of love. To the glory of your name forever. Amen. 

The Rev. Silvester Beaman, a longtime confidant of and spiritual adviser to the Biden family, expressed the hope reflected throughout the ceremony, praying for the Administration and the American people: 

More than ever ... [President Biden and Vice-President Harris] and our nation need you. We need you, for in you we discover our common humanity… We will seek healing of those who are sick and diseased. We will mourn our dead. We will befriend the lonely, the least and the left out. We will share our abundance with those who are hungry. We will do justly to the oppressed, acknowledge sin and seek forgiveness, thus grasping reconciliation… We will seek the good in all and for all our neighbors… We will seek rehabilitation beyond correction… We’ll extend opportunity to those locked out of opportunity. We will make friends of our enemies… We would rather use our resources for the national good and become a beacon of life and goodwill to the world and neither shall we learn hatred anymore… We will lie down in peace and not make our neighbors afraid…  Let us all acknowledge from the indigenous Native Americans to those who recently received their citizenship, from the African-American to those whose foreparents came from Europe and every corner of the globe, from the wealthy to those struggling to make it, from every human being regardless of their choices, that this is our country.”

But, in the end, Lady Gaga rocked!