Final Word: Good versus evil

By Paul Moore

The most telling of the multitude of images which have appeared over the last few days is, to my mind, the photograph of presidents Trump and Zelensky deep in conversation in the midst of the splendour which is the Vatican. If that meeting is the forerunner to some kind of lasting peace in the Ukrainian war then, ironically, the late Pope’s greatest legacy may have come after his demise.

It is strange how for most people (there will always be the lunatic fringe) the concept of a Pope transcends the limits of the religion he is supposed to represent. Perhaps this is because in one sense the Pope is also a statesman, given the status of the Vatican City, but he always seems to be a spokesperson for humanity and not necessarily catholics. I suspect that is why many who are not catholic find the idea of a Pope unsettling. This is particularly the case if the Pope in question is deemed to be, or after his death, deemed to have been a ‘good’ man. By all reports Pope Francis was indeed a good man and we have been offered ample evidence of his goodness and humanity over the last few days.

What I find most fascinating in all the reports which emerged after his death is the range of individuals that Pope Francis was. What I mean by this is that he seemed to have lived a number of lives, whether as a soccer player, a teacher, working in factories and, of course, in his church work. In all of these guises I imagine he was not the same person. He would have had to behave in different ways, have different language forms, wear different clothes even perhaps take different moral positions on issues. But of course that is true of us all. Psychologists call it multiple personality syndrome which makes it sound as though it is a little unseemly, as though we are all up to something having all these personalities, so I much prefer the Indian term for it which is ‘anatta’. Anatta simply means that there is nothing constant about a person. Behaviours are picked up and dropped, beliefs asserted and abandoned, ambitions forged and shattered, passions ignited and extinguished. The self is a work-in-progress being constantly rewritten even though we are all assessed as though we are just one character set in stone.

The trick I suppose, and this is one the late Pope seems to have managed, is to be considered a decent person in whatever guise you present yourself. This is really tricky because everyone’s definition of what is ‘good’ and ‘decent’ is inevitably different especially as we all have these multiple personalities. What we can fall into, especially if we are deeply religious in the sense of attached to a particular church or doctrine, is a syndrome wonderfully termed, Noble Cause Corruption. This syndrome basically argues that history would suggest that seeking to do good has greater potential to promote evil that seeking to do bad since those who believe they are morally superior think this gives them the authority to do unspeakable things to those considered to be immoral in their eyes.

This is one of the reasons (there are in truth many more) why I am deeply suspicious of organised religion and individuals who consider themselves to be morally superior to the rest of us. It is a short step from there to governments legislating on our private behaviours – as we are seeing across the world on a daily basis – and the most telling thing we can perhaps say about the late Pope is that he appeared to live without moral arrogance despite his supreme role in the organised church.