Taking responsibility for our fathers' sins

In December, I spent a gray, listless day at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Oranienburg, Germany, a northern suburb of Berlin. Sachsenhausen, as the closest concentration camp to Berlin, served a prominent role in the Nazi police state. Its inhabitants formed a sort of persecuted smorgasbord, ranging from high-profile prisoners such as Paul Reynaud and Albert Willimsky, to countless other individuals including homosexuals, communists, Soviet prisoners of war, Scandinavian rebels and pacifists, Roma, and Jews. Everything evil about the Nazi regime was on display at Sachsenhausen, from medical experiments on Jewish children to the machine-like execution of 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

It is a place that made me feel the worst I ever have about humanity. With the sound of gravel crunching under my feet and winds penetrating my winter coat, I could only imagine the hopeless existence of the victims of one of the worst institutions mankind has ever seen. No place on Earth has made me want to leave it as much as Sachsenhausen, and unlike its victims, I only had to remain there for a few hours.

Inextricably linked to Sachsenhausen, yet demonstrating the tremendous power of humanity to heal is the Holocaust Memorial, visible from the Reichstag. It consisted of rectangular concrete pillars of varying heights on top of a wavy ground. When one enters into the monument, one immediately loses any bearing on where one is; the columns rise too high to see over and the undulating pavement, reminiscent of the graveyard in the Jewish ghetto in Prague, quickly leads to a sort of quiet panic.

What is most striking, though, is the lack of words, symbols or overt reminders of the victims of the Holocaust. It hauntingly demonstrates the incredible Nazi depersonalization of the Jews. These two symbols, occupying spaces amid the nexus of current German society, beg the question: How does a society deal with an evil committed by its own members, committed in broad daylight?  At what point does the lack of recognition of such acts turn into its own privation of evil? At what point does embracing the guilt prevent the continuing progress of the community? Is there a balance between these two poles? Germans have had to battle with their sins from World War II, while still having to rebuild their society into one emblematic of democracy and social justice. What lessons can we learn from this process?

During the week of the death of Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach whose career ended amid a child molestation scandal occurring right underneath his nose for an extended period of time, we here at Gonzaga University need to investigate our own collective soul and decide on our own collective existence. While Paterno may or may not have known the extent of what was going on and the attempt to cover it up (which is highly debatable), he himself is merely a symbol for the institutional corruption at work.

What is clear, at the very least, is that officials at Penn State made a conscious decision to try to bury a scandal instead of removing the cancer from within their midst and living up to their obligations as decent human beings. Indeed, for them it was a surprisingly easy decision and, based on historical evidence, it too often is.

As most members of the GU community know, the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province, reached a $166 million bankruptcy settlement with around 500 victims last spring. Most of the victims were Native American youths from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Many of the perpetrators were knowingly sent to Native American posts after allegations were raised against them in other areas. Several of these pedophiles were indirectly or directly linked to GU, including former president John Leary, S.J. While the legalese of whether GU is connected with the Northwest Jesuits is beyond the scope of this letter, linguistically, organizationally and spiritually we are. No artificial line can be drawn between the two organizations.

My point in writing is not to disparage GU, the Jesuits, or the Catholic Church. I proudly affiliate myself with two of these organizations, and deeply respect the immense contributions each has made to humanity. But this is not a moral ledger sheet where the good is weighed against the bad; to do that smacks of a morally bankrupt, self-preserving judgment.

As a community, we must choose to stay by the principles that underlie this institution and this community and seek to take responsibility for these sins. We must pray for forgiveness, expose the wound, and only by doing this can we heal. While the vast majority of us affiliated with the university bear no direct responsibility for these horrendous actions, we all bear a responsibility to attempt to make things right, to pay respect, to humble ourselves and prevent all attempts at pure organizational self-preservation. We must become active in making sure this never happens again. We must stand by our principles. Cura Personalis. A desire for truth. Christian. Catholic. Social justice.

The great 20th century thinker Hannah Arendt stated, after examining the Nazi injustices, "Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."