The Holy Father speaks often of the culture of
indifference. It is a culture that neither hears the cry of the poor, nor sees
their suffering. What is this phenomenon of indifference? Surely, at the bottom
of indifference is an attitude that says: If it does not affect me, I don’t
really care. There is a Chesterton verse that has some applicability here:
meanwhile the cold queen of the north is looking in the glass; the shadow of the
Valois is yawning at the Mass.[1] It is an
attitude as old as Cain who asks if I am my brother's keeper. And it is as
calculating as the doctor of the law who asks Jesus who is my neighbor. Still,
it would be worthwhile to dig a little deeper in search of the roots of modern
indifference, because I think that there are new elements operating within much
of the indifference we see today.
Recently, I read a novel by the noted Spanish author
Arturo Perez-Reverte, entitled El pintor de batallas, (The painter of battles).[2] It is readily
available in English. It is the story of a war-correspondent, photographer, who
spent his adult life traveling to places of violence and conflict across the
globe taking pictures, so the general population could see images of war. It is
a difficult book to read. The narrative pulls the reader through paths that
pass through the bloody conflicts of the last decades of the 20th Century:
Somalia, Bosnia, Croatia, Beirut, Gaza, and countless others. At his prime as a
photographer he retires from the public eye, he buys an abandoned light-house on
a secluded beach and begins to paint upon its interior walls a dramatic scene
of the final apocalyptic battle of the world.
The drama of the story is in the dialogue between the
photographer turned painter and a man who at the beginning of the novel appears
and announces that more than likely he will conclude his visit by killing the
painter. The man is someone the painter recognizes but had never met; he is a veteran
of the conflict between Croatia and Serbia whom the painter had once photographed.
The photo made the man’s features famous on magazine covers around the world.
The visitor intends to kill the painter, but not before explaining to him how
the photograph altered the course of his life.
The novel is a brutal narrative of how this modern man
had insulated himself from pain. He had prevented the suffering he observed so
close at hand from causing him to form any real relation to the persons
suffering. Our photographer could not make sense out of the suffering he
chronicled, so he cut himself off interiorly from the possibility of any
relation to those affected, and from the possibility of assuming any
responsibility for what they were suffering.
Without giving you the ending, you should know that
the dialogue between the painter and the man he photographed engenders in him a
more profound self-awareness. He realizes that a life cut off from the suffering
of others produces a pain as cruel as the cruelty he photographed from his
objective, impersonal and comfortable distance.
I (not the author of the novel) would call this effort
to prevent personal connections with people bearing intense suffering an
attitude of “relational contraception”. Human encounters and the relations between
persons they generate open up a space for compassion and a kind of response;
but we know that to open ourselves to compassion implies a willingness to accept
in some way to suffer also, with another person. In order to prevent this
possibility of life, a human being can hold himself at a distance from the
suffering of others. In fact, this mentality prevents the generation of authentic
societal life.
Such perhaps is a way to understand the individualism
and indifference of many in contemporary society. It is the disciplined
indifference of those who would rather avoid the pain of hearing and seeing and
thus relating to those who suffer. The painter of battles lives a self-imposed
exile from relationships in a futile attempt to build a private space where the
pain he witnessed could not touch him. He lives within the reduced horizon of the
modern windswept world, where he is alone with absurdity. He sees this private
space as not much, but in the end all he could hope for. It is a pitiable stance,
and in some way ought to generate compassion. He too suffers.
The novel reminds me of Cardinal Ratzinger's remarks
somewhere in Dogma and Preaching that modern atheism is largely an armchair and
television phenomenon. Looking at a television or computer screen, people say look
at all that suffering, how could a good God exist and let such things happen? Let
us make sure it never comes here. But, as the future Benedict XVI emphasizes in
that essay, the people who actually work with others to alleviate suffering are
usually the ones with deepest faith.[3] And often the
people living in the poorest regions of the world are the ones who maintain the
liveliest faith in God, and they are often the most generous to others in need.
A world hiding behind objective indifference needs the
joy of the Gospel. We can be credible evangelizers if we first open ourselves
to human encounters, seeking to embrace other persons and to alleviate the
suffering they experience. The Lord is
present with those who suffer; we believe this. But, it is somewhat difficult
for the modern world to believe in the Good God; it needs help. Out of
compassion, we have to show with the work of the Gospel that God is not found
on a screen while one sits on a sofa. He is present in the poor, and in those
who offer themselves for the good of others.
But the world will not believe us when we say God is
to be found there, in that place where a brother or sister suffers, unless they
see the Church in that place where prevails the human encounter and the helping
of one another to carry the Cross. To announce the Gospel is equivalent to saying
to the indifferent: Come with us to meet the Christ present among those who
suffer. I think this is what Pope Francis means when he speaks of
evangelization and says he wants a church which is poor and for the poor.[4]
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