We have heard about “them” all our lives.
We have used “them” as a verbal foil for our shortcomings, our family’s problems, our society’s woes. “They” provide us with an overarching excuse as ubiquitous as orange barrels on the interstate.
Everybody knows “they” can control the weather, right?
“They” want wars to stimulate the economy; “they” want disruption and disorder. “They” want anything but peace.
Who are these faceless, nameless hoards who secretly control everything that goes wrong in society?
You can make the logical argument that “they” don’t exist. “They” are a figment of our collective imaginations.
You can also make the case that these fictitious scapegoats grew from our own unwillingness to accept responsibility for what happens to us, to our families, our friends and our society.
We need to take responsibility for both the good and bad, and Pope Francis has consistently reminded us of that throughout his papacy.
“I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes you are incapable of responsibility,” he wrote more than five years ago.
He also suggested early in his tenure that people should “say no to an ephemeral, superficial and throwaway culture.” It is a culture that “assumes you are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great challenges of life.”
“The Church is likewise conscious of the responsibility which all of us have for our world,” he wrote more recently. “There is much that we can do to benefit the poor, the needy and those who suffer, and to favor justice, promote reconciliation and build peace.”
In other words, rather than passing on the reason for society’s shortcomings to the amorphous “them,” our faith calls for us to take personal responsibility for correcting the problems we can fix. We need to realize that working to improve our lives and the lives of others is part of our calling.
We are beyond due for this personal awakening, the pope cautions.
“Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.”
In other words, “they” are not keeping us from building the world our faith demands. That’s on us.
We are responsible for making sure it all works out.
Or as newspaper cartoonist Walt Kelly’s character “Pogo” said so eloquently decades ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
GLENN RUTHERFORD
Record Editor Emeritus
