Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

EVIL: QUESTIONING AND CHALLENGING THEOLOGY AGAIN AND AGAIN 105technologies expand the possibility of overcoming suchinequality. Globalization permits a much quicker awareness ofwhat is evil, much more precise and detailed than in earliertimes, because the same technologies that promote globalizationalso offer the possibility of clearer awareness and moreappropriate discernment. Therefore Giddens is right to observethat evil today is not so much a physical evil but far more amoral evil. 28 In themselves the technological instruments ofglobalization should permit us to strengthen the relationshipbetween moral evil and responsibility. Yet the network of mechanismsand structures, together with the fragmentation of time,may be used as alibis to weaken this relationship betweenmoral evil and responsibility. In fact, this seems to be the predominantexperience of our day, which expresses itself in attitudesof indifference and banalization.4. Indifference to evil and the banalization of evilToo often the increase in injustice through the very instrumentsthat ought to bring greater justice and welfare for all isdenied or obscured by various excuses. Such strategies of evasionof responsibility are as old as the history of humanity.Sacred Scripture gives clear testimony of this when it speaks ofthe first sin of human beings: Adam shifts the blame onto thewoman and the woman continues this mechanism by accusingthe serpent (Gen 3:11-14). Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg,among others, has shown that the same mechanisms of excuseand shifting of blame were in use when Jesus was put on trial. 29They were in use also at the time of Auschwitz. After theSecond World War, a Nazi leader of the Holocaust, AdolfEichmann, was brought to trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt’smemorable account of this trial, mentioned above, wasprovocatively subtitled The Banality of Evil. 30 The atrocious evil28Giddens, 44, 52.29Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Apostle’s Creed in the Light of Today’sQuestions (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 78-89.30See note 12 above.