Why Christians join the forces of good — and evil

LIKE most Irishmen and women, I left home at a very early age.

It wasn’t to seek fame or fortune, but to follow my heart. It was my vocation. My calling.

When I heard the columnist Kevin Myers recently use the term “the highest calling” to refer to soldering, it gave me pause for thought.

Who did he think was doing the calling, exactly? Be that as it may, we all have aptitude and fondness and a certain predilection for something or other in life.

And unless you are some kind of sadist or fanatic, it’s usually best to match that disposition with the promptings of your heart. That’s how most of us find our calling in life.

Perhaps, if Edward Horgan (Letters, January 3) were of a more generous nature (or of a more discerning disposition), he would have looked at the dilemma facing soldiers generally, and Germans in particular, during Hitler’s fatally charismatic rise to power during the 1930s.

Subversion of the state was a slow but meticulous process, matched only by the Führer’s Machiavellian subversion of the churches — all in the name of nationalism and obedience to an authority which was only partially democratically acquired. The dead giveaway that it was all done surreptitiously was the fact that most Jewish people themselves failed to see the danger until it was way too late — even Kristallnacht was no real intimation of what was to come.

It’s true of course that most of the soldiers fighting for the Third Reich were nominally Christian, fighting for their country (as soldiers do), but so were most of those fighting against the mad Nazi regime.

Whether young Irishmen or Englishmen, Americans, Russians, Canadians, Dutch, French, Poles, Australians or New Zealanders, Christians (along with countless others) died what must have seemed ignominious deaths in the fight against evil personified — and nothing could be done to turn the clock back to the innocence of a more peaceful era until death had stalked the land and reaped the harvest prepared by the devil and his fallen angels.

For, you see Mr Horgan, Hitler was almost certainly insane. But he wasn’t stupid. And he used every trick in the book. Every ounce of authority he could muster. Every nationalistic trait he could summon. And every authoritarian fool he could command to bring his quite sick and myopic vision to fruition.

It was a rare bird indeed, such as the magnificent Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or the Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe, who saw through the bluster and the flak, and gave their lives as professing Christians in love and self-sacrifice for their fellow-men.

We could all give a beautiful Sound of Music rendition of that conflict, or of more recent ones. We could even extend that magnanimous interpretation of events to a Michael J Fox Back to the Future scenario. And all our problems would be magically solved in cinematic glory.

Hindsight and imagination are wonderful things. So is confronting the forces of evil. And if one thing is sure in this life, it is that evil (like any other animate or inanimate thing) will put up most resistance when it is itself threatened. The fact that tyrannies and terrorisits fight ferociously to preserve their power bases should surprise no-one. That, unfortunately, almost inevitably increases the innocent casualties, even when those who intervene have the best will in the world.

And unless you are prepared to take the Christian maxim to “offer the evil man no resistance” to its logical, literal conclusion (and if you are, I salute you Mr Horgan), then regimes and countries and individuals will always intervene on behalf of others or of themselves. And if they do, let’s hope that their intervention is timely and benign, and ultimately for the good of their fellow man.

Richard Dowling

Patrick Street

Mountrath

Co Laois