Sobering Words

Courtroom artist Ronald Searle (Eichmann) | screenshot

At the completion of the Eichmann trial, NBC's Frank McGee recorded a message from inside the Jerusalem courtroom, the scene of the trial. His message should remind any and all in these uncertain times that a loss of reason can infect anyone and start someone down the road to commit unimaginable atrocities.

In 1961, McGee said:

For each of us who has ever felt that God created us better than any other human being has stood on the threshold where Eichmann once stood. And each of us who has allowed the shape of another person's nose or the color of their skin or the manner in which they worship their God, to poison our feelings towards them, have known the loss of reason that led Eichmann to his madness. For this was how it all began with those who did these things.

Unchallenged, prejudice rots into violence and, when those possessed by prejudice are manipulated by a demagogue into serving blindly, metastasizes into genocide.

One cannot help wonder whether or not McGee would be astonished at the degree to which people in this era have emancipated themselves from any association with God, and, consequently, the frequency with which men and women continue to lose their minds to madness and are on the road to repeating the worst mistakes of the 20th Century.

It is precisely an actual communion with Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church that awakens people to justice and conscience. Those, however, who bandy about their (c)atholic identity as a marketing tool to gain the approval of others and to attain worldly power, they have a different reward, a reward that one day might surprise them.