The Torturers Next Door

It's easy to blow out of proportion the pictures of prison abuse in Iraq.

The photos were shocking and frightening. But the people responsible for the abuse of prisoners are being dealt with decisively.

The difference between Iraq torturers and U.S. torturers is that the U.S. torturers will be prosecuted — and what's the same between them is that it took the United States to bring them to justice.

But the photos also remind us of the current state of the American character. The U.S. torturers don't come from the cruel backwaters of an oppressive regime. They come from our own neighborhoods. Their friends and family back home said they were normal, apparently good-hearted Americans.

And the U.S. torturers behaved like children of the media — as if they intended their torture to have an audience. They took pictures of what they were doing, and made gestures for the benefit of the audience. They were gleeful and smiling. They acted like pornographers, not interrogators.

How were our own neighbors capable of this bizarre sexual torture? In his 2001 World Peace Day address, Pope John Paul II suggested the reason. He said the culture in the West was becoming increasingly distant from God, and destructive. He called the degradation of character in the West “a phenomenon of vast proportions, sustained by powerful media campaigns and designed to propagate lifestyles, social and economic programs and, in the last analysis, a comprehensive world-view that erodes from within other estimable cultures and civilizations” (No. 9).

He said this cultural anti-revolution is being driven by the most sophisticated media products in years.

When he pointed out that “Western cultural models are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable scientific and technical cast,” he was undoubtedly speaking of America. It is by and large American movies and television shows that entice not just our neighbors, but millions worldwide, to buy into a secularized worldview.

These products, he said, are “marked by the fatal attempt to secure the good of humanity by eliminating God, the Supreme Good.”

His message: The post-Christian culture in the West, married to American hip ingenuity, was a juggernaut capable of leveling other cultures with its sickness.

Cardinal Pio Laghi said that it is just this sort of horror that Pope John Paul II will mention to President Bush when he visits the Vatican on June 4. Cardinal Laghi is a close friend of both the Holy Father and the Bush family. The Holy Father sent him to speak with George W. Bush on the eve of war last year.

“I was afraid that the war would make the plague of terrorism more violent, as the Pope said, and that there would be cruel massacres,” the cardinal told Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. “But I did not expect the torture of prisoners.”

“I love the United States and I did not imagine this madness was possible. I am dismayed,” he said. “I have American friends who are holding their heads in their hands and I with them.”

What is a Catholic response to this horrifying situation, in which America is becoming synonymous with the perversity of the West to so many in the world?

It's the same response Pope John Paul II has been suggesting throughout his long pontificate.

“Today more than ever, dear brothers and sisters,” he told lay people on the feast of Christ the King in the year 2000, “your apostolate is indispensable, if the Gospel is to be the light, salt and leaven of a new humanity.”

If Catholics are willing to do what the Pope asks, we will slowly, arduously, but surely bring the Gospel back to America. We can start with our own neighborhoods — where the prison torturers started out. Who can we invite back to Mass? Who can we tell about the good news that the confessional is a place of mercy? What family can we introduce the rosary to? We won't change our neighborhoods overnight — but we can do more, faster, than we think.

We must also take up the Pope's even more challenging call. “Dear lay faithful, as witnesses to Christ you are especially called to bring the light of the Gospel to the vital nerve centers of society,” he said.

How can Catholics bring the new evangelization to the leaders in media? To the government? To academia?

The juggernaut of American secular culture could eventually become a dynamo of the new evangelization, if Catholics follow what Pope John Paul II has asked them to do in our society.