Cooperating with or Avoiding Evil

[The Good Place spoilers] In the TV show The Good Place, four people fight to spend eternity in “The Good Place.” At one point, they recognize that they belong in “The Bad Place” because of their actions during their lifetimes, but as they try to learn to be better, they discover that no one in hundreds of years, even the best person they know, has earned a spot in “The Good Place.” Why? Cooperation with evil.

Cooperation with evil is exactly what it sounds like—helping evil be done. This can be formal (for example, giving a murderer a knife in order to help him murder) or remote (usually material, such as shopping at a knife store known to also donate knives to murderers). Recently, it has been in Catholic headlines regarding remote material cooperation with abortion: is it permissible to vote for a pro-choice candidate for their other policies, and is it permissible to accept a COVID vaccine that has used aborted fetal cells at any stage of research or development? (The Church says yes to both, given certain context, though plenty of talking heads are telling people no, thus creating the confusion.)

But there are lots and lots of other issues involving cooperation with evil other than abortion. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. Most purchases endorse poverty wages, exploitative labor, cooperate greed, and harm to the environment. Our taxes fund wars, torture, for-profit prisons, euthanasia, pollution, etc.. Once to start to seek purity, you realize how everything is tainted. Even if you tried to live, work, eat, travel, vote, and associate ethically, you would most likely fail in one or more areas, especially because it would take a certain amount of privilege to have the time and resources to research and disentangle yourself from all forms of cooperation of evil. We have to interact with people. We have to interact in the society in which we find ourselves. For many people, it is a choice of survival to take the easy, cheaper route. We are both collaborator and victim.

So where do we draw the line? At what point are we responsible for the systemic evil? At what point is our way of life a sin?

The Church recognizes that purity is impossible, and although we strive for that, we will fall short. The Good Place isn’t based in a Christian worldview. In reality, no one earns “The Good Place.” We are saved by Christ’s mercy when we fail perfection. But cooperation with evil is still a very real danger. I am guilty of being a white, middle class American consumer. I can try to do better, but I can't totally disassociate from every way that my way of life contributes to evil in the form of others' struggle or environmental impact. Must I give away every single thing and go forage in the desert? Thankfully, no. 

John the Baptist did not tell centurions and tax collectors to quit working for the Roman Empire. He did not tell people to stop paying their taxes (which funded war, torture, capital punishment, colonization, emperor worship, etc). Instead, John the Baptist told them to personally do no evil and to do their jobs honestly (Luke 3:12-14). They may be a small contributing part of a an evil institution, and their actions may materially cooperate with evil, but they are not responsible for the greater Empire's sins. Their cooperation is remote. They are responsible for their own sins and the choices they actually have power to make.

It’s a murky area determining how remote the cooperation is before it is a problem. Regarding recent vaccines: No child was killed in order to make vaccines; no child was killed in order to be used in scientific research. No fetal cells are directly used in research (only cell lines copied from a fetal cell). No fetal cells are in the vaccine. So is there a difference if research cells come from an aborted child or a miscarried child? Is there a difference if a donated organ comes from a murder victim or someone who died in a car accident?

And then comes “proportional reason.” Sometimes cooperation with evil depends not on the remoteness but also the outcome. We might conclude that we should avoid any scientific use of aborted fetal cells in order to protest elective abortion. But we also might conclude that COVID vaccines are the only way out of a global pandemic without millions more people dying. The weight of the pandemic outweighs the abortion protest; refusing the vaccine doesn’t save any babies, but accepting the vaccine can save thousands of our neighbors. Sometimes the reason is proportional. Other times it is not.

And people don’t like that. They don’t want the murky weighing of remoteness and proportionality and degrees of cooperation. They want black and white, do and don’t. They want the Church to be totally firm or totally lenient. But the best the Church can do is advise, because some of us have more power to be more discerning than other (choosing which vaccine to receive, choosing where to shop, having the time and freedom to protest). In the end, it is up to us to personally choose no evil, and to avoid it when we can. And when we can’t, we rely on Christ’s mercy. This is sometime a Bad Place, and we can’t completely avoid cooperation with evil until we are in the Good Place, and evil is no more.

St. John Ogilvie, SJ

St. John Ogilvie was born into a Calvinist family in Scotland in 1579. At 12, he was sent to Europe to study, where he attended Benedictine and Jesuit educational institutions. In 1596, he joined the Catholic Church. Three years later, he joined the Jesuit order. In 1610, he was ordained a priest and served in France. He repeated asked to be sent to Scotland to minister to the remaining Catholics there. Since 1560, it had been illegal to preach or endorse Catholicism in Scotland.

In 1613, he returned to Scotland disguised as a horse trader. He preached in secret and celebrated Mass in homes. He had some success in Edinburgh and went to minister in Glasgow, where he was to receive five people into the Church. One of those betrayed him. In October of that year, he was discovered and arrested in Glasgow. He was tortured with multiple interrogations, sleep deprivation, and having his hair pulled out, but refused to give up names of accomplices. He refused to confess and refused to pledge allegiance to King James.

For that, he was hanged for treason on March 10, 1615. His last words were: “If there be here any hidden Catholics, let them pray for me, but the prayers of heretics I will not have.” He threw a concealed rosary into the crowd. According to legend, one of his enemies caught it and subsequently became a devout Catholic. He did not die immediately, and the executioner had to pull his legs to end his agony. Although the order included a sentence of being quartered, he was not, and he was buried outside the city in a plot reserved for criminals.

St. John Ogilvie is the only post-Reformation Scottish saint, and he is described as “Scotland’s Catholic martyr.” His feast day is March 10.

Servant of God Julia Greeley

Julia Greeley was born into slavery in Missouri sometime about the 1830s/40s. At age five, her right eye was injured as a man whipped her mother, leaving her permanently disfigured. In 1865, Julia was emancipated. She moved to St. Louis and became a cook and nanny. When the family she worked for moved to Colorado, she went with them. She later went to work in Wyoming and New Mexico but continued to return to Denver.  

In 1880, Julia was baptized into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Denver. She had a particular devotion to the Sacred Heart. She attended daily Mass and walked around the city distributing literature from the Sacred Heart League, which published literature on Catholicism and devotion to the Sacred Heart. She was known for visiting every firehouse in Denver once a month to share pamphlets with the firemen.

She also pulled a red wagon through the streets of Denver, dispute her arthritis, delivering food, coal, and clothing to the needy. She’d deliver to white families after dark so they wouldn’t be embarrassed accepting help from a black woman. She even donated her own burial plot to a man who was going to be buried in a pauper’s grave.

In 1901, Julia joined the Secular Franciscans and continued to works of charity. She became known as “Denver’s Angel of Charity.”

She died in 1918 on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. She was the first Catholic layperson to lay in state in a Catholic church in Denver. People streamed in for five hours to pay their respects. She was buried in a Franciscan habit in a plot donated to her.

In her obituary it was said, “Her skin was black, but her heart was whiter than the purest snow. She would as soon have confessed her sins on the street as anywhere else, for she did nothing of which she could be very ashamed. So do you wonder that this old negro woman had the distinction of being called to the other life on the Feast of the Sacred Heart?”

In 2014, the archdiocese began her cause for sainthood.